How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.

Headshot of Anne Helen Petersen

Anne Helen Petersen

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on January 5, 2019, at 10:31 a.m. ET

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“I tried to register for the 2016 election, but it was beyond the deadline by the time I tried to do it,” a man named Tim, age 27, explained to New York magazine last fall. “I hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety.” Tim was outlining the reasons why he, like 11 other millennials interviewed by the magazine, probably wouldn’t vote in the 2018 midterm election. “The amount of work logically isn’t that much,” he continued. “Fill out a form, mail it, go to the specific place on a specific day. But those kind of tasks can be hard for me to do if I’m not enthusiastic about it.”

Tim goes on to admit that some friends had helped him register to vote, and he planned to probably make it happen for the midterms. But his explanation — even though, as he noted, his struggle in this case was caused in part by his ADHD — triggered the contemporary tendency to dunk on millennials’ inability to complete seemingly basic tasks. Grow up, the overall sentiment goes. Life is not that hard. “So this is the way the world ends,” HuffPost congressional reporter Matt Fuller tweeted. “Not with a bang but with a bunch of millennials who don’t know how to mail things.”

Explanations like Tim’s are at the core of the millennial reputation: We’re spoiled, entitled, lazy, and failures at what’s come to be known as “adulting,” a word invented by millennials as a catchall for the tasks of self-sufficient existence. Expressions of “adulting” do often come off as privileged astonishment at the realities of, well, life: that you have to pay bills and go to work; that you have to buy food and cook it if you want to eat it; that actions have consequences. Adulting is hard because life is hard — or, as a Bustle article admonishes its readers, “everything is hard if you want to look at it that way.”

Millennials love to complain about other millennials giving them a bad name. But as I fumed about this 27-year-old’s post office anxiety, I was deep in a cycle of a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I’ve come to call “errand paralysis.” I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months.

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.

My shame about these errands expands with each day. I remind myself that my mom was pretty much always doing errands. Did she like them? No. But she got them done. So why couldn’t I get it together — especially when the tasks were all, at first glance, easily completed? I realized that the vast majority of these tasks shares a common denominator: Their primary beneficiary is me, but not in a way that would actually drastically improve my life. They are seemingly high-effort, low-reward tasks, and they paralyze me — not unlike the way registering to vote paralyzed millennial Tim.

Tim and I are not alone in this paralysis. My partner was so stymied by the multistep, incredibly (and purposefully) confusing process of submitting insurance reimbursement forms for every single week of therapy that for months he just didn’t send them — and ate over $1,000. Another woman told me she had a package sitting unmailed in the corner of her room for over a year. A friend admitted he’s absorbed hundreds of dollars in clothes that don’t fit because he couldn’t manage to return them. Errand paralysis, post office anxiety — they’re different manifestations of the same affliction.

For the past two years, I’ve refused cautions — from editors, from family, from peers — that I might be edging into burnout. To my mind, burnout was something aid workers, or high-powered lawyers, or investigative journalists dealt with. It was something that could be treated with a week on the beach. I was still working, still getting other stuff done — of course I wasn’t burned out.

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.

So what now? Should I meditate more, negotiate for more time off, delegate tasks within my relationship, perform acts of self-care, and institute timers on my social media? How, in other words, can I optimize myself to get those mundane tasks done and theoretically cure my burnout? As millennials have aged into our thirties, that’s the question we keep asking — and keep failing to adequately answer. But maybe that’s because it’s the wrong question altogether.

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For the last decade, “millennials” has been used to describe or ascribe what’s right and wrong with young people, but in 2019, millennials are well into adulthood: The youngest are 22; the oldest, like me, somewhere around 38. That has required a shift in the way people within and outside of our generation configure their criticism. We’re not feckless teens anymore; we’re grown-ass adults, and the challenges we face aren’t fleeting, but systemic.

Many of the behaviors attributed to millennials are the behaviors of a specific subset of mostly white, largely middle-class people born between 1981 and 1996. But even if you’re a millennial who didn’t grow up privileged, you’ve been impacted by the societal and cultural shifts that have shaped the generation. Our parents — a mix of young boomers and old Gen-Xers — reared us during an age of relative economic and political stability. As with previous generations, there was an expectation that the next one would be better off — both in terms of health and finances — than the one that had come before.

But as millennials enter into mid-adulthood, that prognosis has been proven false. Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. The “greatest generation” had the Depression and the GI Bill; boomers had the golden age of capitalism; Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics. And millennials? We’ve got venture capital, but we’ve also got the 2008 financial crisis, the decline of the middle class and the rise of the 1%, and the steady decay of unions and stable, full-time employment.

As American business became more efficient, better at turning a profit, the next generation needed to be positioned to compete. We couldn’t just show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep a job that would allow us to retire at 55. In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible.

And that process began very early. In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris lays out the myriad ways in which our generation has been trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace — first in school, then through secondary education — starting as very young children. “Risk management used to be a business practice,” Harris writes, “now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.” Depending on your age, this idea applies to what our parents did or didn’t allow us to do (play on “dangerous” playground structures, go out without cellphones, drive without an adult in the car) and how they allowed us to do the things we did do (learn, explore, eat, play).

Harris points to practices that we now see as standard as a means of “optimizing” children’s play, an attitude often described as “intensive parenting.” Running around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined.

My childhood in the late ’80s and early ’90s was only partially defined by this kind of parental optimization and monitoring, largely because I lived in a rural town in North Idaho, where such structured activities were scarce. I spent my recess time playing on the (very dangerous!) teeter-totters and the merry-go-round. I wore a helmet to bike and skateboard, but my brother and I were the only kids we knew who did. I didn’t do internships in high school or in college, because they weren’t yet a standardized component of either experience. I took piano lessons for fun, not for my future. I didn’t have an SAT prep class. I took the one AP class available to me, and applied to colleges (on paper, by hand!) based on brochures and short write-ups in a book of “Best Colleges.”

But that was the beginning of the end of that attitude — toward parenting, toward children’s leisure time, toward college selection. And not just among bourgeois, educated, stereotypical helicopter parents: In addition to “intensive parenting,” millennial parents are also characterized by “vigilante” parenting behaviors, where, as sociologist Linda M. Blum describes, “a mother’s unyielding watchfulness and advocacy for her child [takes] on the imperative of a lone moral quest.”

Recent research has found that “vigilante” behaviors cut across race and class lines. Maybe an upper-class suburban family is invested in their child getting into an Ivy League school, while a mom in Philadelphia who didn’t get a chance to go to college herself is invested in her daughter becoming the first in the family to make it to college. The goals are somewhat different, but the supervision, the attitude, the risk assessment, and the campaign to get that child to that goal are very similar.

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.

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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Like most old millennials, my own career path was marked by two financial catastrophes. In the early 2000s, when many of us were either first entering college or the workforce, the dot-com bubble burst. The resultant financial rubble wasn’t as extensive as the 2008 crisis, but it tightened the job market and torpedoed the stock market, which indirectly affected millennials who’d been counting on parents’ investments to get them through college. When I graduated with a liberal arts degree in 2003 and moved to Seattle, the city was still affordable, but skilled jobs were in short supply. I worked as a nanny, a housemate worked as an assistant, a friend resorted to selling what would later be known as subprime mortgages.

Those two years as a nanny were hard — I was stultifyingly bored and commuted an hour in each direction — but it was the last time I remember not feeling burned out. I had a cellphone, but couldn’t even send texts; I checked my email once a day on a desktop computer in my friend’s room. Because I’d been placed through a nanny agency, my contract included health care, sick days, and paid time off. I made $32,000 a year and paid $500 a month in rent. I had no student debt from undergrad, and my car was paid off. I didn’t save much, but had money for movies and dinners out. I was intellectually unstimulated, but I was good at my job — caring for two infants — and had clear demarcations between when I was on and off the clock.

Then those two years ended and the bulk of my friend group began the exodus to grad school. We enrolled in PhD programs, law school, med school, architecture school, education master’s programs, MBAs. It wasn’t because we were hungry for more knowledge. It was because we were hungry for secure, middle-class jobs — and had been told, correctly or not, that those jobs were available only through grad school. Once we were in grad school, and the microgeneration behind us was emerging from college into the workplace, the 2008 financial crisis hit.

The crisis affected everyone in some way, but the way it affected millennials is foundational: It’s always defined our experience of the job market. More experienced workers and the newly laid-off filled applicant pools for lower- and entry-level jobs once largely reserved for recent graduates. We couldn’t find jobs, or could only find part-time jobs, jobs without benefits, or jobs that were actually multiple side hustles cobbled together into one job. As a result, we moved back home with our parents, we got roommates, we went back to school, we tried to make it work. We were problem solvers, after all — and taught that if we just worked harder, it would work out.

On the surface, it did work out. The economy recovered. Most of us moved out of our parents’ houses. We found jobs. But what we couldn’t find was financial security. Because education — grad school, undergrad, vocational school, online — was situated as the best and only way to survive, many of us emerged from those programs with loan payments that our postgraduation prospects failed to offset. The situation was even more dire if you entered a for-profit school, where the average total debt for a four-year degree is $39,950 and the job prospects postgraduation are even bleaker.

As I continued through grad school, I accumulated more and more debt — debt that I rationalized, like so many of my generation, as the only means to achieve the end goal of 1) a “good” job that would 2) be or sound cool and 3) allow me to follow my “passion.” In this case, full-time, tenure-track employment as a media studies professor. In the past, pursuing a PhD was a generally debt-free endeavor: Academics worked their way toward their degree while working as teaching assistants, which paid them cost of living and remitted the cost of tuition.

That model began to shift in 1980s, particularly at public universities forced to compensate for state budget cuts. Teaching assistant labor was far cheaper than paying for a tenured professor, so the universities didn’t just keep PhD programs, but expanded them, even with dwindling funds to adequately pay those students. Still, thousands of PhD students clung to the idea of a tenure-track professorship. And the tighter the academic market became, the harder we worked. We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.

I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset. I’d worked hard in college, but as an old millennial, the expectations for labor were tempered. We liked to say we worked hard, played hard — and there were clear boundaries around each of those activities. Grad school, then, is where I learned to work like a millennial, which is to say, all the time. My new watchword was “Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good”: Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.

In my master’s program, graduate students’ labor was arguably exploited, but we were unionized and compensated in a way that made emerging from the program without debt possible. Our health insurance was solid; class sizes were manageable. But that all changed in my PhD program in Texas — a “right to work” state, where unions, if they existed at all, have no bargaining power. I was paid enough to cover a month’s rent in Austin with $200 left for everything else. I taught classes as large as 60 students on my own. The only people in my cohort who didn’t have to take out loans had partners in “real” jobs or family money; most of us were saddled with debt for the privilege of preparing ourselves for no job prospects. Either we kept working or we failed.

So we took those loans, with the assurance from the federal government that if, after graduation, we went to a public service field (such as teaching at a college or university) and paid a percentage of our loans on time for 10 years, the rest would be forgiven. Last year — the first in which eligible graduates could apply for forgiveness — just 1% of applications were accepted.

When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.

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One thing that makes that realization sting even more is watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it. I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children, the landscapes inhabited and the food consumed seems not just desirable, but balanced, satisfied, and unafflicted by burnout.

And though work itself is rarely pictured, it’s always there. Periodically, it’s photographed as a space that’s fun or zany, and always rewarding or gratifying. But most of the time, it’s the thing you’re getting away from: You worked hard enough to enjoy life.

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.

But the phone is also, and just as essentially, a tether to the “real” workplace. Email and Slack make it so that employees are always accessible, always able to labor, even after they’ve left the physical workplace and the traditional 9-to-5 boundaries of paid labor. Attempts to discourage working “off the clock” misfire, as millennials read them not as permission to stop working, but a means to further distinguish themselves by being available anyway.

“We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,” Harris, the Kids These Days author, writes. “Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.”

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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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.

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.

The thing about American labor, after all, is that we’re trained to erase it. Anxiety is medicated; burnout is treated with therapy that’s slowly become normalized and yet still softly stigmatized. (Time in therapy, after all, is time you could be working.) No one would’ve told my grandmother that churning butter and doing the wash by hand wasn’t work. But planning a week of healthy meals for a family of four, figuring out the grocery list, finding time to get to the grocery store, and then preparing and cleaning up after those meals, while holding down a full-time job? That’s just motherhood, not labor.

Millennial burnout often works differently among women, and particularly straight women with families. Part of this has to do with what’s known as “the second shift” — the idea that women who’ve moved into the workplace do the labor of a job and then come home and perform the labor of a homemaker. (A recent study found that mothers in the workplace spend just as much time taking care of their children as stay-at-home mothers did in 1975.) One might think that when women work, the domestic labor decreases, or splits between both partners. But sociologist Judy Wajcman found that in heterosexual couples, that simply wasn’t the case: Less domestic labor takes place overall, but that labor still largely falls on the woman.

The labor that causes burnout isn’t just putting away the dishes or folding the laundry — tasks that can be readily distributed among the rest of the family. It’s more to do with what French cartoonist Emma calls “the mental load,” or the scenario in which one person in a family — often a woman — takes on a role akin to “household management project leader.” The manager doesn’t just complete chores; they keep the entire household’s schedule in their minds. They remember to get toilet paper because it’ll run out in four days. They’re ultimately responsible for the health of the family, the upkeep of the home and their own bodies, maintaining a sex life, cultivating an emotional bond with their children, overseeing aging parents’ care, making sure bills are paid and neighbors are greeted and someone’s home for a service call and holiday cards get in the mail and vacations are planned six months in advance and airline miles aren’t expiring and the dog’s getting exercised.

Women have told me that reading Emma’s cartoon, which has gone viral many times over, brought them to tears: They’d never seen the particular work that they do described, let alone acknowledged. And for millennials, that domestic work is now supposed to check a never-ending number of aspirational boxes: Outings should be “experiences,” food should be healthy and homemade and fun, bodies should be sculpted, wrinkles should be minimized, clothes should be cute and fashionable, sleep should be regulated, relationships should be healthy, the news should be read and processed, kids should be given personal attention and thriving. Millennial parenting is, as a recent New York Times article put it, relentless.

The media that surrounds us — both social and mainstream, from Marie Kondo’s new Netflix show to the lifestyle influencer economy — tells us that our personal spaces should be optimized just as much as one’s self and career. The end result isn’t just fatigue, but enveloping burnout that follows us to home and back. The most common prescription is “self-care.” Give yourself a face mask! Go to yoga! Use your meditation app! But much of self-care isn’t care at all: It’s an $11 billion industry whose end goal isn’t to alleviate the burnout cycle, but to provide further means of self-optimization. At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting.

