Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Burnout arrives when every corner of our lives feels unstable, and we convince ourselves that working all the time is what will fix it. It’s what happens when you feel that catastrophe could be around any corner and that there are no social safety nets to catch you. You keep doing all that’s asked, especially in your work, but the world around you recedes and dulls to gray. There’s just so little of you left.

Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.

When you’re in the midst of burnout, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task—passing the final! finishing the massive work project!—never comes. “The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”2 It’s the sensation of dull exhaustion that, even with sleep and vacation, never really leaves. It’s the knowledge that you’re just barely keeping your head above water, and even the slightest shift—a sickness, a busted car, a broken water heater—could sink you and your family. It’s the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot that happens to have bodily functions, which you do your very best to ignore. It’s the feeling that your mind, as Cohen puts it, has turned to ash.

Burnout has become so pervasive that in May 2019, the World Health Organization officially recognized it as an “occupational phenomenon,” resulting from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”3 Increasingly—and increasingly among millennials—burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.

Millennials live with the reality that we’re going to work forever, die before we pay off our student loans, potentially bankrupt our children with our care, or get wiped out in a global apocalypse. That might sound like hyperbole—but that’s the new normal, and the weight of living amidst that sort of emotional, physical, and financial precarity is staggering, especially when so many of the societal institutions that have previously provided guidance and stability, from the church to democracy, seem to be failing us.

It feels like it’s harder than ever to keep our lives—and our family’s lives—in order, financially solvent, and prepared for the future, especially as we’re asked to adhere to exacting, and often contradictory expectations. We should work hard but exude “work/life balance.” We should be incredibly attentive mothers, but not helicopter ones. We should engage in equal partnerships with our wives, but still maintain our masculinity. We should build our brands on social media, but live our lives authentically. We should be current, conversant, and opinionated about the breakneck news cycle, but somehow not let the reality of it affect our ability to do any of the above tasks. Trying to do all of that at once, with little support or safety net—that’s what makes millennials the burnout generation.

We gravitate toward those personal cures because they seem tenable, and promise that our lives can be recentered, and regrounded, with just a bit more discipline, a new app, a better email organization strategy, or a new approach to meal planning. But these are all merely Band-Aids on an open wound. They might temporarily stop the bleeding, but when they fall off, and we fail at our newfound discipline, we just feel worse.

I’m reminded often of what I was told while studying for the GRE, which holds true for so many types of standardized testing: It’s not a test of your intelligence, but a test of your ability to take this particular test. And what each particular test is testing for, over and over again throughout our childhoods, is our capacity to perform work in its rawest form: to be presented with a series of problems and a rigid set of constraints in which to solve them, and to accomplish the task uncritically, with as much speed and efficiency as possible. But the curious thing about these tests, at least in America, is that a student’s results can always—with the right amount of money, and connections—be supplemented.

The harsh reality of the job search lays bare the contradictions, half-truths, and poorly constructed myths that motivated millennials through childhood and college. Jobs don’t magically appear with a college education. The student loans taken out to pay for that college education can limit job choices—particularly when an entry-level salary in a field is too low to offset the minimum monthly payment and the cost of living. Health insurance is crappy or unavailable. Gig work, even doing something you love, barely pays the bills. Your high school and college resume, no matter how robust, can still be a nearly valueless currency. Most of the time, all that passion will get you is permission to be paid very little.

As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

The desirability of “lovable” jobs is part of what makes them so unsustainable: So many people are competing for so few positions that compensation standards can be continuously lowered with little effect. There’s always someone just as passionate to take your place. Benefits packages can be slashed or nonexistent; freelance rates can be lowered to the point of bare sustenance, especially in the arts. In many cases, instead of offering a writer money for content that goes on a website, the writer essentially pays the website in free labor for the opportunity for a byline. At the same time, employers can raise the minimum qualifications for the job, necessitating more school, another degree, more training—even if that training may or may not be necessary—in order to even be considered.

That’s the logic of “Do what you love” in action. Of course, no worker asks their employer to value them less, but the rhetoric of “Do what you love” makes asking to be valued seem like the equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct. Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”

It’s easy to see how a profound slippage can develop between pursuing “passion” and “overwork”: If you love your job, and it’s so fulfilling, it makes sense that you’d want to do it all the time.

And a culture of overwork does not mean better work, or more productive work—it just means more time at work, which becomes a stand-in for devotion.

That’s what happens when we don’t talk about work as work, but as pursuing a passion. It makes quitting a job that relentlessly exploited you feel like giving up on yourself, instead of what it really is: advocating, for the first time in a long time, for your own needs.

a company’s stock price often rises, at least in the short term, with the announcement of “restructuring” and the layoffs that accompany it.12 Workers are no longer conceived of as assets. We’re expensive, begrudged necessities.

Companies looking to cut labor costs can rely on temps, outsource to subcontractors, kill a union—but they can also outsource by sending labor overseas, especially to countries where labor is cheap, because regulation and other forms of labor laws are slight, nonexistent, or unenforced. That’s what Apple does—and why it directly employs only 63,000 of the 750,000 workers who manufacture, assemble, and sell Apple products across the world.21 Apple announced that trajectory back in 1993, with the publication of an essay entitled “The Changed Nature of Workers and Work” in the company magazine. “More and more companies are laying off permanent staff and relying on contract workers and outsourcing to carry out their business,” Apple told its employees. “The emerging workplace has a head and no body. It centralizes free-floating talent resources as necessary to meet current needs, and changes size from moment to moment as the marketplace dictates.”22 “A head and no body” is why Apple can claim that its hands are tied when it comes to evidence of extreme overwork in Chinese factories. In fact, it has no “hands” at all: Those companies aren’t technically Apple factories; they just happen to produce the technology that becomes an Apple product. And the success of this philosophy is also a major reason why Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the stock exchange. Apple does all the good, brilliant stuff. All the messy, exploitative stuff that makes those good, brilliant th...

As Jia Tolentino pointed out in The New Yorker, “At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.”10