Plugged in and burned out
Last week, a Buzzfeed article called “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Petersen explained why millennials do the things we do. Or, don’t do.
Petersen writes that millennials — those of us born between 1980 and the mid-to-late-90sto-2000ish, (nobody really agrees) — have spent our young, dumb lives being “optimized” for success in school, work and life, and when it turned out that the world was against us — no, seriously: the economy, the job market, student debt, the general perception that millennials are “spoiled, entitled, lazy and failures at what’s come to be known as ‘adulting’ ” — we found ourselves without the time, energy or resources to accomplish the kind of objectively simple tasks and errands that everyone, of every previous generation, just did.
This creates what Petersen calls “errand paralysis,” demonstrated by the list of tasks she can’t make herself do: she’s avoiding “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.”
Petersen writes that millennials are inclined to continue to optimize ourselves instead of rallying against the various superstructures that created the optimization-burnout paradigm, and burning them to the ground.
It might be true that we can’t seem to do much of anything right, but we weren’t given much to work with. (Petersen notes, correctly and essentially, that “millennial” represents the “mostly white” and “largely middle-class” members of the cohort. )
I agree with Petersen on the why — she makes a dramatically convincing case — but not on the what’s next. She notes that there’s no solution, and she’s right, but because “errand paralysis” exacerbates the more serious implications of burnout, like mental health and financial stability, it’s essential to find something to do about it.
There could be some genuine relief for millennial life if we confronted the uncomfortable but absolute truth that millennials avoid as studiously as the post office: A defining generational difference of Millennials is that we’re never alone, not when we’re always in the presence of a smartphone. My friends sleep, pee and drift around the apartment with theirs (not me; I’m perfect, and took all the fun apps off my phone) and so in addition to constantly working and emailing and texting, we’re also never bored, or at least, never unoccupied, a state of endless if interstitial time, that could otherwise be free for some of our undone life stuff.
In an average moment, when the senses have already been dulled and deadened by open tabs and infinite scroll, the idea of doing one particular task or errand out of many, taking the first of several steps to complete the task (like, actually printing off a return slip, my own personal albatross) and then doing it, feels much harder and less appealing than being forever online.
Millennials live in an atmosphere of distraction, and only an honest and conscious attempt to spend less time on the Optional Internet — like social media, Google, podcasts and texting — will free up the mental and emotional space, and the actual time, to get things done. Only attempts to restore focus and attention to what they might have been before the brainicane of always being online can really do anything when it comes to our time and efforts and how they’re applied.
There are other millennial habits that contribute to the errand paralysis, that don’t have to.
My favourite and least popular advice is to quit drinking because time spent hungover and money spent on cocktails have negative returns on investment.
Minimizing the total number of errands and tasks by living as simply as possible is also a good, if limited, idea, and its necessity has been confirmed by the recent millennial interest in the “tidying up” paradigm of celebrity organizer and Netflix star Marie Kondo. To me, the individual items are less important than creating a life where the things in it, and the time it takes to maintain them, are sustainable, especially for a millennial who identifies with Petersen’s “burnout” thesis.
When even the brightest millennials are so burned out that they can’t mail a letter, we have to make our own upward trajectory, however we can.