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“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being,” an article in Elite Daily explains. “Adulting therefore becomes a verb.” “To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends. “I’m really struggling to find the Christmas magic this year,” one woman in a Facebook group focused on self-care recently wrote. “I have two little kids (2 and 6 months) and, while we had fun reading Christmas books, singing songs, walking around the neighborhood to look at lights, I mostly feel like it’s just one to-do list superimposed over my already overwhelming to-do list. I feel so burned out. Commiseration or advice?”

That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial.

There are a few ways to look at this original problem of errand paralysis. Many of the tasks millennials find paralyzing are ones that are impossible to optimize for efficiency, either because they remain stubbornly analog (the post office) or because companies have optimized themselves, and their labor, so as to make the experience as arduous as possible for the user (anything to do with insurance, or bills, or filing a complaint). Sometimes, the inefficiencies are part of the point: The harder it is to submit a request for a reimbursement, the less likely you are to do it. The same goes for returns.

Other tasks become difficult because of too many options, and what’s come to be known as “decision fatigue.” I’ve moved around so much because of my career path, and always loathed the process of finding family practitioners and dentists and dermatologists. Finding a doctor — and not just any doctor, but one who will take your insurance, who is accepting new patients — might seem like an easy task in the age of Zocdoc, but the array of options can be paralyzing without the recommendations of friends and family, which are in short supply when you move to a brand-new town.

Other tasks are, well, boring. I’ve done them too many times. The payoff from completing them is too small. Boredom with the monotony of labor is usually associated with physical and/or assembly line jobs, but it’s widespread among “knowledge workers.” As Caroline Beaton, who has written extensively about millennials and labor, points out, the rise of the “knowledge sector” has simply “changed the medium of monotony from heavy machinery to digital technology. … We habituate to the modern workforce’s high intensity but predictable tasks. Because the stimuli don’t change, we cease to be stimulated. The consequence is two-fold. First, like a kind of Chinese water torture, each identical thing becomes increasingly painful. In defense, we become decreasingly engaged.”

My refusal to respond to a kind Facebook DM is thus symptomatic of the sheer number of calls for my attention online: calls to read an article, calls to promote my own work, calls to engage wittily or defend myself from trolls or like a relative’s picture of their baby.

To be clear, none of these explanations are, to my mind, exonerating. They don’t seem like great or rational reasons to avoid doing things I know, in the abstract, I want or need to do. But dumb, illogical decisions are a symptom of burnout. We engage in self-destructive behaviors or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list. Which helps explain one of the complaints about millennials’ work habits: They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that they’re bad at work because of just how much work they do — especially when it’s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness.

In recent years, new scientific research has demonstrated the “massive cognitive load” on those who are financially insecure. Living in poverty is akin to losing 13 IQ points. Millions of millennial Americans live in poverty; millions of others straddle the line, getting by but barely so, often working contingent jobs, with nothing left over for the sort of security blanket that could lighten that cognitive load. To be poor is to have very little mental bandwidth to make decisions, “good” or otherwise — as a parent, as a worker, as a partner, as a citizen. The steadier our lives, the more likely we are to make decisions that will make them even steadier.

But steadiness isn’t a word we use to describe contemporary American life. And depending on your religion, immigration status, ethnicity, and sexual identity, chances are that the election of Donald Trump has only made one’s future, and safety, and employability, less stable. Health care and coverage of preexisting conditions is seemingly always in question and/or in peril, as are women’s reproductive rights. War with North Korea looms. We’ve never recognized social media and smartphones as more toxic and more necessary. Our primary concern with the incredibly volatile stock market is how its temperament affects our day-to-day employment. The planet is dying. Democracy is under serious threat. American adults report being 39% more anxiousthan a year ago, and what is anxiety if not the condition of trying to live under these conditions?

Pundits spend a lot of time saying “This is not normal,” but the only way for us to survive, day to day, is to normalize the events, the threats, the barrage of information, the costs, the expectations of us. Burnout isn’t a place to visit and come back from; it’s our permanent residence.

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In his writing about burnout, the psychoanalyst Cohen describes a client who came to him with extreme burnout: He was the quintessential millennial child, optimized for perfect performance, which paid off when he got his job as a high-powered finance banker. He’d done everything right, and was continuing to do everything right in his job. One morning, he woke up, turned off his alarm, rolled over, and refused to go to work. He never went to work again. He was “intrigued to find the termination of his employment didn’t bother him.”

In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive. You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unfu*k yourself.” You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “anxiety baking,” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.

The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there’s no solution to it. You can’t optimize it to make it end faster. You can’t see it coming like a cold and start taking the burnout-prevention version of Airborne. The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is — not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease — and to understand its roots and its parameters. That’s why people I talked to felt such relief reading the “mental load” cartoon, and why reading Harris’s book felt so cathartic for me: They don’t excuse why we behave and feel the way we do. They just describe those feelings and behaviors — and the larger systems of capitalism and patriarchy that contribute to them — accurately.

To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.

But individual action isn’t enough. Personal choices alone won’t keep the planet from dying, or get Facebook to quit violating our privacy. To do that, you need paradigm-shifting change. Which helps explain why so many millennials increasingly identify with democratic socialism and are embracing unions: We are beginning to understand what ails us, and it’s not something an oxygen facial or a treadmill desk can fix.

Until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, how can we hope to lessen or prevent — instead of just temporarily staunch — burnout? Change might come from legislation, or collective action, or continued feminist advocacy, but it’s folly to imagine it will come from companies themselves. Our capacity to burn out and keep working is our greatest value.

While writing this piece, I was orchestrating a move, planning travel, picking up prescriptions, walking my dog, trying to exercise, making dinner, attempting to participate in work conversations on Slack, posting photos to social media, and reading the news. I was waking up at 6 a.m. to write, packing boxes over lunch, moving piles of wood at dinner, falling into bed at 9. I was on the treadmill of the to-do list: one damn thing after another. But as I finish this piece, I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time: catharsis. I feel great. I feel something — which is not something I’ve really felt upon the completion of a task in some time.

There are still things to tackle after this. But for the first time, I’m seeing myself, the parameters of my labor, and the causes of my burnout clearly. And it doesn’t feel like the abyss. It doesn’t feel hopeless. It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge, a paradigm through which I can understand my actions.

In their writing on homelessness, social psychologist Devon Price has said that “laziness,” at least in the way most of us generally conceive of it, simply does not exist. “If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you,” they write, “it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.” My behavior didn’t make sense to me because I was missing part of my context: burnout. I was too ashamed to admit I was experiencing it. I fancied myself too strong to succumb to it. I had narrowed my definition of burnout to exclude my own behaviors and symptoms. But I was wrong.

I think I have some of the answers to the specific questions that made me start writing this essay. Yours are probably somewhat or substantially different. 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, and to try to disentangle myself from the idea that everything good is bad and everything bad is good. This isn’t a task to complete or a line on a to-do list, or even a New Year’s resolution. It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work. ●

We’re not feckless teens anymore; we’re grown-ass adults, and the challenges we face aren’t fleeting, but systemic.

We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.

I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them.

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.

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.

“To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.

The thing about American labor, after all, is that we're trained to erase it.

That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks.

We are beginning to understand what ails us, and it’s not something an oxygen facial or a treadmill desk can fix.

Our capacity to burn out and keep working is our greatest value.

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Ellen Hart

This article is so spot on I am literally shaking.

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Taylor Woodhead

*LITERALLY SHAKING* lmfao. Urban Dictionary that.

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David Ruddle

This feels like satire and I wonder that's why it got so much likes lol

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Elizabeth James

My mother lived on an island where there was no running water, people beat their clothes on rocks, there was no heat in winter, and people wore shoes only for Sunday church. She has no patience for people whining about how hard women have it now. To her, raising a kid in the U.S. today is like living in a Four Seasons.

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Jason Downs

Elizabeth James same here. Half my family is from a 3rd world country. If I as much as refuse to sleep on the floor in my 30’s and go get myself a hotel room like a grown adult, it’s because I’m a “spoiled American.” If I so much as wear clothes that match, they call me Cinderello. Any resemblance to modern civilization blows their minds and just seems like wasted luxury to my family. It’s exhausting.

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Nayton Wong

You're shaking because you didn't stop to eat halfway through reading it.

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Michael Craig

Elizabeth James Darn right these are the weakest sorriest people ever in the world! They need google to get across the street, how to write a song.. they need an app to learn how to care about others.. they nned an app to prove that sex was consensual and a RAPE did not occur, as apparently, all sex is rape to them, or maybe 50% of the time..They know NOTHING of romance or love that scares the hell out of them. They will run like hell from a decent romantic guy, into the arms of a 50 shades of grey kinky raper freak and meanwhile say how much they hate men, after deliberately going for the 3 way violent kink session, and posting up naked pictures of themselves having sex !! They need health coaches, they hire strangers to mentor them intead of being close with their families..Everything is asked of google..never speak to a real person in person!!They are SO screwed up!!

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Jim Blankenship

Michael Craig Hopefully you won't talk to any of us if we're all so bad, then! I find it pretty interesting that you spent about half of your rant on what you think our sexual proclivities are, though. And maybe you should take some of your own advice and get to know an actual millennial before forming an opinion; your ideas are so buzzwordy and bizarre that I'm 90% sure you got the majority of them from the internet and tv. But cool take on the subject, I enjoyed the read. 10/10 for entertainment

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Blair Reiter

Michael Craig are you ok?

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Justice Litle

Look up the phrase "directed attention fatigue" on Wikipedia.

This is literally a biological phenomenon, rooted in lack of sleep, in which a chronic state of mild-to-severe sleep deprivation causes the brain's executive function to deteriorate and reduces the capacity for decision-making.

When you don't get enough sleep, your brain doesn't get the time it needs to consolidate memories, and your body doesn't get the time window it needs to repair tissues and flush out toxins.

The ongoing result of mild sleep deprivation, coupled with a constant sense of urgency, is descent into a permanent fog of low-grade anxiety, worsened by a dulling at the edges.

The likely reason millennials feel this more intensely than any other generation (so far) is because the ratcheted up pressure to succeed is coupled with the overwhelming presence of sleep-robbing technology.

The CEO of Netflix has said "our greatest competitor is sleep." He clearly thinks that's cool. The reality is that any technology that consistently robs you of your sleep is on some level your enemy, and is slowly destroying you.

Millennials want to "have it all" while simultaneously fearing they will slip into a ravine of failure, with failure defined not just as having the best job but not living their best life, or not living it as well as their friends.

As a result they are like treadmill-addicted hamsters slowly running themselves to death for lack of rest.

The simple answer -- unplug and get more sleep -- is actually not simple at all, because finding more time for healthy sleep and rest goes directly against the grain of "having it all" and being the super-worker who has a super social life with time to watch five Netflix shows besides.

As a result of billions of years of evolution, the human body and brain combine to form the most elegant and impressive machine in the history of the universe. But this machine still needs time to regenerate and repair itself and carry out basic maintenance functions.

Those who continue to sleep-deprive themselves, while racking their lives with performance anxiety, will slowly degrade or destroy their body-mind functions as surely as a car engine will break down if driven constantly with no maintenance. This is the story of the millennial generation on the whole, and Gen Xers too, and the majority seem clueless.

Get more sleep and rest. Look into bodily functions and restorative needs of the body and mind on a basic biological level. Or don't, and let burnout swallow you as you burn out your machinery.

This will be hard because technology and society have made you addicted to the notion of "having it all." Figure out how to give up that addiction, or figure out how to work and play smarter and get more sleep in. Or accept burnout as your fate.

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Tracy Frye Seymour

Nailed it. Thank you

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Clayton Arbo

that makes a lot of sense. my sleep hygeine is crap and yet another source of guilt. improve sleep hygeine is tbh on my to-do list.

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Sally Oh

Thank you. As a functional health coach, I deal with food first, sleep second. Many of my colleagues deal with sleep first. It's a critical piece. No sleep = no brain.

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Thalia Sutton

Very well put. Thanks for it. I'll also add on that the some people need more sleep than others, or need it at defined parts of the day that don't work with normal job cycles. (For instance, high school nearly killed me because regularly getting up before the sun comes up does something odd to my brain chemicals (probably because of SAD) and so I never felt rested, ever, no matter how much sleep I got.)

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Sandra Wernicke

So what you're saying is... shut your fucking phone off. lol

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Tracy Meserve

Yes, milennials don't get enough sleep, but that does not change the fact that the reason we are working so hard is because we are working harder for less money and less benefits. Wages are stagnant, pensions have disappeared, labor unions have been gutted, and health insurance in our country is a joke. Start fixing these problems and maybe milennials can work less and also get more sleep. Our country is in need of systemic change and that is not going to come any time soon, so we workers are just keep being squeezed tighter and tighter.

And yes, technology is evil.

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Suzie Cochrane

Thank you for this insight.

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Ria Zausibal

Interesting point. Being constantly tired and never having enough sleep is a "burnout" after being constantly stressed. Stress also damages your brain. Burnout has biological causes. It is not easy to sleep more, when you don't have the time for it and you are too stressed to sleep. It's a vicious cycle that only ends when you finally collaps or you work less and sleep more and loose your job, your home and then you collaps.

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Aimee Schlueter

Thank you, Anne, for articulating this state of being into words. More importantly, thank you for the ever-elusive sense of peace I feel in my anxiety-ridden world right now that I think comes from realizing there is not something inherently wrong with me but rather a larger epidemic amongst many in our generation.

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Cyan James

I echo this! Anne, this is such a thoughtful, clearly explicated piece of writing. Thank you for taking time, in between all the needling of everyday life tasks, to commit these thoughts to paper in such a systematic and sensible way. It's so helpful to see it laid out like this (and not just to offer explanations about why the 'to do' list can be so daunting for so many of us, but, even more so, as a reflection of how many of us feel so "mosquito bitten" and itchy, if you will, with the churn of *so many things to attend to,* just to have a shot at independence. The power of decisional exhaustion cannot be underestimated.

The burn-out you address has caused me to jettison many ways of "proving myself" that probably could advance my career, but at the cost of myself. Instead, I'm focusing on only friends and activities that are enriching and truly meaningful on their own. Of course I still have to do a lot of pesky things, but keeping focus on creating space and quiet and a sense of non-obligation has really helped. I'd be curious to know what works for others, too.

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Desiree Valenzuela

This Boomer has no advice to offer, at least not for the younger people. For my fellow Boomers, however- I would ask you, as kindly and politely as I know how- to please not be such rude, impatient, intolerant jerks in your dealings with younger people. Once in a while, a situation will call for pushback on our part. But far too often I see my fellow Boomers being really nasty in situations that do not call for it. It isn't helpful, it won't fix or improve anything. Nine times out of ten the target of your wrath really doesn't deserve it. It's just a pointlessly angry, ugly way to live. Everyone loses, including you.

