A persuasive case on millennial burnout
I remember the first time I felt concern over the millennial generation. It was 2005, when I was teaching a first-year writing and communication course at Virginia Tech.
My student, a conscientious and capable young woman, experienced anxiety to the point of not functioning while taking what I viewed as an extremely low-stakes test worth a mere 5% of the semester grade. Her test anxiety had started when taking the Virginia “Standards of Learning” exams that she had to pass to graduate from high school. Even though she was salutatorian of her class and knew the material cold, the anxiety meant she’d barely scraped over the bar on her third try. This had left a scar.
As a college instructor, I tried to help students ratchet down their worries with perspective. I told them that long term, grades didn’t matter. I told them about my own mediocre college career, and just look at me: big success!
Over the years, more and more of my students spoke of having their first school-related anxiety attacks in middle school. These were smart, hard-working people, as far from the stereotype of “coddled snowflakes” as you can imagine.
I became convinced that the problem was not a character defect in the millennial generation, but a problem with the culture in which they were asked to operate.
With “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,”
Anne Helen Petersen — to use a phrase popular with millennials — “brings the receipts.” “Can’t Even” explores the precarity reflected in the experiences of millions of lives in the United States and across the world, a precarity rooted in the fact that it is more difficult and more costly to achieve a stable, middle-class lifestyle, as wages have failed to keep up with profits, even for those who have what we would consider “good jobs.”
As Petersen shows, this leads to strain and burnout. The origins are not in millennials themselves, but their largely Boomer parents who have infused them with concerns over academic achievement and loaded them up with activities to make sure they stacked up well against their peers. Boomers were the first parenting generation to make their children the primary focus of their attention, thus triggering their own burnout and anxiety.
But the problem extends beyond parenting and to the very structure of work and the workplace itself. Stable union jobs with good wages that don’t require a post-secondary degree have been replaced by gig work. The endless hustle has made weekends and actual leisure scarce.
The result? More burnout. We now see the pattern repeating and intensifying as millennials (the oldest of whom turn 40 next year) are parents themselves, passing their burnout along to their children.
Petersen’s interest in the subject stemmed from her own experiences. A holder of a PhD, she pivoted to a successful career as a journalist but found herself worked to a nub with no end in sight.
The solution, in her view, is to “burn it down,” to rethink and restructure society around our shared values for a good life, rather than continuing to work ourselves to a frazzle while a fortunate few get very rich. (Though even they do not escape burnout.)
As we’ve seen with this pandemic, this is not just a millennial story. It is everyone beyond the most fortunate. If you are feeling frazzled, wondering how you’re going to be able to keep it together, you may find some solace in Petersen’s book. It argues persuasively: You’re not alone, and there are things to do be done about it.