Millennials Became the Burnout Generation Study Guide
Study Guide for Anne Helen Petersen’s “How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” Part 1
The Contradiction
There is much talk about the newer generations, Millennials and subsequent ones of being spoiled, coddled snowflakes who lack basic development.
Two notable works are the best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff and the viral Atlantic essay “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” by Jean M. Twenge. In these works, young people are emotionally fragile, lazy, narcissistic, inward, and incapable of acting like adults.
Indeed, Anne Helen Petersen addresses this stereotype in her essay. As she writes, basic tasks cannot be completed by today’s generation like mailing a letter.
Adulting and Errand Paralsysis
Petersen defines adulting as doing tedious tasks that are required to live in the adult world such as basic chores: grocery shopping, house cleaning, etc.
Errand paralysis is when the To-Do list is so long people just go to bed and say “Screw it.”
Petersen includes herself in the narrative. As she writes:
None of these tasks were that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, registering my dog for a new license, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car. A handful of emails — one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going — festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame.”
It’s not as if I were slacking in the rest of my life. I was publishing stories, writing two books, making meals, executing a move across the country, planning trips, paying my student loans, exercising on a regular basis. But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better, I avoided it.
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Not Laziness But Burnout
Petersen is arguing that the newer generations, post-Millennial, are not lazy; they are burned out. It’s not so much a flaw of individual character but something systemic to culture at large, a society that promotes a dystopia where people are underpaid and overworked. Society has acclimated itself to this burnout but it can be felt in the background. As Petersen writes:
But the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.
That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.
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Economic Disadvantage
Petersen argues that it is grotesque for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers to paint younger generations as spoiled when the younger gens have several economic disadvantages: cost of education, cost of housing, and crappy or at best mediocre job prospects, which often require a side hustle.
Competing for good jobs has become a scene out of the Netflix show Squid Game, about a world that is essentially a tooth-and-claw zero-sum game with only winners and losers, no in-between.
Contrary to being lazy, many of the new generations are full-time careerists who fearfully worship at the altar of Workism, putting all their energies on career success. As Petersen writes:
It wasn’t until after college that I began to see the results of those attitudes in action. Four years postgraduation, alumni would complain that the school had filled with nerds: No one even parties on a Tuesday! I laughed at the eternal refrain — These younger kids, what dorks, we were way cooler — but not until I returned to campus years later as a professor did I realize just how fundamentally different those students’ orientation to school was. There were still obnoxious frat boys and fancy sorority girls, but they were far more studious than my peers had been. They skipped fewer classes. They religiously attended office hours. They emailed at all hours. But they were also anxious grade grubbers, paralyzed at the thought of graduating, and regularly stymied by assignments that called for creativity. They’d been guided closely all their lives, and they wanted me to guide them as well. They were, in a word, scared.
Every graduating senior is scared, to some degree, of the future, but this was on a different level. When my class left our liberal arts experience, we scattered to temporary gigs: I worked at a dude ranch; another friend nannied for the summer; one got a job on a farm in New Zealand; others became raft guides and transitioned to ski instructors. We didn’t think our first job was important; it was just a job and would eventually, meanderingly lead to The Job.
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A certain amount of fear is normal in life. I’m a Baby Boomer, and fear helped me succeed in college.
When I was seventeen during the summer before I went to college, I did construction work, and I was so sweat-soaked and tired when I got home that all I could do is shower, eat a bowl of cereal, go to bed, and wake up the next morning and start my Hell Day all over again.
It became apparent to me as a teenage kid that if I didn’t go to college, my life would be miserable and I would be so tired I wouldn’t even have time for thoughts; in other words, I would have been a Work Bot who Never Becomes Someone.
I went to college because I wanted to Become Someone.
I nearly failed my first year of college. I received a letter of probationary warning: Either stop dropping classes and improve your grades or you’re expelled.
The warning letter put a fire torch on my rear and motivated me to change my ways, stop hanging out with my high school buddies, and start being consistent with my studies.
I dumped my old friends and quickly spiked my GPA so that I was on the Dean’s List, but let there be no mistake, fear was a huge motivational factor.
Easier for Me
But let’s be clear. My college life as a Baby Boomer was easier than today’s generation. I paid $75 a quarter to go to Cal State and I could major in anything I wanted and be confident I’d find a high-paying job with good medical benefits and afford a house. That scenario doesn’t exist for my students today.
For example, I had no student debt to worry about. But today the average student loan debt is $36K overall and $55K for private colleges.
Today’s Fear of Failure and Disappointing One’s Parents
Petersen observes that today’s generation in college feels the stakes are so high that they immediately must get a high-status job to define their success and “intrinsic value”; otherwise, they will disappoint themselves and their parents. As we read:
But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. I told one student, whose dozens of internship and fellowship applications yielded no results, that she should move somewhere fun, get any job, and figure out what interests her and what kind of work she doesn’t want to do — a suggestion that prompted wailing. “But what’ll I tell my parents?” she said. “I want a cool job I’m passionate about!”
Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.
Or at least that’s the theory. So what happens when millennials start the actual search for that holy grail career — and start “adulting” — but it doesn’t feel at all like the dream that had been promised?
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Study Guide for Anne Helen Petersen’s “How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” Part 2
Curating Our Life to be Self-Actualized and Successful
Social media has become the prominent mode for curating our lives as being successful and self-actualized.