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Trisha Dee

100%.

Also, we need to stop this inter-generational shit hurling. Its an invention of lazy social media.

I have boomer friends who dont have a pot to piss in because they stuck to their principles. Which didnt include voting for neo-liberalist horseshit propagated by Reagan and Thatcher.

This is politics, not people.

All of us do what human beings have always done - we try to thrive and survive. …See More

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Elizabeth Bennett

When I walk into a retail or food-service establishment and people in this age group are standing around yapping or messing with their smartphones when they're being paid to give service but are not doing so----and I encounter this not infrequently----I don't have a moment's qualm about telling them to get off their self-entitled candy asses and do their jobs.

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Trisha Dee

Elizabeth Bennett Sorry.... what's this got to do with the article?

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Desiree Valenzuela

Trisha Dee absolutely nothing. This is such an obvious troll attempting to stir shit up that I can't be bothered to engage, and just blocked them.

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Tracy Meserve

Desiree Valenzuela Agreed. Also pretty sure "Elizabeth Bennett" is not her real name. Ironic that they chose that name, as that character would absolutey not behave rudely to wait staff. Perhaps Mrs. Bennett would be a better alias?

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Desiree Valenzuela

Tracy Meserve there's an "Arthur Bennett" who shows up here regularly, with similarly trollbait comments. They may be the same person, the fb accounts are nearly identical. Which is to say, nothing there at all. Good catch on the name! I missed that LOL.

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Blair Reiter

Thank you!!

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DebbieDavid Fabric

Elizabeth Bennett

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Alynn Hyland

This is really great writing and sheds light on why I seemingly couldn’t send bills, invoices, etc in the mail in my early 20s. I would love to see how others get beyond these moments. For me, it is timing my tasks then trying to set 5 minutes aside while I’m doing something that requires little attention (boiling water for coffee, waiting for laundry, on hold on the phone) to do these tasks. To me, it’s the best kind of multitasking.

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Jennifer Beaudette

This really resonated with me. I think my life is going pretty well but I feel pretty regular bouts of analysis paralysis, followed by guilt for not just 'doing the things'. What works for me is to take a step back and make sure that I'm not over-committing to one area in my life (like trying to run ALL my errands on Saturday morning), committing to doing 2-4 things per day MAX (literally writing them in my calendar), and then doing them. No excuses. Make them enjoyable too, because like the author says they're never going away. Try to do them in chunks, like paying all the bills as one action, or cleaning one room of your home (not the whole house though).

This approach works for me because it sets reasonable expecations and you actually do have the time to do those few things..and then you feel good for accomplishing them, and you have the time to feel good about feeling good!

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Brianna Whitfield

Yep. I have stopped telling myself being unmotivated is a flaw. I just tell myself this is gonna be mundane and tedious and to do it anyways. Waiting for motivation leaves me with 2 month old to do lists.

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Alissa Marie

Brianna Whitfield idk why but what you said really, really resonated with me. Finding motivation is hard, sometimes impossible, and I feel like a failure when I can't be motivated to do something. But it's not a flaw, you're right. So thank you - I just need to remember that sometimes.

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Trisha Dee

Comment from a Boomer... (Boo, Hiss :) )

It was actually a good article. I'm very well aware of the massive financial constraints and the subsequent feelings of futility. This I get.

It was interesting to hear the experiences of being over-parented - something I'd not registered really, in spite of the fact of seeing some of my more idiotic contemporaries doing it.

So... some good insights.

And I'd love to dispatch advice based on my years of living and experience but a/ most people would be unlikely to listen and b/ I havnt got very much of it. All I can respectfully suggest is that, outside of work, do things that delight you rather than things you feel you ought to do . And if that means bingeing on Netfix, do it. Although, reading, learning to play an instrument, or doing evening classes about stuff you'd genuinely like to do might serve you better.

But.... the 'Not doing chores' thing? I'm 65, dont work, and I've continually always had a list of stuff I ought to do but havnt. That's not a Milleniall thing, its a people thing. I deal with it by writing lists and ticking stuff off - aim to get one thing done a day. Or a week, or whatever.....

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Jude Pi

2 responses, from 1 millenial:

1. yeah, the overparenting thing is a big deal. I was diagnosed with a specific learning difficulty at age 7, and mum found a gym group for disabled kids within about 2 weeks. it was 30 minutes drive away & also had a swimming group. so, up to 3 times/week, we'd drive straight from school, do a 2 hour session, drive home & go to bed (sandwiches in the car for dinner), plus we'd do swimming on another day (also 30 minutes drive, but only a 30 minute session). I remember saying I didn't want to go, and being ignored. I remember mum saying she would've listened if I *really* didn't want to go. I also remember the bafflingly intense, suicidal depression at 10 or 11. if I'm ever stable enough to have kids, I'm putting a hard limit on extracurriculars.

2. the not doing chores thing is really reassuring, thanks. I'm trying to bring my ability to be domestic and my idea of how domestic I should be closer together. to that end, I hope to A. work on shame around untidyness (cos I don't want to have to shame tidy before I have friends over) & B. build a routine aroud shopping->cooking->eating (hard for me, due to neurological reasons that are difficult to explain, but failing to eat regularly if I live alone is BAD for obvious reasons). some random lady on the internet seems to agree with this need to prioritise!

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Trisha Dee

Jude Pi Thanks for the feedback, Jude.

When I was growing up in the 50s/60s, my parents (who were working class) very much wanted me to do better than they had and they pushed quite hard. But at the same time, they made it very clear that they wanted me to be happy so that. if and when I failed, it was no big deal. People seemed to have kind of lost that.

The shame tidying thing? Bah. People worth knowing dont care if your home is untidy. They maybe care if the place is full of cockroaches and dogshit, but that's something else altogether. I've been shame-tidying for the last ten years basically because my home's been a building site and if you dont tackle at least some of the dust then you go past untidy and onto another level.. :). Now I keep it tidy (ish) because its a beautiful place and it delights me to keep it like that.

If you want to stay healthy and well-fed, I'm afraid routine's a must. Nice thing though about routine is that it becomes automatic eventually.

Pretty sure that the key to this is to do it for yourself. Not because someone else expects it of you.

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Brooklyn Ann

Trisha Dee I like you.

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Trisha Dee

Brooklyn Ann Why, thank you! I suspect you're my kind of person..... :)

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Amelia Victoria

I think some of the bits that hit home the most for me as a millenial are the thoughts that I'm never doing enough, even in my down time. The whole learn an instrument, take online courses, read books advice is fine, but it's gotten to the point where if I'm doing anything that can be considered unproductive (i.e, video games/watching tv/youtube, etc.) I feel such a roiling guilt that I no longer enjoy doing them. It's always: I should find a more productive hobby! I love reading, but I've been doing it for fun; maybe I should read more for education? No, wait - this educational book is better…See More

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John Kolena

Reply from a boomer.

No, it was a child-like article.

Here's what millennials are proud of:

Zero acceptance of responsibility. Blaming everything negative on others.

Hypocrisy (They want good wages and health care, but screw the businesses -- Uber, Airbnb, and the like -- they patronize.)

No judgment and no values. (Or at least neither judgment nor values, as expressed by their lack of voting.)

But you've got to give it to millennials. They are totally excellent at one -- and only -- one thing: whining.....

well, I guess everyone should be good at something.

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Trisha Dee

John Kolena Child like?

Its you who's acting like a petulant child. You've dismissed an entire generation on the basis of some knee-jerk generalisation.

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Avery Booker

John Kolena, Good wages and healthcare. Okay where I live, we actually have healthcare, so not an issue for my peers as some, but my friends in the US have told me their struggles enough for me to know what that is like, and no, they are not all my age, some are boomers and gen x.

But good wages. Ha. What does good wages to you mean? To us? That means enough to not live week to week. That means being able to save. That means a lot less than it means to you. We want the companies to actually giove the workers a part of the profit they make each year, not watch it go to people who wouldn't suffer if they went without. But to many boomers, likely because of the stubborn belief that we want the same things as the generations before (no), that's a crazy thought. No, we want to be able to live without being afraid of the next minor hurdle.

You think we will not pay more for that? We would, but first we want to catch up our wages to be able to do so. It's not a crazy ask.

And you mention voting. I know you don't care, but my country voted in larger than average numbers for the younger generation in 2017. You know why? We had a reason to. There were things effecting us and the younger ones. We now have a free year of tertiary schooling. We have better laws allowing new parents more time with their newborns (well our Prime Minister did have a baby to make her point lol). We have a new law allowing wage and job safety for those being abused. You see the theme? They affect my age group. They aren't some stupid tax cut for someone who wouldn't notice it in their bank account. We want things that help us, help those younger than us, and don't see the point until then. Also personally? I have voted every time since my 18th birthday, so I can say a lot of things about our global issues and know I did my part.

Values. Ah values. Those things like wanting my child to be safe, or that all people deserve rights to exist, that gay, bi, trans, non binary, autistic, black, hispanic, or whatever minority is being told shouldn't or doesn't exist are valued too. My values are less personal, more global. That is a growing trend. And good. Needs to be the change.

I know you will never change your mind about how we see the world, and all we are are whiners who ruin the world, because we can't work hard enough, but the reality is that the world is not like it was 40 years ago. It really is harder for us. It really is damaging to be in the headspace that we are wasting time if we aren't working. I feel that acutely, as I cannot work. I often feel like I am wasting time, that if I just tried harder, it will work out, that I will find a job that works for me, that my autism will stop being an issue, my PTSD will go away, my depression and anxiety will stop being so consuming that leaving the house terrifies me. If only. It's never simple. I can't just flick a switch and fix it, and be ready to work. I would be out there right now if I could.

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Kathryn Lauber

Trisha Dee When it comes to blaming everything on others, what I've been hearing alot of lately is alot of boomers blaming alot millenials for alot of what's wrong in this country. And they refuse to take responsibility while blame laying.

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Trisha Dee

Kathryn Lauber Intergenerational shit hurling (as I've said below) is less than helpful. And that cuts both ways.

Having said that, blaming millenials for the state of the country (any country) is preposterous. You've hardly had chance to get into gear yet.

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Joan Albright

I burned out before the end of this, and saved it in the 'to do' folder in my bookmarks, which apparently is now 3 pages long and which I haven't actually removed anything from in a month. I have never felt that a news article 'gets' me like this one.

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Sara Brinsko

We're a generation of lazy fucks. I'll just put it out there lol There's no burnout - we're lazy and just don't want to do anything after work (except drink). Plain and simple.

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Alynn Hyland

Cheers mate🥃! I’m also a big fan of naps.

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Sara Brinsko

Alynn Hyland Yeah that package sitting in my room isn't getting sent any time soon. But this nap is gonna happen.

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Mickey Sjv Gregory

No

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David Clark

Someone didn't read past the headline.

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Sara Brinsko

David Clark I did, thanks. I am burnt out, myself. But I feel like this article makes me seem like an excuse. I don’t have errand paralysis. I’m tired and don’t feel like going. But I think about older generations like my parents and grandparents who worked so hard and never complained. I feel like we could learn from that. That’s all.

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Sarah Oak

Sara Brinsko Someone definitely didn't read past the two paragraphs. I am glad that you allow yourself to think you're such a special snowflake, though.

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Sara Brinsko

Sarah Oak lol okay

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Reynee D Rainey

The ONLY real comment here. You’re absolutely right - i’m Lazy and I 🍹 the only thing is I don’t feel burned out nor do I feel guilty about it.

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Clayton Arbo

Idk where you work -- but after work I'd usually be found on my laptop at home responding to work emails, on HipChat, and working on projects due the next day. Drinking happens, but certainly the minority of evenings, as one would expect.

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Clayton Arbo

Sara Brinsko yeah i definitely get errand paralysis....trying to calculate every variable, what order I should do what in to save 4 minutes, etc. it becomes exhausting. Then downtime I spend mostly feeling guilty for not working on the to-do list. So overanalyzing to the point of paralysis was something I really related to in the article.

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Carolyn Snow

Sara Brinsko I think you're probably in burnout and just in denial. Not feeling like doing anything is one of the symptoms.

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Carolyn Snow

I'd like to add that spending one's not-completely-chock-full time doing the equivalent of falling on the floor and just lying there is a coping mechanism. That means there's something unpleasant that you're trying to cope with. Possibly... your life? Or something in that life?

Even acknowledging that possibility is powerful.

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Quilani Arnold

Speak for yourself, friendo. Or perhaps learn the definition of “denial”.

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Aleta Mitchell

Sara Brinsko No previous generations just drank and smoked themselves into a somewhat more agreeable state. The health conscious Gen Y doesn't have that, so have to let off steam with...naps.

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Alejandro Suárez Mascareño

That's what my father would do. No extra work after work. He had a long term contract at 19, never needed to find another job, he had money to buy a house at 30.

Now I am working at home during christmass to make my CV look good enough that when my next temporary job ends I would be able to jump into another temporary job. I'm also looking for jobs while I have a job, because I know the one I have won't be renewed no matter what (it was already stated in the offer), and organize moving from country.

I kinda wish I could afford to just drink after work.

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Tyler Hennessey

Exactly. Burned out on what? Don't you have to do the work to burned out on it? lol

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Jared James

You forgot lazy fucks that don't tip appropriately.

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Felicity Griffits

You think it was any different in the 50s, 60s, 70s & 80s? The difference is that they could actually afford to knock back a few without feeling guilty about all that life admin they were neglecting. Back then those who worked full time usually had stay at home wifeys who paid the bills, shopped, cleaned, cooked, booked dentist appointments, planned vacations and sorted the social calendar. Now we are all expected to work full time and sort all that crap out ourselves.

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Caroline Intan

There were a lot of things I related to in this article:

1. The whole voting thing - I had to push my younger siblings (I am a millenial and they are millenial/gen-z) to register to vote. It wasn't hard to register and they eventually did, but it took forever. When I asked them why, they said they didn't really know. They knew it wasn't going to take long to register, but they put it off because it was just part of the to-do list they needed to get to.

2. I think I felt burnt out since graduating high school. I was the typical overachiever in high school and when I went to college, I was so burnt out and didn't feel motivated anymore. I went to a private university, got my business degree and now my student debt is growing to approx. $60K. I am not sure I learned anything, but it did help me get a job. I believe I learned more from my jobs than I did from school.

3. Branding - if I had a dollar for every time someone told me it is all about branding...I've always been told that I had to market myself and saw that as a positive concept towards success. But from this article, I can see how it can be negative; to see ourselves as products that we need to constantly market and no guarantee it will work.

