Why is burnout more prevalent now?

Alex Willis
The Good Life: Spring 2024
2 min readApr 25, 2024

It seems that nowadays it is more frequent to hear about people being burnt out in their careers than in the past, but why is that? I hear older people saying that the next generation “does not want to work” and while I want to quickly defend my generation i believe there is some truth in their statements. Younger adults these days so not really want to work the jobs accessible to them, but not because they are lazy, but because they can not find any passion or deeper love for what they are doing. They are expected to give their all and sacrifice parts of their personal life for a job that does not really give us much back but a lousy paycheck that barely pays the bills. Of course you do not need to be in love with your job, but the environments being fostered in most jobs today drain the employee rather than helping them build skills, which leads to a larger amount of people silently quitting and putting in a lot less effort in their job. Another reason for the rising amount of burnout happening is the rise of hustle culture in our society. Today it is emphasized that we work as much as possible to get as rich as possible instead of maintaining the balance between social and work life. When more and more people who had an easy road to money flaunt their new cars and houses every week and make it seem like simple hard work will help the common person accomplish what they have, it leads to a fleeting confidence in people who should be maintaining longevity over the fast lifestyle of the rich. When their confidence lowers it makes it seem like their truly is no point in working or they work until their body physically can not keep up.

--

--