We have become inculcated with the idea that we must curate a narrative on social media: We are on a self-actualization journey; we have a hard-work ethic, and we enjoy the fruits of our hard work.
We like to show the world our expensive vacations, our pet dogs, our euphoric romances, our mouth-water meals. We fail to realize that this facade is pure BS, the effluvium of the insecure, the impoverished, and the psychologically damaged.
No matter how much attention and validation is lavished upon us for our social media curations, we feel constantly impoverished, hungry, and “thirsty” for more attention. We can never get enough. We remain sad, anxious, and depressed.
To make our connection to social media even worse, not only are we emotionally addicted to self-curation, we are told that having a “social media presence” is essential to promoting our career and establishing “our brand.” As Petersen writes:
The social media feed — and Instagram in particular — is thus evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself. The photos and videos that induce the most jealousy are those that suggest a perfect equilibrium (work hard, play hard!) has been reached. But of course, for most of us, it hasn’t. Posting on social media, after all, is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we’re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.
For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The “purest” example is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. But social media is also the means through which many “knowledge workers” — that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information — market and brand themselves. Journalists use Twitter to learn about other stories, but they also use it to develop a personal brand and following that can be leveraged; people use LinkedIn not just for résumés and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren’t the only ones who do this, but we’re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.
“Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.
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Turning ourselves into “a brand” is a form of self-commodification that contributes to Workism. As we drink our own Kool-Aid and believe the BS narrative we spin on social media, we become lost narcissists worshipping at the altar of Workism and not realizing that eventually we will crash and burn.
Business is both complicit and happy with our demise. They are looking at us as wet rags and every last drop will be squeezed from us.
The Phone Tethers Us to Work 24/7 While We Suffer Wage Stagnation
In the Smartphone Age, the idea of a 40-hour work week is a joke. The smartphone makes us beholden to our job responsibilities 24/7, either by explicit decree by our boss or our own internalized pressures to keep up and remain competitive.
We would like to believe our increased hours and productivity would result in commensurate pay, but on the contrary, we get paid less, suffer less job security, and endure fewer benefits. As Petersen writes:
But as sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg points out, that efficiency was supposed to give us more job security, more pay, perhaps even more leisure. In short, better jobs.
Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.
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Optimization Is a Pretty Word for Burnout
As we optimize and maximize our efficiency to champion our success, we actually fall precipitously into a rabbit hole of mental and physical weariness and collapse.
Worse than exhaustion which has an endpoint, burnout is a form of an ongoing collapse in which we are in a state of depression and sadness yet keep pushing ourselves to maintain our agenda. Somehow with no rewards, we keep telling ourselves to exploit ourselves more and more as if there is a rainbow waiting for us when in fact no such rainbow exists.
Exhaustion has an endgame. You collapse, hit rock bottom, and abandon the thing that caused the exhaustion.
In contrast, burnout has no endgame. You slog forward in a state of frayed and tattered emotions with no will to stop yourself.
Our intellect tells us to stop and get off the Workism Treadmill, but we have internalized a compulsive addiction to self-punishment that defines what our powers of reason tell us.
As a result, this pathological condition called Burnout becomes the new normal for newer generations. As Petersen writes:
All of this optimization — as children, in college, online — culminates in the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location: burnout. “Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by 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 it’s 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.
What’s worse, 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.”
In his writing about burnout, Cohen is careful to note that it has 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 differs in its intensity and its prevalence: It isn’t an affliction experienced by relatively few that evidences the darker qualities of change but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the contemporary condition.
People patching together a retail job with unpredictable scheduling while driving Uber and arranging child care have burnout. Startup workers with fancy catered lunches, free laundry service, and 70-minute commutes have burnout. Academics teaching four adjunct classes and surviving on food stamps while trying to publish research in one last 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.
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Propaganda Against Millennials Reframes Necessity as “Killing” and “Laziness.”
What critics call “killing” high-quality cultural artifacts like nice furniture, diamond wedding rings, and sit-down restaurants as a sign of bad taste and laziness is actually the necessity of optimization. As Petersen writes:
One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industries our generation has supposedly “killed.” We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have. We’ve exchanged sit-down casual dining (Applebee’s, TGI Fridays) for fast casual (Chipotle et al.) because if we’re gonna pay for something, it should either be an experience worth waiting in line for (Cronuts! World-famous BBQ! Momofuku!) or efficient as hell.
Even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: You can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work.
This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.
Raising a Family Is the Second Shift
Peterson observes another factor to burnout: Having a family. Raising a family is hard by itself but coming home from a job to cook and clean for a family is the Second Shift. This life has become the new normal and burnout is inevitable. More and more of the young generation are opting out of marriage and having kids altogether to be spared the Second Shift and the financial burdens of raising a family.
Add to the Second Shift the “massive cognitive load” from worrying about money all the time and you’ve got Burnout.
Post-Petersen Essay, American Burnout Has Gotten Worse
America has gotten worse since Petersen’s essay came out in 2019. When we look at the economy, climate change, global conflicts, the Covid Pandemic and its variants, America’s political polarization, the decline of American democracy, and masses of Americans with no decent and critical thinking skills living in a conspiracy-addled Fever Swamp of weaponized misinformation, we find ourselves living in a constant state of Hair on Fire.
When our Hair is on Fire 24/7, the burnout Petersen describes is multiplied by a thousand.
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