4. Working hard - In my current job, I work hard and am super efficient. I am praised by my colleagues. I stay later then necessary, travel whenever they ask and I make myself available via email and phone at any time of the day. I also answer every email they send. I tell myself, the reason I do this is so I can distinguish myself from the others, get recognition so I can get promoted and get a salary increase, but the job doesn't even make me happy, but it does pay the bills (somewhat).

5. Grad school - I not sure what I want to do with the rest of my life anymore. I am currently doing my post-bacc in computer science, but it is currently on hold because I work too much and I haven't been doing so well in my courses. I am now considering if it was pointless to get my post-bac in the first place and just get my MBA instead. But in all honesty, going to grad school would be a safety net for me since it would get me a better job and higher salary, I tell myself. But mentally, I don't think I am prepared to be in that academic mindset again - making time to study, the exams, etc.

6. PTO - This holiday, I took two and a half weeks off to decompress from work and figure things out. I made to do lists, I cleaned my entire house, I made a linkedin account, cleaned up my resume, I shredded all unnecessary papers, I made a financial tracker to track all my finances, I followed a health journal to start eating properly, I downloaded the Calm app to help me sleep and meditate and I am finally using the fitbit I bought 2 years ago. I am now in the last two days of my PTO and I still feel as burnt out as before I went on vacation.

While I laugh at those opinions that say my generation is entitled, ungrateful, and selfish, those "millenials are killing this industry" articles, and the thought that previous generations were able to pay off their student loans after working one summer and being able to buy a home with their first job out of college, I am also frustrated. We are trying really hard to adult and lead fulfilling lives. I guess my point is, I relate so much to this article and I am glad I am not alone.

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Or Mitchell

Wow, just wow. This is one of the best pieces of millennial insight that I have read in a while.

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Quenta Payton Vettel

I'm the mother of two millenials who have some of these feelings, but are still working hard to succeed. Do you really think your parents weren't dealing with similar - albeit different - issues? I'm a woman born towards the end of the Baby Boomers generation - I didn't get any of the benefits of being an early Baby Boomer that my bothers had. I didn't get to cash in during the economic boom of the 80s and 90s. I didn't get to retire at 53 with a sweet buy-out. I'm 61, still trying to keep a full-time job with benefits until I can hopefully get to Medicare and Social Security. I've been laid o…See More

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Andi Kahclamat

"Grow up" helpful, I'm sure your two Millennial kids feel cured of their anxieties when you say that!

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Trisha Dee

Quenta. I hear you. But does it not bother you that for the first time in over 100 years, we have kids who dont have the expectation of doing better than their parents did? Because it certainly bothers me.

I have two sons and four grandchildren. My two boys are in their forties. They're both hard working guys in entirely honourable professions. They've got sod all chance of buying their own homes until I shuffle off this mortal coil (and I'm in no hurry to do that). I help out where I can.

Fuck knows what world my teenage grandkids are going to have to live in....

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Rachael Czako

My parents are about your age. My father worked nights at a steel mill and days running his own electrical biz. My mother worked full time at a Drs office, raised us kids and put herself through nursing school. Sometimes we had no food, sometimes no heat and yes, we were told we could be anything we wanted to be and to always find beauty in this world. Both sets of grandparents made it through the great depression and both grandfather's fought in the Korean war. I'm proud to say my parents aren't the kind of "Boomers" who would ever comment negatively on a BuzzFeed article telling folks to grow up, but they are the kind who would be proud of me for telling you - Do better!

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Quenta Payton Vettel

Trisha Dee I do have the expectation that my daughters will do better than us, because they are working hard to do so. My daughters are in the early 30s so I don't know how 40-somethings are doing. We helped them with college and both paid for part of their undergrad and/or master's - either through scholarships and/or loans. I just don't understand the "I can't manage the basics of my life - it's just too stressful." We've all dealt with stress in different ways. I know it's not easy for these young people, but I (and my parents who had less than me) have always been about personal responsibility. I don't accept this "I'm too stressed to take care of the day-to-day responsibilities of my life." We've all had stresses - my guess is you have too. I'm not saying what they've gone through is easy, but if they give up on doing the basic parts of life, then our country's future is doomed when we need them to step up and move our country forward.

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Quenta Payton Vettel

Rachael Czako Where in her article did she talk about what she could do to make her life - and her family's life - better? That's what her parents and grandparents did - they looked at what they could do to get through the basic responsibilities of life and make their family's ilfe better. That's my point. I had times in my life when things were so bad I couldn't get off my couch, but I ultimately had to get off my butt in order to move my family's life forward. Don't just complain about what is going on - do someting to move forward? I know it's not easy, but we need the Millennials to make this country better.

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Maureen Basedow

Trisha Dee there is no data to support that "first time in over 100 years" thing. Do you think there is a century of records and polling to back something like that up?

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Clayton Arbo

I see my parents dealing with a lot of the same economic issues I'm dealing with now, however they have cars, own a home, were able to get married and have two children when they were ~30. So I think where the anxieties especially affect Millennials is that we feel we must "not be good enough" or failures, because I don't have these same things at 31, not by choice, but because there's not enough stability in my life to support them now.

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Clayton Arbo

Quenta Payton Vettel Also - I'll point out that the Great Depression was a shared experience that lead to the New Deal, a real paradigm shift. It doesn't help that today social media "narratives" make us all feel as if we are alone in not attaining what we were taught we could if we worked hard. If this article is part of an honest conversation among a generation then I see no reason for your negativity. I'm kind of baffled by your motive to comment what you did, actually.

I think you're also overlooking the signifigance of the fact that we're the most educated generation to-date, raised (by boomers) to believe that education and hard work would lead to prosperity. Only to realize we're still living paycheck to paycheck and working part-time at Starbucks on the side. Nothng wrong with working at Starbucks, but hopefully you can understand how it's easy to internalize that as a personal shortcoming, since we were raised to believe education and dedication would lead to greener pastures. That's a large point made in the article.

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Thomas Keller

Quenta, sure, you are an example of somebody who didn't win big. Your children will love you.

But for every one of you, there are 5 other baby boomers who has squandered every penny and driven up all the costs of socity, relentlessly squeezed up the prices of housing, food, and necessities...then cut salaries down, down, down...then handed that lousy deal to their children.

I actually know granparents who have evicted their own grandkids from apartments because the kids couldn't pay a huge rent increase. "Too bad" they said. Then they go on huge vacations. Then they wonder why they aren't invited to the kids' weddings.

Baby boomers are about to learn a very very harsh lesson. What happens when you destroy the dreams of your children? You are buried in an unmarked grave.

This happened a LOT in the depression.

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Maureen Basedow

Ready to get roasted in the comments, but like a lot of other late baby boomers, gen-X-er's, etc., we did have it any better -- especially if we went to college as first gen and had no family wealth, were poor or working class. There is so much obvious privilege expressed in this article that it's not worth going into, but I have one story that illustrates the problem with paragraph about individual action not being enough to change things. Bear with me.

My boomer husband's employer (architecture) closed shop from one day to the next and published an article in the local biz journal saying t…See More

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Lisa Rowe

Katie Santmyer I would counter that with the noted fact that the upward mobility has been mostly limited to the very top percentage, while for the rest it's been either stagnant or downward. Hence the income inequality today, which affects millennials, gen-x, and boomers.

A very few people are moving upward. The vast majority aren't.

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Health News

And these two replies show EXACTLY why Millennials are having such a difficult time in the world and shall continue to for quite some time. It's as if Katie and Lisa read an entirely different comment than the rest of us.

Sorry Maureen.

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Beks Lazar

I think you'll find, a lot of people are experiencing many of these things, not just millennials.

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Sarah Oak

I agree -- I think that millennials are the only ones stigmatized for it. You'd never tell an older person that they're a lazy "special snowflake" for being burnt out.

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Maureen Basedow

Sarah Oak happens all the time.

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Toni Dach

Sarah Oak If I had a dollar for every time I had to give someone 15+ years older than me a "minute to decompress" after I give them simple instructions on how to do things on a computer, well, I'd probably make some snide comment about how the author of this piece just doesn't understand how to succeed. (is this an option? Can I get people who refuse to sit down and learn basic computing skills to pay me extra to tell them it's okay and to take their time? Yeah, I write programs...I'm not talking about that...I'm talking, like, opening a second file explorer window or inserting a new a column in a spreadsheet.)

It's by no means all of them (my absolute favorite computer-based trick related to my work was "invented" by someone who's easily pushing retirement), but this is another burden that younger workers deal with, largely uncompensated. Our employer offers classes on basic computer skills (from improving typing skills to basic Microsoft Office and beyond), but I'm often left cleaning up messes from people who don't really know how to work a computer. I show up to help them program something, and end up teaching them how to, say, turn off their email pop-up notifications. Since I'm there, and they're sure I know how to do that.

My very first professional experience, as an intern, was a lesson in how this would go in the future. The VP I did the most work for (1) didn't understand PowerPoint. So, I sent him off to give a presentation that I had developed an approximately 100-slide PP for - animations, transitions, jump-outs...really great stuff - with a CD. Told him to give it to the company's AV person. Of course I sent him with transpariences (I'm barely Millenial if at all, so this was a long time ago and an overhead projector would be standard equipment) in case of a tech snafu...only to find that he didn't even give the CD to the AV guy, and all my work making the presentation dynamic was for naught. Sigh...so I spent several hours on the phone before the next time he gave the presentation figuring out a way to get it to their AV guy without his involvement (we ended up overnighting the CD to them). He was impressed when he saw it as it was meant to be, but I wasted several hours making sure the real visual aids were used when all he had to do was hand the guy a CD when he got there! (2) He didn't know how to work email, really at all. He could read them, but had trouble replying and DID NOT know how to delete emails. Once a week, I spent an hour with him going through his inbox and "filing" and deleting emails...again, time I could have spent doing real work. No desire to learn these skills, either, and he's still working!

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Lauren Fahrner

As an older Gen Z reading this was very gratifying. I saw how some of these actions are starting to affect my generation, such as the parts where “branding” and being constantly monitored was mentioned. For me and most of my friends we have come to regard everything around us as a part of selling ourselves, whether to potential partners and friends or in job interviews. When I took a class meant to prepare me for interviews, the professor tried to teach me about selling myself, but I already understood everything my older professor was trying to tell me, to an even greater extent than she did. We are constantly selling ourselves to those around us and we are so used to constantly being watched that we do not know how else to live. I remember being younger and pretending that I was on a TV show; I would never do anything gross (like pick my nose) and I would always try to be kind even if it was only to a worm on the sidewalk. Now I do not have to imagine that I’m always being monitored because I (as well as my entire generation) have and are currently living it.

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Lauren Fahrner

Also, my hope is that my generation has seen enough pain and hurt (since the majority of us have only known a post 9/11 world and have lived in a state of repressed fear our whole lives) and changes the state of our world.

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John Kolena

excellent self-pity...

how many times did you have to hide under your desk to practice for incoming nuclear bombs?

ok, that's the past. but what have you DONE about school shootings? I'm betting zero.

Stop hoping and DO something.

(and stop replying inanely to your inane comments)

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Avery Booker

John Kolena Sir troll, may I remind you that her generation is barely able to vote? Until the gun lobbiests stop controlling the govt, there is little she can realistically do. Until your country stops loving gun freedom more than people, the shootings will not stop. Until you do something about the stigma of abuse and anger and depression, they will not stop. Look to other countries who have even basic safety laws. We don't have these issues. But you love a law that's so outdated, so dangerous, that even the idea of basic safety is abhorent to you. I don't care right now if this is the collective you, or the personal, the issues are not hers to fix. Your generation could have decades ago, well before internet and media let the backwards people of your country have such a voice. Don't blame her, or her generation. At least her generation have been trying to do something about it, even if your opinion that protests aren't worth much.

Also Lauren? Your comment was not inane. Thank you for your contribution.

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Lisa SG

It's like you read my mind. I'm 38 yo. I have a law degree and a job with the federal gov. I'm divorced with a teenaged child. I should be in a good place but instead I find myself struggling to pay the rent on my one bedroom apartment. It takes about 45% of my take home pay this rent. My income based student loan payments take an extra 20% of my take home pay. I have given up on the hope of home ownership. I'm praying student loan forgiveness will kick in to help free me from the overwhelming six figures of student loan debt I'm drowning in. Everyone told me not to worry about how much debt I accrued because it would all pay off in the end. I feel like the victim of a bait and switch scheme. My son will graduate from high school soon. I won't be able to help him financially. He will have to decide if he wants to allow himself to be chewed up and spit out by the same systems that it feels like I've been betrayed by. I watched the movie Interstellar and thought it was ridiculous that the workers on the ship would pay 20% of their pay for life as passage fare to the new planet. Then, I realized I agreed to the same in exchange for an education. On paper, I look like a success but I feel like a failure and a dupe.

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Greg Ire Claire

We've all been baited and switched over, ...and they wonder why people are no longer motivated... We all waiting for Incentives.

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David Ruddle

Law should not be a PhD when it has such a casino level of payout. You get almost a doctor level of debt and can get paid 50K yearly, which is broken. At least make public service law a bachelors of law where you learn how to efficiently deal with public defender cases and non-profit orgs. More intense cases should be for PhDs.

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Cheryl Palen

This is way too long to finish reading....someone has a lot of time on their hands complaining about something that has been going on since the beginning of time. My god,my dad worked full time and then coached most evenings after work to put food on the table for us four kids. I worked 41 years in public schools with caseloads up to 70 as a speech therapist and raised my own kids while taking Master's classes. It's just something you do until you can pay your bills and finally retire...get over it already!

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Adena DeMonte

Even though I agree this is very long, I think the main point is in the past most people, if they wanted to, stayed in 1-2 jobs throughout their careers. I know my boomer father worked for the same company from start to retirement and he was able to afford having his wife stay home to raise 2 kids and to put us through college. He grew up pretty poor and so did my mother (lower middle class at best) and his life was definitely better than the one his parents had and theirs was better than their parents, etc. This generation is generally going backwards in terms of quality of life, and it's not because we're lazy. Our parents truly believed that if we just worked hard, we'd have an even better life than they did. For many, the fast-rising costs of college, housing, and overall life, and the not fast-rising wages, the loss of pensions and skyrocketing healthcare costs (so considerably having to work "forever"), et al, have brought us to this place where it's really hard to ever feel, well, settled, or ok. That's not to say prior generations didn't worry about the bills or work multiple jobs to afford their lives, but generally speaking, they could keep those jobs, they could look forward to retirement, they could pay the mortgage, help put their kids through school, etc. This is no longer true. Plus, we have increasing pressure from social media which is really impacting many psychologically in a way other generations just didn't experience.

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Kate Walz

Right, but they did that with a liveable wage, even without a college education. That generation didn't have to get a college degree to be considered for a decent salary, nor did they need to work three jobs to make ends meet. The world has changed considerably since 1970, and people refusing to acknowledge that is contributing to all sorts of divides in this country.

