Why Millennials Are The Burnout Generation
Feeling burned out?
We just amazon primed Anne Helen Petersen’s new book “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”! It’s still on the way so we decided to dig up her article that caught the Internet by storm last January.
Millennials, including us, are often overwhelmed by “adulting”—that is a word we’ve invented to describe carrying out duties and responsibilities of a developed individual. “Adulting” in this era is beyond getting a job, filing taxes, or doing our own laundry. We pressure ourselves to *optimize* our lives—have cool jobs that also pay well, dine at the trendiest restaurants, party until 3am when we aren’t working, and then somehow make it Barry’s 6 the next morning. We want to do it all, perhaps do *more* than our peers.
“I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few.…We liked to say we worked hard, played hard…We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough.”
All of this optimization makes us burn out. And suddenly we might be wondering, what’s the purpose of all of this hard work? What is my purpose? Some of us like to call this a mid-life-crisis-that-happens-at-age-20-something or a mini existential crisis. In case you’re experiencing symptoms of being burned out, think about the last time you did something for yourself—not for your resume and not for Instagram. When was the last time you picked up a book “for fun” (many of us have been doing more of this during quarantine yay!) or baked a batch of choc chip cookies to gobble up? The small and seemingly insignificant things we do can have the greatest impact. They affect our mood, which in turn affects how we treat ourselves and others around us.
“I don’t have a plan of action, other than to be more honest with myself about what I am and am not doing and why...It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it.”
