Why Millennials are Burned Out
Do you feel like your life is an endless to-do list? Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram because you’re too exhausted to pick up a book? Are you mired in debt, or feel like you work all the time, or feel pressure to take whatever gives you joy and turn it into a monetizable hustle? Welcome to burnout culture.
“Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.” Burnout is of a substantively different category than “exhaustion,” although the two conditions are related. 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.” 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.
In his writing about burnout, Cohen is careful to note its antecedents: “melancholic world-weariness,” as he puts it, is noted in the book of Ecclesiastes, diagnosed by Hippocrates, and endemic to the Renaissance, a symptom of bewilderment with the feeling of “relentless change.” In the late 1800s, “neurasthenia,” or nervous exhaustion, afflicted patients run down by the “pace and strain of modern industrial life.” Burnout as a generalized condition is nothing (entirely) new.
But contemporary burnout differs in its intensity and its prevalence. People patching together a retail job with unpredictable scheduling while driving Uber and arranging childcare have burnout. Startup workers with fancy catered lunches, free laundry service, and seventy-minute commutes have burnout. Academics teaching four adjunct classes and surviving on food stamps while trying to publish research in an attempt at snagging a tenure-track job have burnout. Freelance graphic artists operating on their own schedule without health care or paid time off have burnout. 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.” Increasingly — and increasingly among millennials — burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.
In a way, it makes sense that millennials are feeling this phenomenon most acutely: Despite the fact that this generation is often portrayed as a bunch of underachieving college students, in actuality, we are currently living through some of the most erratic, anxiety-filled years of adulthood. According to Pew Research Center, the youngest millennials, born in 1996, will turn twenty-four in 2020. The oldest, born in 1981, will turn thirty-nine. And, as of 2019, there are more of us in the United States — 73 million — than any other generation. We’re not seeking our first jobs, but trying to take the next steps, and confronting pay ceilings in the ones we have. We’re not just paying off our own student debt, but figuring out how to start saving for our young children. We’re balancing skyrocketing housing prices and childcare costs and health insurance premiums. And the promised security of adulthood never seems to arrive, no matter how hard we try to organize our lives, or tighten our already tight budgets.
Until the term “millennial” coalesced around our generation, there were other names vying to label the millions of people born after Generation X. Each gives you a sense of how we were defined in the popular imagination: There was “Generation Me,” which put a fine point on our perceived self-centeredness; “iGen,” which evoked the phones and internet that had become the backdrop to our lives; and “Echo Boomers,” a reference to the fact that the vast majority of our parents are members of the single largest (and most influential) generation in American history.
The name “millennial” — and much of the anxiety that still surrounds it — emerged in the mid-2000s, when the first wave of us were entering the workforce. Our expectations were too high, we were scolded, and our work ethic too low. We were sheltered and naive, unschooled in the ways of the world — understandings that have ossified around our generation, with little regard to the ways we confronted and weathered the Great Recession, how much student debt we’re shouldering, and how inaccessible so many milestones of adulthood have become.
Ironically, the most famous characterization of millennials is that we believe that everyone should get a medal, no matter how poorly they did in the race. And while we do, as a generation, struggle to shed the idea that we’re each unique and worthy in some way, talk to most millennials and the thing they’ll tell you about growing up isn’t that they conceived of themselves as special, but that “success,” broadly defined, was the most important thing in their world. You work hard to get into college, you work hard in college, you work hard in your job, and you’ll be a success. It’s a different sort of work ethic than “work the fields from dawn to dusk,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not work ethic.
Still, the millennial reputation lingers. Part of its resilience, as will soon become clear, can be attributed to long germinating anxieties about eighties and nineties parenting practices, as boomers translate residual anxieties about the way they raised us into critiques of the generation at large. But part of it, too, stems from the fact that many of us did have high expectations and incongruous ideas about how the world works — expectations and ideas we’d internalized from a complicated, self-reinforcing nexus of parents, teachers, friends, and the media that surrounded us. For millennials, the predominant message of our upbringing was deceptively simple: All roads should lead to college, and from there, with more work, we’d find the American Dream, which might no longer included a picket fence, but certainly had a family, and financial security, and something like happiness as a result.
We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system — of American capitalism and meritocracy — or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken. We’re the first generation since the Great Depression that will find ourselves worse off than our parents. The overarching trend of upward mobility has finally reversed itself, smack dab into the prime earning years of our lives. We’re drowning in student debt — an estimated $44,000 per person — that’s permanently stunted our financial lives. We’re moving in greater numbers to some of the most expensive zip codes in the country, in search of the intense, high-profile job of our dreams. We’re saving far less and devoting far more of our monthly income to paying for childcare, rent or, if we’re lucky enough to somehow get the money for a down payment, a mortgage. The poorest among us are getting poorer, and those in the middle class are struggling to remain there.
And that’s just the financial baseline. We’re also more anxious and more depressed. Most of us would rather read a book than stare at our phones, but we’re so tired that mindless scrolling is all we have energy to do. We’re more likely to have bad insurance, if we have it all, and little by means of a retirement plan. Our parents are inching toward the age at which they’re going to need more and more of our help, financial and otherwise.
The only way to make it all work is employ relentless focus — to never, ever stop moving. But at some point, something’s going to give. It’s the student debt, but it’s more. It’s the economic downturn, but it’s more. It’s the lack of good jobs, but it’s more. It’s the overarching feeling that you’re trying to build a solid foundation on quicksand. It’s the feeling, as the sociologist Eric Klinenberg puts it, that “vulnerability is in the air.” 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 amid 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. People from other generations have been burnt out; that’s not a question. Burnout, after all, is symptom of living in our modern capitalist society. And in many ways, our hardships pale in comparison. We did not weather a Great Depression, or the catastrophic loss of life that accompanied a world war. Scientific advances and modern medicine have increased our standard of living in many meaningful ways, but our financial calamity has nonetheless changed the economic trajectory of our lives; our wars are not “great” ones, but they are deeply unpopular forever wars that drain our trust in government, fought by those in economic situations where the military is the only route to stability. And then there’s climate change, which requires a global effort and systemic rewiring so massive that no generation or even nation can address it alone.
There’s a pervasive feeling that despite some of the legitimate wonders of modern society, our potential has been capped. And yet we strive, because we know nothing else. For millennials, burnout is foundational: the best way to describe who we’ve been raised to be, how we interact with and think about the world, and our everyday experience thereof. And it isn’t an isolated experience. It’s our base temperature.
Excerpted from Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Download Buzz Books 2020 to read more of this title, as well as dozens of other excerpts of forthcoming books.