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Nicole Vella

ok, so you're not a millenial. explains why this article does not resonate with you. thanks for your input though.

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Aleta Mitchell

Well I'm a GEN Y and I took the time to read it, so here's the TL;DR for someone who claims to elevate work and stick-to-itness: because of economic and social change, the current generation feels like they have no boundaries between work and play, and have to constantly work and sell ourselves to get less than previous generations would get, and still have massive debt hanging over heads from the education we were encouraged to get and seemed ?? like a good bet at the time.

Pervasive techonology further erasses these boundaries and exacerbates our worsening financial situation (well, that may just be me that thinks that last part, but stuff like $1000 iPhones are fucking ridiculous). This along with other things encourages a perfectness and Anthony-from-that-Twilight-Zone-episode constant 'Happy Thoughts' so we're not just trying to juggle a million balls, but make sure all those balls are shiny and dazzling.

Admittedly in some ways the underlying patterns of these issues have been experienced by previous generations (the idea of burn out isn't new and wasn't invented by Generation Y, for instance), but the merry-go-round does feel like it's moving at a break-neck pace.

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Sarah Dieterich

I feel like you kind of missed the point of this article with your statement. Why should we, as young adults, spend 30-40 years with constant mental exhaustion just to "achieve" retirement? Why is it so wrong to want to enjoy what we're doing now, and to want to feel less overwhelmed all the time? Also, this has not necessarily been going on "since the beginning of time" as you put it. Before all of this technology and constant need to be on social media, you could resonably go home at the end of the day, and just spend a quiet evening with your family, and then go to work the next day. Now, it feels as though there's a constant pressure for us, as young adults, to be perfect in all aspects of life, which means ina ddition to school and/or work maintaining one or (more likely) many social media profiles, and the accessibility of having a cell phone creates the perception that we should always be doing something, even in our perceived free time that is designated for relaxing.

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Tracy Frye Seymour

You have described my life in your essay. I'm a "Gen X'er", but the problems you describe in your essay really hit home. I have been in health care for over 30 years, and I am having serious burnout. I'm 49, and I know I will have to work until I am 70 or older. I was so busy working that I forgot to live life. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and perspectives

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Thalia Sutton

As someone who's overcome burnout multiple times, I'll say that I agree with about and thank the author for every point except the notion that burnout can't be cured. It can--you have to A) fix the chemical imblance that's making you depressed (which is part of the physical aspect of burnout) and B) change what you're doing and why (ie, take better care of yourself and give yourself meaning in your life).

What that meaning is is different for everyone, but I'd say start with doing something because you want to, not because your parents or the system told you to.

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Melissa Ng

I mostly agree. I've had two major episodes of burnout: one drove me to drop out of high school; the other led me to quit a five-figure-a-month job [the millennial dream! Especially for a high school drop-out!] because it was making me actively suicidal. Money is tighter than it used to be, but my life is emotionally sustainable and financially too - I can't splurge for no reason as much as before, but what's the point of a big bank account if you killed yourself from the stress? I do think the obsession with finding The Perfect Job is causing a lot of problems for my contemporaries, but on th…See More

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Wouter Zwiep

B takes care of A. Nowadays we're used to symptom treatment, which doesn't work if the person stays in the same enviroment that caused the symptoms (job, for example). If it works, it's merely a temporary bandaid which just delays the inevetable. This is even more true now that the latest research (starting ~2005) shows merely a 'chemical imbalance' (as in: born with it) is a myth, yet pharmaceutical companies still advertise with it. Now there might still be some cases where a pill fixes everything, but they're prescribed more than necessary. Effectiveness of medication and/or CBT is roughly 55% and I assume, I'm merely speculating, but I assume the cases in which it fails, the cause of the symtoms are not adressed. Because how are we going to mask the suffering of a souldraining job? Talk therapy? Neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors? They will never give the same effect a different ob would give. But if one's unable to get a different job, has no motivation/options or gets turned down every time, professionals have to revert to CBT/antidpressants/stimulants. Because wellfare is seen as not-done, though it would be a better alternative to working for many people. But that's a different topic.

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Wyntre Hawke

Reading your article Burned Me Out.

You are ridiculously self-absorbed, whiny and sanctimonious.

You actually believe your life is more difficult than women from, say WW 11 who raised large families, while working outside the home, while worried about loved ones on the war front?

You think only millennials got sold a bill of goods about what to expect from life?

You honestly think your generation is “special” in this regard?

Pathetic is more like it.

Loved how you finally managed to blame everything on President Trump. /s

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Sarah Oak

"World War eleven"

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Beks Lazar

Ah no avatar and thumbs up for Trump. THE ONLY THING MISSING WAS CAPS.

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David Ruddle

One little point in this dumb post I agreed with was just how much of the worlds problems millennialls seem to take on. The news is really unimportant! Does it effect your daily life, traffic, your wealth? If not forget it!

I notice lots of millennials believe everything they read and it drives them into madness, like world is ending soon (climate change), we are going to war with NK (lie, we are less likely now than with Obama), your kids are going to get shot without gun control (still statistically insignificant chance of happening), stock market is melting down (its gone down after 10 year bull market, its natural, economy is great still), democracy is dying (how many times do I have to explain electoral college and how it works? and the problems in the latest election were 99% democrat shenanigans, the actual system is strong, Russian "hacking" isn't real its just propaganda on social media), yes a LGBTQ person got abused on the subway but that abuser was thrown into jail, nobody supported the abuser and life went on etc etc.

Sorry for the long rant I am just saying, of course things can get better but don't allow the news to burn you out! Its not essential to read it especially if its adding to your daily stress! Use that energy on yourself to become a better or happier person, or if you like, use that energy on local political causes! You'll never solve world issues by yourself, don't put the sadness of the world on your shoulders and just do your best everyday.

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Joyce Herder

Wyntre and David..........I totally agree. The article was a bunch of ' blame it on everyone else' gratitudes, whining on why "I" cant do it and 'the sky is falling' poo bah

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Clayton Arbo

This was incrediblty gratifying to read. It really helped me connect the dots and identify how a cycle of burnout, dysfunctional thought-processes, and irrational behaviors have hijacked my life! Also made me feel a little less alone. Thank you Anne

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Daniel C Stadler

sorry, you are just a fuck up. It your fault. Not the time, not you generation or any of that.

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Abby Neff

A. Your article is way too long. You could have accomplished all your errands in the time it took you to write about why you are too lazy to do them.

B. Classic millenial explaination: "I have a problem and therefore it must be a millenial only problem because really... it's all about me." News flash! EVERYONE HATES MENIAL CHORES. IT'S NOT AGE SPECIFIC. GET OFF YOUR ASS AND DO THEM ANYWAY.

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Blake Johnson

Abby is correct. She should have gotten fired from her job as a writer by instead spending that time running them errands. This clearly would have made things better for the author.

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Diane Quilter

I wrote a similar comment before I scrolled down and read yours. Exactly! Stop navel-gazing and run your errands already.

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Jared McClanahan

There is nothing new or profound about being tired and procrastinating. This article drips of privilege and entitlement masquerading as victimhood, aka every negative millenial stereotype.

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John Smith

I stopped reading after the first paragraph. Only because I am a millennial, and I vote. Registering wasn’t hard at all. Did it on my millennial phone online, and it took 2 seconds. They sent my card with in a week. I also received a mail in ballot when the lectins were nearing, I didn’t even have to leave home to vote if I didn’t want to.

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Kelsey Rubenking

you missed the whole point of the article, then

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Ashleigh Rinkle

I'm a millenial, I vote, and I read the whole thing anyway ;)

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Brooklyn Ann

I almost stopped too at that, but the rest of the piece was very good.

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Adena DeMonte

Brooklyn Ann yes, it was not the best lead into this article at all. Many of us who feel a lot of the emotions the author discussed also managed to vote without issue. I would have moved the voting bit further down in the article, as an example, vs the lede.

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Joyce Herder

Nah, this article was a bunch of whining and self agrandisment. Millenials have it no harder than any other generation. And as soon as they own up to that, the better off they will be.

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Jim Kowal

In the time it took this loser author to write this crap, she could have finished all those tasks she's been procrastinating. "Analysis paralysis" is just a millennial excuse for "sucking at life."

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Blake Johnson

So your suggestions is that she do those tasks instead of doing her job so she can get paid. Great idea dude.

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William John Black

All that writing just to say, “We have it in us to do what those before us are still doing and have also done, but we choose not to, because we don’t have to all the time.” The problem, inherently dangerous, with that mentality is that, sooner rather than later, it becomes a habit. There are millions of people out there that, each day, they have to complete tasks and chores that they would rather not do, but they do complete them anyhow. Why? We realized early on that eating only ice cream and candy bars will rot your teeth. You have to eat your veggies, meats, and potatoes as well. Seriously, are people now trying to put some psychological spin and get a medical diagnosis behind their inability to suck it up and do work? That’s what this post read as and, frankly, it’s outlandishly pathetic

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Mickey Sjv Gregory

lol

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Elizabeth Bennett

What? You think a whiny pee-pants who feels entitled to have "a Cool Job Doing My Passion" and took out a mountain of student loan debt counting on . . . a tenure-track job in . . . Media Studies . . . is outlandishly pathetic? You Scrooge, you!

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Joyce Herder

The article and attitude IS outlandishly pathetic. You are spot on William. There is that old saying...........you pay your dues in life...............You dont walk into a dream job and expect a 6 figured salary............you pay your dues. Something I guess they never have heard of.

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John Kolena

I don't doubt the author's (and those of many others chiming in) experiences. And I am sorry about the health consequences that have resulted. But as an early boomer who has watched and trained uncountable millennials (as a teacher), I think a lot of the problem is self-imposed. To give a full accounting would likely take a response as long as the original. Here are just three examples.

Many millennial goals are totally unreasonable. To wit (from a companion recent article at the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/.../me-and-my-quarter-life...): an Audi, a house in Notting Hill -- for Americans, think Upper West Side, NYC, and a job as a TV presenter... and all by age 25!

There is much (deserved) complaining about external events (the two financial crises you mentioned) that have left your generation -- and mine and others' -- in pain. So what have you done in reaction to this and other politically correctable situations? Apparently nothing -- or at least nothing that you tell me about in your long long post.

The millennial work/life style feeds both into and off much of the current miasma. 'Consulting' seems to be a trendy job. Not. Stop flitting from job to job. It's why companies gave up pensions.

You've invested in disruption, yet whine about the decay of unions. (Too bad for the good jobs and health benefits those cab drivers and motel owners once had.) Apparently, given your generation's behavior, pension-less, low-wage, no-health-care jobs are to be valued. If not, stop patronizing those businesses (Uber, Airbnb,...) that provide them. Yet, you simultaneously -- and hypocritically -- complain bitterly about your lack of access to "fair compensation... adequate health care, or 401(k)s". Which is it?

You want a job that plays to your passion, but you went to grad school for the opposite reason (you weren't "hungry for more knowledge"). Which is it?

Finally, some advice.

Stop collecting experiences (and for heaven sake stop posting them). Start by being great at something you really like.

Own (!) the fact that doing errands will always be with you. Just because you can call a car on demand or post your latest food experience immediately, the messy details of life don't get solved that way (well, unless you're really really rich).

Vote. In every single election. For every single race on the ballot. Stop telling me you don't feel your vote counts. Or that it's too complicated to figure out whom to vote for. Or finding a voting place is too hard or it takes to long to stand in line. Your generation has (and has had for more than a decade) more votes than any other current generation. But you've thrown that voice away.

And stop whining about boredom and burnout (would you rather have had the draft and the Vietnam War? ok, even if women were exempt.)... your lifestyle choices have brought them on. Start fixing them.

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Carrie Heller Reisner

I found myself wavering between, "Oh, come on" and moments when I realized that as a Gen Xer that my experience is legitimately different from that of a millennial. I'm someone who finished a doctorate while working a full-time professional job, raising a very active son, and managing (along with my husband) a household, so not getting to simple tasks because of "burnout" seems like pure crap. I have had single millennial colleagues with no children, with good paying jobs and excellent health insurance take on way more than they've needed to outside of work as a way to one-up their peers and …See More

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Sarah Foltz

Actually, staying in a job for more than two years costs millenials money... So staying for more than a year and a half won't pay off (literally) https://www.forbes.com/.../millennials-arent-afraid-to.../

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Carrie Heller Reisner

Sarah Foltz Maybe it's different in my line of work, but you can't advance up the ladder without some longevity in a position. It just takes time to build up the experience. In my experience as a supervisor, my employeees who have stayed for about three years have moved on to great positions, while the ones who moved on quickly have stalled out in entry-level jobs.

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Ingo Tango

The article describes the problems of the millenials really good. The end of the article also shows the typical thinking of the millenials in my opinion. It says Trump, capitalism, patriarchy and climate change is on the to-do list of the millenials, to fight against, or in short to save the planet. No more and no less. The next burn-out lies in waiting. If you want a stable lifestyle, you should live a conservative life. If you are burn-out for havinga full-time job, being a mother and wife, you should consider being a stay-at-home mom. The solution is not socialism, please look to Venezuala. The solution is not to damage the economy with some dubious climate change goals. Not capitalism and not patriarchy has forced you to take student loans. The overall problem is that the millenials want to eat their cake and have it too.

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Alicia Prevost

...you do realize the vast majority of people no longer are able to be stay-at-home moms because they need both salaries to pay the bills, right?

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Joyce Herder

Spot on Ingo. If millenials think they are undercompensated now, let socialism set in and see how fast things go down the toilet. And as for Trump.............he is a Godsend to this country. He doesnt believe in the climate change we are all gonna die tripe or the PC bullshit. Thank heaven we have someone in office that stands up to this garbage. Its about time the millenials learned to deal with life.

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Carrie Micko

Alicia Prevost but a key line mentioned feeling a need to continue the standard of life of their parents. That's unrealistic to think you can start out where your parents arrived after decades of getting there. Much of the article was good, but the misguided politics at the end soured it.

I think much of the problem millennial are experiencing is from the fact that many entry level jobs disappeared just as they entered the workplace. It's like trying to climb the stairs with the first two or three stairs removed.

Also personal expectations are way too high. You really do need to learn to say no.

As a late baby boomer I've experienced burn out as well. We used to call it the type A personality. We used to use the phrase, "Work harder, do more!" as the definition of type A.

As I raised my kids I watched those type A people enter the education system and teach that pattern to the next generation. I actually told a teacher I was going to try to teach my A-student child to get a B in her class, because she was demanding way too much at a young age from her 5th grade students in her words to "prepare them for college-level work." This kind of thinking takes the joy out of learning and burnout starts already in school. I said B-level people are happier in life. Learning when it's "good enough" over "perfect" can lead to better mental health. There needs to be a fair amount of unstructured free time for all the learned stuff to get used in creative ways in childhood. That free time should not be filled with virtual living, but actual living.

