Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

There’s no burnout Olympics. The most generous thing we can do for others is to attempt to not just see, but really and truly understand, the parameters of someone else’s experience. In short, acknowledging someone else’s burnout does not diminish your own.

This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.

Trying to find, cultivate, and keep your dream job, then, means eschewing solidarity for more work. If a coworker insists on set work hours, or even just taking a vacation, they’re not setting healthy boundaries—they’re giving you an opportunity to show that you can work harder, better, more than them.

When I’m stressed by work, I find myself resenting the amount of sleep I need. Even though I know that sleep actually increases productivity, what I understand is that it decreases available working hours. All I want is to wake up and start, as that Goldman Sachs analyst put it so bluntly, “completing things on a regular basis.”

But for most millennials I know, the only person “forcing” them to work long hours is themselves. Not because we’re masochists, but because we’ve internalized the idea that the only way to keep excelling at our jobs is to work all the time. The problem with this attitude is that working all the time doesn’t mean producing all the time, but it nonetheless creates a self-satisfying fiction of “productivity.”

I find myself returning to one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received about how to actually reduce burnout: Think not just about how to reduce your own, but how your own actions are sparking and fanning burnout in others.

So here’s what we can do. We can unite in our resistance to the way things are. We can refuse to blame ourselves for wide-scale societal failures, but also understand how fear of losing one’s already tenuous standing makes us overly protective of the privileges we do have. We can recognize that it’s not enough to try to make things better for ourselves. We have to make things better for everyone. Which is why actual substantive change has to come from the public sector—and we must vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for it tirelessly.