Also, you gotta look at life from a big picture perspective and less myopic and self centered. There needs to be a more important reason for living than just your own personal happiness and self actualization. That used to be called selfishness or self centeredness. Having a religious perspective on the purpose for life is also most helpful.

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Michelle Hankins Jonjak

Alicia Prevost , don't feed the troll.

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Constantine Zachariadis

Alicia Prevost There are alternatives. No need to buy a new $1K Iphone every year or have the $6 latte 3 times a day. These are choices we all make and they have their pros and cons.

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Matthew Lowery

This is the dumbest fucking take. Did you even read the god damn article? Jesus fucking Christ. How utterly out of touch can you be?

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Alicia Prevost

Carrie Micko Except it didn’t take my parents decades to get there. They were home owners by their late 20s and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. My dad’s salary was more than enough to buy a decent starter home for a little over $100000 in the 80s. My brother and sister-in-law are just buying their first home in their mid 30s and are looking at nearly half a million for their starter home...and that’s moving quite a bit out from where they work, where it would have been over a million. I still can’t afford a home and I’ve been at my job for over a decade now. There’s quite a bit of proof out there that home prices have far outpaced salaries. Millennials are not kids fresh out of school expecting a fancy home...we’ve been in the workforce 10-20 years and wondering why home ownership is still beyond us.

And yes a big part of the problem is a lack of entry level jobs and the ones that do exist increasingly ask for experience...which defeats the purpose entirely.

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Alicia Prevost

Constantine Zachariadis Yes, clearly the 1000 dollars I spent on my phone is what’s is standing between me and owning a 250,000+ home. That must be it.

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Julianne Hannes

I thought it was because of my adult ADD, clinical depression, and social anxiety

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Adena DeMonte

Same boat, but I think everyone feels this way to an extent. If we were all open about it, maybe we'd realize that "clinical depression" is more a reaction to our current society than something really different about us (though some of us are more depressed than others, of course.)

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Daniel C Stadler

You are pobably just a spoiled brat who doesn't understand that life is hard. "adulting" is hard because you are still a child.

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Julianne Hannes

Daniel C Stadler

I was born deaf and did not talk until I was five after I had tubes put in my ears, worked my ass off my whole childhood to overcome my developmental delay and to prove I wasn't communitively handicaped and not only did I catch up but I graduated a year early ahead of my grade in spite of also having undiagnosed ADHD and Autism that I had to fight to get diagnosed and get proper treatment for so I could be able to drive a car and lead an independant life normal people like you take for granted. Then my life gets derailed when my childhood home gets forclosed on, my college goes bankrupt, I wind up in an abusive relationship for two years, I miscarry a baby, and I lose two close relatives to cancer back to back. How dare you tell me that I don't understand that life is hard, how dare you. I understand clearly that life is hard, probably better than you can even fathom.

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Bobs Photos

An "orgy" of self pity, rampant with reasons why the world is so unfair to these people. Each generation born into the world had to deal with

the world as they found it. It took grit and determination. World Wars...police actions, the draft...financial catastrophes, each generation dealt with it and prospered. The problem with millenials is that they worry so much about what their so called "peers" think of them. They all want a job sitting on their butts playing with a keyboard and making $100,000. Nobody wants to get his hands dirty. Want to make $100.000 , become a plumber or electrician, but that requires physical effort.You should be angry with those institutes of ( a'hem ) "higher learning" for not teaching you basic, fundamental critical thinking and financial responsibility. This article just reinforces your confusion and points strongly why you are a generation of absurd failures. Nobody owes you anything.

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Joyce Herder

spot on Bob

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Roy Scott

You were spot on until:

"You should be angry with those institutes of ( a'hem ) "higher learning" for not teaching you basic, fundamental critical thinking and financial responsibility."

... Get the fuck off it.

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Blake Johnson

I agree with Bobs Photos. The fact that financial stability is demonstrably harder to achieve for young generations and that working the same amount as your parents results in less purchasing power is something they need to just deal with.

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Show 1 more reply in this thread

James Rawley

And yet Millennials are the strongest supporters of the mass Third World immigration that is the root cause of all their problems lol.

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Adena DeMonte

Many of our grandparents and great grandparents immigrated to America from poverty and they were able to live The American Dream and here we are. So why are people from third world countries today any different?

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Joyce Herder

Adena DeMonte They want everything given to them nowdays.

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Blake Johnson

Joyce Herder "They want everything given to them nowdays." No, they are frustrated to find themselves learning that less is given to them for the same amount of work.

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Jason Cristerna

I wouldn't try to reason with Joyce, she's been spamming anti-milennial nonsense all over the comments.

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David Ruddle

A lot of this article feels like self imposed oppression. When you start to think anyone else deserves your time rather than yourself, you open yourself to exploitation, abuse and bullying. If you feel you must Instagram every dinner so people will keep you in their feeds, that's not different then being forced to do it. Unless that is your hobby and it gives you pleasure. That's another word, millennials need to learn how to find pleasures in small things. If seeing Christmas lights and reading a book in a comfy bed with your own kids feels like work to you, throw your smartphone into a toilet.

Instead of being the burnout generation be the middle finger generation. Its like that scene in the movie Elf when the big boss demands that James Caan's character keep working through Christmas. He quits and joins his son. That's just a movie but that is an example of the attitude you need to have. If someone tells you to stop being a parent to your "worthless kids" and get back to work, you social media shame them.

Its about an attitude of self-value. People need to know you are valuable to treat you with value. All of those tasks, like donating books to the library, are supposed to be about JOY. If what you are doing is about contentment, you voted, you cleaned your kitchen, you sharpened a knife (you can do this yourself its actually pretty fun), you bought new boots (whats a cobbler?), these things can be pleasant tasks with enough determination. You instagram yourself at the library, now you showed you value your time and helping others. Don't waste time on a special silly dinner.

To end my ramble, I'd like to warn against assuming socialism is going to solve anything. In China they have constant surveillance, and lives of rigorous work. Once you are self-imposed and dedicated to your union, you work at your unions demands, you worship your government, they own your body and mind forever. So don't assume overthrowing capitalism does anything, except that initial rush of self-actualization then back to slavery.

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Joyce Herder

great post

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Inez Maxine Neal

Leave us alone. Hand out house and car keys. Don't just write a useless article. Do something.

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Mike Olsen

This article really sums up the fundamental problem with millennials, or any other "generation", group, person, etc. It is simple laziness, and making continual, unending excuses for that laziness. These people spend more time actively seeking out excuses than doing literally anything else. It's not difficult to understand why people like this aren't happy with their own lives.

I actually had to read the article a second time. The first time I attempted it, I found myself skipping ahead because I was so sick and tired of hearing excuse, after excuse, after excuse for not being able to do a simple task, like going to the post office. Seriously? If you have difficulty doing a simple task like that, it's pretty amazing you are still alive. Fixing a meal, putting it on a table, picking up a fork, getting the food to your mouth, and then swallowing said food, and having to do that at least 30 times during the meal, is a much more technically challenging and complicated endeavor than a trip to the post office. And we didn't even get to the logistics of having a beverage with the meal...

If you relate to this article, your biggest problem is you. Stop making excuses and start making your situation better. The only person you have ANY true control over is YOU. Stop looking for someone else or something else to fix your problems! Don't expect a whole lot of sympathy for having "errand anxiety". The only people who will sympathize with you on that are other lazy-asses. If you continue to align yourself with those people and those ideas, and you continue to believe it is always someone or something else's fault, your situation will never improve.

If you don't like your position or place in life, your job, your relationship, or your situation- change it! Take some personal responsibility in your life, for crying out loud! If you spent half of the energy that you do searching for and spouting excuses, actually trying to change things in your own life, you'd be in a much better place, mentally and physically.

I know a lot of millennials who are moderately to extremely successful in life. How can they can manage to be successful, given all of the incredible "burdens" discussed in this article? What is the difference between them and the people in this article? Primarily, they don't spend all of their free time making excuses. They solve their problems, rather than complain about them, or wait for someone else to fix them. They understand that hard work trumps excuses every time. If their current employer doesn't appreciate their hard work, they find a different employer. Most importantly, if they don't like their situation, they do something about it.

A long time ago, I heard a quote that perfectly describes lazy people: "If it is important to you, you will find a way. If not, you will find an excuse." This article is chock full of excuses, and it just perpetuates the problem. It gives lazy people one more thing to look at and say, "See? It's not my fault."

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Kenneth Ryan Howard

Unless this is a new phrase I don't get you have a typo. “now it’s our dominant child-reading strategy.” I think should be "child-rearing"

Also, it seems to me most of this is a matter of perspective shift. You keep saying you "have" to do all these things like its a burden. The reality is that most of what you're talking about are privileges that most of the world doesn't get.

Try reframing things. You dont "have" to exercise, eat healthy and wear cute clothes. You "get" to do those things. They are the things that are supposed to be improvments on our quality of life. Maybe a vacation would help. Instead of going to Hawaii go to Indonesia or some other less developed country so you can get some perspective and appreciate these things more.

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Mark Chapin

It is a pity that you self-absorbed weaklings can vote.

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Blake Johnson

Yes. What a pity that a generation stomped on by a transformed economic system has a say in whether that economic system should be adjusted.

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Nick Rowan

51, a GenX here, and burned out. My to-do list is eternal. Every waking moment is monetized. I get up at 330 AM, commute 2 hours/day, work 7 hours in a loud, dangerous environment (I'm a schoolbus driver), go to the gym and either write or craft (or work a side hustle app),get home from work at 630 PM and am still responsible for feeding two other adults, one of whom has been home all day. On weekends I work a second job. We're still financially bleeding and I can't see a way out.

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Greg Ire Claire

And they wonder why people aren't motivated anymore....

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Reynee D Rainey

This. Or...maybe we were protected to the point that nothing was ever our fault. So we sit back and judge others for not taking responsibility, when we can’t do it ourselves.

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Charissa Hayes

You clearly missed the part where she said that overprotectiveness and being overwatched led to the problems we have today.

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Reynee D Rainey

Charissa Hayes see, you just proved my point.

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Brian Charles Harris

'Then those two years ended and the bulk of my friend group began the exodus to grad school. We enrolled in PhD programs, law school, med school, architecture school, education master’s programs, MBAs.' Your priledge is showing, maybe instead of pondering over the plight of millenials you should be pondering why people who supposedly did it right are still broke and unhappy with their lives, regardless of age?

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Greg Ire Claire

Anyone complaining about millennials is probably unhappy or ineffective

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Cara Elizabeth

Good piece. I refuse to accept any reality that tells me I am broken or I am somehow insufficient as a human. I have things I can work on. I also have things I cannot do. I refuse to be ashamed of the latter. Especially when the system I have grown up in has failed me so repeatedly.

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Tom Megginson

People in their 20s and 30s don't have a monopoly on ADHD. All of the frustrations, anxieties, and avoidance tactics are shared by everyone with that type of brain. The good news is, there are ways to make life easier and more satisfying without losing what makes you special.

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Joseph Nemeth

At 62, and among the last of the baby boomer generation, I want to say: Bravo, Ms. Petersen!! I am so weary of hearing the standard "Millenials don't grow up" nonsense. Your observations are spot-on, as is you recognition that this is a systemic problem that cannot be "solved" by individuals. You are also correct to pin this on capitalism. The future will judge the value of capitalism in the long term, but it is clear that it has outlived any usefulness it had.

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Joyce Herder

ph puleeeeeeeeeese. Without capitalism you would be a slave to the state

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Trisha Dee

Joyce Herder Rather than a slave to whichever pissant organisation pays you minimum wage?

Get out of here....

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Joseph Nemeth

Joyce Herder With all due respect, I AM ALREADY a slave to the state. I do not raise my own food. I do not spin my own thread or make my own clothing. My labor is managed by others and sold for more than I am paid in wages. The only thing I actually own is debt, in the form of a mortagage on property, and currency in my wallet that guarantees a 3% return for someone else. And I'm friggin' tired of this BS that taxes are slavery and guns are freedom.

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Brad Asbury

As one of the younger Baby Boomers, I didn't have to read the complete article because of my introspective nature and age that I grew up. The crux of the problem is not that you are burned out from the anxiety of "working all the time", but the way you were taught to look at life.

No one allowed you to fail, when you were growing up. You did not have to earn anything as a child. You did not have to behave as a child. You were simply told to get a good education and do well in a job. You were never fully socialized.

I believe all citizens should have to be in the military for 2 years and have to learn a trade while in school. If they refuse to take education (HS), they should be thrown out of school at 16 and put in the workforce. You may think me harsh, but my thoughts are wholly based on my observation of how our American society has evolved in the last 50 years.

Consider this, parents parent differently than they did 50 years ago. Teachers teach differently than they did 50 years ago. It is obvious that young adults think differently than they did 50 years ago, as a result! Kids that were never required to learn to cook, clean their own room, do their own laundry or pay for their own car, now don't know how to do it! It is an overwelming task to them! They struggle just to get up for work and actually groom and prepare for the workday! If they were to have a flat tire, they would not know how to change and would have to rely on their phone to call for help! If, at home, the lights went off in one section of the house, most would not know what to do! If, for some reason they needed to use a saw, hammer or measuring tape, they would not know how to use them, either.

You may say, "No problem! I have a telephone and I can call a serviceman of one type or the other." Well, if parents and teachers were still teaching the things they were 50 years ago, we wouldn't need trade school to teach us basic self-sufficiency or the military to teach us to get up, dress properly and clean up our bedroom!

I don't just blame the day and age we live in...the other day, I had to write a check for the first time in a while and caught myself having to think of the proper way to fill it out! Our lives of luxury have "dumbed us down" and made us lazy, to the point that self-sufficiency has become a big stress in life and knowing how to deal with that stress was never learned by dealing with failure as a kid.

---thoughts from just another old goat---

...so, get off my grass!

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Jade Dolloff

I just wanted to say... that despite the fact that I identify with the feelings this article is describing, my upbringing was very different from the one you've painted. From age ten onward the cleanliness of our home was largely my responsibility. My personal chores, like laundry and my bedroom, had been my responsibility years before that. By highschool I was waking up at 5 AM to prepare our home, shower, and then wake up my parents for work. I took the most difficult classes available to me, attended trade school half the day my junior and senior year of highschool, and was competitive in m…See More

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Brad Asbury

Jade Dolloff I see your dilemna. You are not in the majority. You probably had that parent that was a perfectionist and were driven to achieve regardless of the cost. That is one of the primary cracks in a strong, tight-knit family. (That may not apply to you, but I was once married into that type of family. It broke up because I wasn't perfect. My son, who lived with her is a neurotic mess.

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Aleta Mitchell

I agree with some of the things on here...and would rephrase or rethink some others. I think we're definitely a generation that doesn't understand our physical and emotional boundaries. Many of us are constantly pushing because that's the sort of economy we (*and* our forebears in Gen X and BB) have squeezed ourselves into. Some of us are genuinely lazy for no objectively or subjectively good reason. There is no such thing as "the patriarchy," and just putting forth this and Donald Trump as shorthand reasons for "why life is so shitty" is the bad type of lazy.

GENERATION Y needs to seriously reconsider our system and rebel to some extent, but in a smart not destructive way. I see too many especially on the left calling for just destroying systems rather than calmly rebuilding and revolutionizing. This also seems to stem from the bad kind of lazy. The kind borne from genuine sloth as well as anger.

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Tom Bridgeville

What a long boring article about dope smokers who can't get anything done. Smoking dope takes away all ambition, and these little babies are so overwhelmed about mundane tasks in life that you can forget about tryin' to buy a house, they'll just sit in Mommy's basement playing video games and texting their friends on $1,200 iPhones and complaining about their student loans which they all do, every day, nonstop on all social media. Listen up you dopes:

Since you can't afford college, don't go. Duh, you want to be $100,000 in debt before you've earned a nickel? That's plain stupid.

Now they all want to elect politicians who will forgive their student debt. Not while I'm around.

What skills did you learn while growing up? Can you fix anything? Can you pound a nail or handle a saw? No, are you kidding! Millennials can't do anything except bitch and moan about a choice they made - going into debt.

Here's what Trump should do - bring back the draft. That's the shock and awe that they need. Make them serve two years in the military. Learn to get up at 5:00 AM, shine yer boots, say Yes sir and No Ma'am, learn a skill. 90% of the Armed Forces is involved in support for the front lines, so there's plenty of opportunity for these dope smokers to learn something without worrying about getting shot.

Such a bunch of helpless little ninnies, can't even fix a leaky commode, have to call a plumber. Forget about buying a house.

Bunch of foul-mouthed little snot noses, always ready to smoke dope, put on a mask, and go throw rocks and protest capitalism. Piss on y'all.

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Daniel Larson

Did you even read it? We're not smoking dope and we won't participate in an unnecessary draft. You're a coward for posting something like this from a fake profile. Sorry you don't understand the investment in college, and that you've turned so sour in life

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Ashleigh Rinkle

Maybe you should write your own article :)

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Tracy Frye Seymour

Let me guess... You're a disillusioned Baby Boomer.

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Greg Ire Claire

All human behavior needs to be reinforced with some kind of reward, otherwise it's a slave society. We can read between the lies .

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Jared McClanahan

#oldwhiteguyboilerplate

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Jason Cristerna

"Piss on y'all" Another "mature" boomer folks.

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Matthew Lowery

Fuck off, boomer.

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Elizabeth Anderson

I have spent twenty years trying to explain to teaching colleagues that there is so such thing as laziness. Instead of reconsidering their practices when a full eighty percent of the students are dropping out before graduation, they instead pushed a program to help students develop "grit."

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Jacob Chacko

Okay I'm a millennial too and this just seems like a scattered, stream of consciousness piece of writing to tell us about your life.

You're depressed, you probably lack adequate exercise, sleep, and your brain chemistry has taken a change as a result of it. When you were a nanny you were probably forced to get outside and move more - which in turn stimulated normal neurotransmitter production.

If you are reading this and feeling the same way - go see a doctor and work on your depression. Try to stop being so sedantary if you can (I know that's asking a lot of someone surviving depression) because it's what is fundamentally killing you.

I guess though there is a paradox because most of us can't afford to get the medicine to help treat depression and without those pills it's near impossible to get the motivation to not just lay in bed all day.

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Mark Pierce

The burnout is exactly what the 1% capitalists want you to experience, for it makes the middle class too tired and apathetic to take back what corporations take from them

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Blair Reiter

I feel all of this so much. I just wish there was something I could do about it.

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James Sodium

"Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics."

That's right. And it wasn't an advantage. It was destructive. We were a recession generation too in the shadows cast by Reagan's mistakes.

What Gen-X lucked into was the information age. Computers became a thing and Boomers had no clue with them. It created a huge job market that didn't exist and we lucked into it by no one's design.

I don't know what the modern equivalent is. Maybe there isn't one. The shadow of Reaganomics is long and dark.

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Bahb Cruz

The helicopter parents of the late 80s-1990s raised these millenials. The previous generation had been raised with all the material goods anyone could want - that was the result of being born to Depression Era parents, many of whom had little growing up and therefore wanted to make sure their own children, the "Baby Boomers" (the eventual parents of today's millenials) were well-supplied when it came to consumer goods and college educations. But such an upbringing only meant that the Baby Boomers complained to their own parents "You only focused on material goods! You never listened to how I was FEELING!!!" And so, once these Boomers became parents themselves, feelings AND material goods were tantamount to their children's well-being. They became obsessed with ensuring that their children had only positive experiences, no negative ones. Nobody could be left out, everyone was made to feel "valuable" - even if it meant severely contorting the truth or even lying to make that happen. Well, sorry, Life doesn't work that way. I think nothing illustrates my point better than the parents who call their child's boss at work to ask for a raise or promotion for their precious little darling. That's how you screw kids up: give them everything - then when they're adults they have no incentive to achieve on their own.

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Bahb Cruz

All that said, it doesn't help when the economy is such that the job market not sucking up young talent the way it was in the go-go 1980s. I do feel sorry for today's younger generation: their upbringing aside, they've been let loose into a crowded world that seems to have a dearth of opportunity when it comes to making a comfortable living.

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Michael A Brito

As a baby boomer who has lived the above experiance, I'm sorry but you are not unique, maybe its just part of being a human of a certain age, and has nothing to do with you as a millenial! Many in my generation have had our time in this "mired", "bogged" down expanse as well. I can recount many a time in my 20's and early 30's when this was the case. Fear not for you will still experiance bouts of this when you approach retirement as I am! LOL

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Kevin Graham

I'm a high functioning autistic. And bipolar. I'm neurodivergent enough that I feel like being things like "normal", "appropriate", and "stable" feel like full time jobs for me. But I'm still functional enough that I'm expected to get an education and a job on top of that. I guess this explains my burnout.

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Joyce Herder

Just because you are 38 numerically, does not make you an adult. Your whole story sounds like nothing but excuses. You sound exactly like what you are whining about. A spoiled, self serving, entitled brat. Sorry to burst your bubble, but life is not fare. It never has been and it never will be. Deal with it. Or you will still be writing dribble like this when you are 70 years old.

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Nayton Wong

I got burnt out reading this article.

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Christopher Rose

Wrong wrong wrong. This is from a Gen-Xer. You can't see it because you were born into a world of easily available 24 hour entertainment of all kinds. Internet, DVD videos, satelite TV/Cable, Video games , portable video games, cell phones. You get this "paralysis" becasue you have goten used to the idea all things in life need to be at least as entertaining as the things I mentioned above. Otherwise you don't do them. Or procrastinate them to death. It's why you think all your jobs have to be "interesting". This is a realtivley new pehnomenon. My grandparents who worked at a weaving mill or as farmers didn't have the option of an "entertaining" job. This didn't start with melinials though. This started with the Boomers. And each generation since has become more enflective. Which has also driven up the level of narcacism and general cluelessness to how life works in the rest of the world. This is why the imigrants coming here are going to eat yoru lunch in about 20-30 years time. They were dirt poor and didn't grow up with all these distractions you consider "essential". Becasue they are hingry and poor they have a very good idea what is important and what is just fluff.

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Gabriella Smith

old Gen-Xers WTF does that mean ?? iam 48 and not old,...

and besides my daught is only 10 years of age ,. i wanted have kids when i late 30s ,.. not in my teens and adult 20s ...

Millenials are liek much gen X weather they like it or not ,.. the only thing is that kind oppsites ,. the 1980s and 1990s are not much diffrences to me .. style , movies ,.. the music in teh 1980s was upbeat ,..and teh music in teh 1990s was down beat ..

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Devin K. Fleming

By old Gen-Xers, she means the first wave of people born during Generation X. It started in the early 60s. The majority of millenials were raised by the tail-end of the boomers and the front-end of Gen X. You were born in the middle of Gen X, so she's obviously not talking about you.

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Gabriella Smith

Devin K. Fleming good thanks for explaining ..

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Mickey Sjv Gregory

What an idiot

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Desiree Michelle Hartney

Mickey Sjv Gregory Calling someone with LD an idiot. Real nice of you.

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Gabriella Smith

Desiree Michelle Hartney thanks ..your understanding and tolrances ,..

to hateful people like Mickey Sjv Gregory try make them feel enitiled and feel good to try shame people with LD or disbilty by calling them hateful,,names .. i have LD ...not will be shund away ,.. i,ll be myself .. not feel shamed ,..how i expressed ..

.. if anything they so called Mickey Sjv Gregory are true idoits when they dont expect that fact there a lots people with LD and austsim and down syndrome ect ,..people with some kind of disbilty,... we have rights to,.. hateful monsters like Mickey Sjv Gregory ,.. we are here get used to us .. or educatied what LD is ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_disability

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Leo Baranovsky

Oh just think of Hillary and be calm

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Kenneth G Cox

Millennials, how do you cope with them when they all have the answer why a task or an explanation is all ways an excuse not to do or why would I do it that way any way, problem not solved, so I find my self ignoring them or not even actknowledge that they are even there. The western world is going to recede into a job that cant be done and won't, north America will be a place with all the wizz kids, know every thing but accomplish nothing - wonder what it will belike after I'm gone?, just saying!

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Josephine Vaughn

I have read this entire article. I am 71 years old, and all I can say is you all have to learn to say NO!!!!! and stand up for yourself!!!! I'm a boomer, we did not make life just for ourselves, we went to war, we were activists, we lost our lives on college campuses when we were shot for protesting, we lost our friends to an unwinnable war, we burned our draft cards, we massed in the streets of Chicago as the Chicago police beat us bloody, we were gassed. We had to live on the edge all the time as the major cities went up in smoke and riots. Our leaders were assassinated!!!! Dr. Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy dead for standing up for civil rights. You talk about working all the time, we worked our fingers to the bone while supporting our families and still we stood up for society and said NO WE WON’T GO. Look at the Parkland School survivors, that’s who we were – and still are. We laid our lives on the line for something we believed in, something that helped society and we all paid our bills, put stamps on the envelopes and took them to the post office. Start acting like those ADULT STUDENTS FROM PARKLAND. Follow their example, they will teach you how to live a productive life. Life is about giving back to help others less fortunate than you. Grow up and get a life!!!!!

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Maureen O'Hearn

thank you so much, I understand my millenials a whole lot more!

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Teri Zuege-Halvorsen

I find it hilarious that the author says the 1980s were stable. I graduated from high school to 13% unemployment where I lived. No full time jobs were available so I had four part time jobs to afford my rent. The 1980s were good for people who already had a four year degree or were already at the top of the food chain. Things did not get better until the 1990s and even then wages were lower than they had been.

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Mary Benfield Clayton

There is nothing new under the sun. I blame the inability of young people to grow up on the 'dumbing' down of education. Gotta make sure the stupid kids of the wealthy can get a degree.

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Zeke Smith

"Until or in lieu of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, how can we hope to...?" Ultimately there is no "in lieu of" Capitalism is killing us all, we urgently need revolution. Read, share, spread THIS: https://www.revcom.us/a/457/how-we-can-win-en.html

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Joyce Herder

so you would rather have socials huh?

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Sarah Wroe Amos Clark

Thanks for this perspective. As an old person I have dodged this particular bullet but am glad to have been given a sense of how life looks to you and so many others.

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Tom Blumm

How about stupid articles like this from Buzzfeed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6gSXAny04s

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Tim Cabrey

Edit this, maybe more would read it

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Kate Phillips

This article was fantastic! I live in Australia so some struggles I can't relate (the concept of cross country moves are rarer compared to the US and our health care is considerably better over all) but the feeling of just... continuing on, because that's all I've known or learned to do as an adult is so real. The line "Our capacity to burn out and keep working is our greatest value." is spot on - we do just keep plugging away because eventually we might get a promotion, eventually we might be able to afford a house deposit, eventually the grass mightbe greener because I would've maybe reached…See More

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Patrick Morales

I think there's an additional component here that's hinted at but what the social media/app aparatus has done beyond abusing our dopamine cycles is created an addiction to novelty. I hear this all over this article but it's not really recognized by the author when she describes her requirement for tasks to be exciting.

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Sandra Wernicke

I would suggest there are better solutions than ASKING FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO "FIX YOUR PROBLEMS" Socialism....

LOLOLOL holy shit is that a bad idea.

Learn to live within your means like the rest of us.

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Brooks Fiesinger

I disagree with your political opinions 100%.

However, I agree with the rest of this article whole heartedly... Conveniently as I stare at my list of 25 things I "MUST" get done "TODAY" while I feel like the worst father in the world because my daughter doesn't get my attention 24/7.

Some of those "things" include major projects that I "must" do if I want any chance to "win".

I really enjoyed reading some of the replies below about "solutions" to this "problem". What I'd be interested in is any resources anyone has that talks about ways to essentially step back from the to-do list. Its not …See More

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Jason Baum

Socialism does sound good in contrast: http://www.bbc.com/.../20180709-unlike-most-millennials...

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Joyce Herder

I suggest you read about socialism in the historical sense and then stupid stuff like this will not come out of your mouth

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Jason Baum

Joyce Herder I think you'll have to be more specific, Joyce

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Trisha Dee

Jason Baum Joyce doesnt know what social democracy is.....

For her its just commuwnism and Venezuela.

Most European countries practice a form of social democracy. We're doing fine and our standard of living is beginning to exceed that of the United States.

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Matthew Lowery

At the end of the day, the ignorance of boomers is all-encompassing. As is visible in the comments, most are so blinded by ideology that they're entirely incapbale of comprehending the points made in this wonderful article. With any luck, the boomers will die off very soon, and millenials will come to become more conscious of the grotesque conditions left for us by previous generations.

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Shaun Favell

That isn't burnout - my milennial children have been this way since young adults. You're not the burnout generation, you're the spoilt generation. You just think it's burnout because you have a lower threshold for the work/reward quotient. You only wish to do the things that feel good, and not the things that should be done. Somehow, the carefree childhood given to you by your parent generation has created adults that stil live in their childhood, expecting others to bail them out when things go wrong, and happy to consume the nicer things made possible by others; such as security. I predict your children will have to pick up your tab in the future.

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Cecille M. Gultiano

I think every generation is a burn out generation. Come on, we all agree that people are better now than before. Health, equality, science and technology? Etc... But if we are the burn out generation, I'm glad because I rather not be part of the generation that has to deal with wars or widespread cholera.

Also, this article stressed me out, Didn't finish reading.

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Donny Marks

>Why millenials are the 'burnout generation'

>Immediatly starts talking about the 2016 election.

i literally stopped reading.

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Scott Lawton

So, I agree whole heartedly. I think a lot of the negative comments are from people not exactly getting the point. My only thought it how do we fix this and more importantly how do we not pass these insecurities on to our children, if we chose to have them? It's one thing to "know" but it's another thing entirely to "understand" and implement actions to change.

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Stephen Healy

Really clear and compelling piece. In talking about it with a colleague I do wonder if this phenomena--performance culture, or whatever we want to call it--takes on a particularly acute expression in an academic context where contract work (adjuncting) is the norm and where there is an endless multiplication of KPIs against which we measure performance. As the author intimates one price we pay for this decision-fatigue is that confronting other challenges (like climate change) or leveraing opportunities (like organising in ways that might make the SDGs obtainable) becomes that much harder... As I scan over some of the comments, I can see that many people have pointed out that people pointed out that life has always been hard and that farmers worked from sun up to sun down. True, but until recently farmers didn't get emails from their crops tell them it was time for harvest (they do now, performance culture is definitely a part of modern farming). If you read Sahlin's work you'll learn that for most of human history (100's of thousands of years) people met their necessities through about four hours of collective work. And yes, life was hard then, but leisure time was different. As Karl told us, necessity and the the anxieties that come with it, may always be with us but its form is historically contigent. We don't have to work this hard, but a political struggle will be necessary to rethink the norms that surround wrok

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Greg Ire Claire

Lack of Incentives and Rewards. mediocre generica - we'll all be waiting for the generations that surround our own to do better. I really don't think complaining about young folks will solve anything or make society any better. -U4RIA

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Marianne Willburn

The idea that this is a purely a Millenial issue is just plain false. It's cultural - and as the result of many factors, most notably the digital revolution. Perhaps the only ones not affected are those of the Greatest Generation. Most of that generation are too far removed from popular culture to feel they must participate in the intense superficiality that makes up a great deal of our lives today - and they are happier for it. They still see things like puzzle building and home canning and family get-togethers as joys and challenges of life, not premium content.

I get it - once you get drawn in, it feels impossible to see a way out. I speak as a GenXer, a freelance writer and a person who lived very very frugally for 12 years to pay off 104K of student loans on what amounted to one income (my husband's middle class job) with two small children (while we were renovating a fixer upper so we could afford a home). We got severely burned by both 2001 and 2008. However, I'm extremely thankful the smart phone culture was not part of my world at that time - it would have sucked vast amounts of time away from the business of living our lives, and interfered with building a strong community network - a real one.

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Wendy Wiseman

I was struck by the absence of the most significant factor in all our lives, regardless of generation (I'm not convinced that a 38 yr old qualifies as a millennial, but that's beside the point)--the total transformation of the planet and the foreclosure of a stable future due to climate change. I have to say this author, while bemoaning all the woes she can muster, remains rather clueless regarding the one thing, besides the fallout of neo-liberalism of course, that really matters. This is incredibly disheartening. What the hell?

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Brianna Whitfield

Best piece I've ever seen written on the millenial predicament. Great writing and resonated so deeply with me, a young millennial born in '94.

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Matt Janes

I suffered from burnout 10 years ago and have since qualified from Harvard as a neuroscientist, now creating online courses to help others. Here's my FREE course about burnout thrv.co.uk/burnout

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Molly Oliver

"Our parents — a mix of young boomers and old Gen-Xers — reared us during an age of relative economic and political stability." Not true. Anyone remember the 1970s? I was young but I remember long lines at gas stations, talk of high unemployment, and a general feeling of doom and gloom. It felt much worse than the 2008 economic crisis. Let's not forget history, folks, or you get a skewed impression of the here and now.

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Utkarsh Waghmare

I quite literally got chills multiple times while reading. Such a well-written and highly relevant article. I am the same age as you and even though I'm from a different country I could relate to almost everything you described here. Thank you so much!

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Kate Gaffney

Thank you for sharing Anne! This is beautifully written, honest and compelling.

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Christopher LaRondie

So many people here claiming "nailed it" or "spot on". Yet the person who wrote this is not a millenial and neither are the people telling her this is accurate. We are "the burnout generation" GTFO. hololens, elctric cars, web based solutions, 256 QAM digital compression, 4k compression, screen sharing, jet engines that are virtually silent and currently building a 40 story tall rocket to go to mars by 2025. All i ever see in these kind of posts is a hint of mid life crisis and jealousy. Get off the millenial hate train. It's so funny that we as a species have jumped so much further ahead in the last 20 years than the 100 before it, yet the generation grown in those 20 years are the do nothing burnout generation.

on behalf of all millenials EAT ME!

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Cole Robbins

The capitalist system will not go away. It is too ingrained in international relations and commerce. Perhaps just the US could change to Democratic Socialism if it were strictly isolationist, but with the entire world using capitalism as the international means of trade, I think the chances are too incredible slim for it to happen.

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Brian Blank

Wow. Narcissistic much? 😳

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Robert Pearl

They are only molding the republican party what's the problem just look in our congress .

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Jacob McCleery

Thank you for writing this. It's so insightful and helpful.

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Jen Ye

And my thinking is just every generation has their struggles.

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Julie Anne

One of my biggest challenges with millenials is not laziness, but their lack of interest in taking responsibility for what happens... yes, the economy tanked on you, but you CHOSE to go to graduate school. Even if you were given bad advice, it was your choice to take on the debt when you could have just kept working.

So many of the millenials I've worked with are always looking for outside influences to blame the problem on and make excuses - it's not, "I'm sorry I didn't get to your email sooner." It's, "I didn't get the email." It's not, "Sorry I dropped the ball and didn't follow up with the programmer. Let me take care of it right now." It's, "The programmer never got back to me."

Maybe because the millenial parents didn't let you suffer the consequences as you were growing up, nothing was ever your responsibility. It was your responsibility to study hard, but when that didn't work, they were calling your teachers to up your grade rather that letting the consequences be your responsibility and your reality and something you dealt with - they were always fixing it for you.

Yes, you were given bad advice about college debt and career choices, but rather than just acknowledging that and figuring out how to fix it, you want to assign the responsibility for your situation to "them." For example, a lot of us lost money when the stock market tanked in 2008. It was the result of bad advice from many financial advisors, but you don't hear the older generations constantly blaming them ten years later. We just pick up and keep going and figure out a new plan.

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Dan Thompson

This is a fabulous and incisive article. I will say though that I disagree with the conclusion, which seems to be that there is nothing we can do to treat burnout, because burnout is an inevitable result of capitalism, exploitation, etc. It is true that having less money makes everything harder and makes burnout more likely, and millennials are financially less secure than their parents. But my wealthy millennial friends seem to be burned out about as often as my less financially secure friends. I think our generation puts a ton of pressure on ourselves to always be improving, always be living the perfect life, always be achieving our dreams. That pressure leads people to feel inadequate regardless of how well they're doing. I don't doubt that some of the pressure on our generation comes from inequality, from the fear of not making it, but I think it also comes from social media, from intensive parenting, and from a ton of other cultural factors that the author wisely mentioned. And while we can't always guarantee our financial safety, we do have the power to change our outlook.

I used to feel inadequate if I didn't spend almost all of my free time working on some form of self-improvement. A while ago I started setting three goals for myself every three months. I try to ensure that it won't take more than an hour or so per day outside of work to stay on track. Now I tell myself that by going to work and by working for an hour or so on one of my three goals, I've done enough. I don't have to feel guilty about not doing more, I'm not allowed to worry about goals outside of the three I have at the moment, and I can do whatever I want with the rest of my time. It has taken a huge weight off of my shoulders.

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Rosie Torr

Gen X has that never ending To Do list as well. I am living it now at 41. Even my mother in law has the same issues. Maybe everyone does? Nothing is new, really. Is it possible it is modern technology mixed with our never ending search for perfection rather a generational situation that is taking the joy out of our lives? Or should we not even expect to be joyful? Is that our problem? We need to lower our expectations for our entire existence, I suppose. Exchange earnestness for sarcasm (yes, I must be Gen-X).

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R. Scott Harris

Anne. Good article, but I'm the GenX hiring manager with 15 years experience leading you Millennials. You don't want to hear it, but if you were more loyal to us leaders and our companies, you'd suffer less burnout, depression, and anxiety. We love you guys and are willing to sacrifice our time, our finances and even our hearts to lead you well...but you leave us for so-called greener pastures.

You have now learned the truth about greener pastures. They leave you apathetic, anxious and alone.

Find a good boss, find an ethical company and stick with it even when it is hard work...get gritty. You will experience FOMO of the next shiny startup but as my loyal apprentice we'll build great things, change the world, make some money, raise risilient kids and leave a legacy.

Proverbs 3:3-4 Never let go of loyalty and faithfulness. Tie them around your neck; write them on your heart. If you do this, both God and people will be pleased with you.

--R. Scott Harris

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Deborah Alston

I burned out before I read the whole article

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Walter Prindle

The article indirectly, perhaps accidentally, points out something about the modern economy: a large part of the labors of modern workers is neither material (though it is somewhat materialistic) nor is it meaningful (unless you consider projecting an image which distorts reality, to be meaningful). The never-ending, never-enough labor is to craft an unrealisticly utopian image of self and the position of this projected self within the community and the cosmos. If we as a society could get back primarily to producing things which help us with what we need or want, ways to make that more effi…See More

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Diane Quilter

Not enough sleep? Turn off the TV, get off Instagram, and go to sleep.

But on second thought, it's actually a good thing that people like you are too lazy to vote. THANK YOU.

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Diane Quilter

How many tasks could you have completed in the time it took you to write this piece of rationalization and navel-gazing?

Fantastic news: You don't have to "feel like" doing these tasks. You just need to get off social media and DO THEM.

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Phil Sheo

The author acts like no other generation has had challenges. To wit, I offer this: Gen X has had to deal with two Iraq wars (one coming into college and one on the other side); two WTC attacks; a dot-com bust as they started making money; the 2008 recession as they were trying to recover; the real-estate market crashing, which destroyed any equity they had and hamstringing them for the better part of a decade, while trying to raise a family or recover from divorce; the credit market drying up, making it impossible for those who lost their jobs in the recession to start businesses; wage stagnation outstripped by inflation; their self-indulgent parents pi$$ing away whatever estate they would have been able to count upon in previous generations... I could go on; but, I think I've made my point.

Quit the pity party and the 'adulting' and just quit the adolescence ad infinitum and the faux sense of entitlement and that your $hit doesn't stink and that 'likes' equal aaccomplishment. You might find you actually enjoy your life and maybe, just maybe, you will get somewhere.

PS - Please learn to spell and use proper grammar and punctuation. You might be surprised as to how that may affect others' opinions of you.

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Alan Goos

Thanks for shitting out 10 erroneous pages about the most entrepreneurial generation to ever exist.

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Roxana R. Ontiveros-Coronel

I want to sob. Especially about considering grad school even though I still owe for my 2004! Bachelor's and can't seem to "secure" a job.

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Mason Wang

Read the first few paragraphs, then my ADHD kicked in and realized the article was too long to read.

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Mary Bennett

Hi Anne --

Great article on millennia burnout--well thought-out, researched and full of useful insights. This is the response to it that I just texted by 24 year old daughter who, according to my Christmas letter update, is "feeling the stressful effects that the introduction to "adulting" can bring...":

Interesting... I read the whole thing! I had to say a prayer for the author, though, in that I DO absolutely believe that the “burnout” she describes (which, by the way, I believe comes in many different forms for different people and has been around for millennia—no pun intended—in one form or another) is treatable and can be remedied! The author will probably come to this same conclusion as well once she reaches my age...😏. The biggest takeaway—or theory—I got from reading this essay is that rather than the “to-do” list being overwhelming and endless, we should CHANGE what’s on that list by redefining what is really important and fulfilling in life. I know this is an extreme example, but think of the poorest of the poor people around the world, and how modern-day people who spend time with them describe them as the happiest people that they have ever been around. But, oh you say, we DO live in that modern world...that is true, and while it certainly makes it more difficult to emulate that “poor” type of happiness, the goals of satisfaction, prosperity and joy in life CAN be achieved in our current circumstances!

And, again, this may seem hard to apply to modern life, but what do we always come back to as the two most important things in life? I know you know the answer—love God and love each other. Keep God in the mix, buttercupper, like at the top of the mix as much as you can (I know this is hard and that we often fall really short)—and He WILL guide you, keep you, and show you the way. CHOOSE LOVE❤️❤️❤️

All the best to you and Happy New Year!

Mary Bennett

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Evon Michelle Davis

Excellent article! I wondered how many people would actually be able to finish it in this era of so much to do, so little time, but it was very compelling and I kept reading. People will eventually either meld with technology to be able to "optimize" or they will finally walk away from it.

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Elliott Straube

Saying that "boomers had the golden age of capitalism" is misleading.

Boomers lived in a golden age of American / European economic growth. The rest of the world was suffering and dying from poverty and political oppresion brought about by totalitarian regimes (India, China, Africa, Latin America).

The rest of the world is catching up, and is better off than better before. That means more competition for labor and goods, competition that America didn't used to have. Naturally, our generation (millenials) has to work harder to compete for the best jobs.

This "globalism" that has lifted the world out of poverty does make it harder for Americans ages 22-37 to become wealthy, yes. But we must keep the bigger picture in mind as we bemoan the efforts required to mail letters.

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Alex May

Everyone competing around the globe for the same jobs will end up meaning you better accept the worst possible conditions.

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Jonathan Mailer

Wow, how ignorant can you get? I'd love to know how free-market "capitalism" is at the root of all this burnout and how socialism is the solution. The American mixed economy (corporatist is the accurate term) has been anything but free for the last 106+ years.

Is it the Federal Reserve that does the bidding of the top 1% that's "capitalist?" The federally protected Big Banking cartel? The federally protected health-care cartels of Big Hospitals, Big Insurance, AMA, and Big Pharma? Energy? Practically ad infinitum.

Would love to hear some details, but of course progressives are interested in anything but the real causes of most current problems. Having to become literate in actual economics is another task to put off indefinitely.

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Michelle Hankins Jonjak

I think this is a good article, but something large that you are missing is that much of this was said about GenXers. The helicopter parenting and social media being pervasive is unique to your generation. You were told you were precious and unique....we Xers were told the very opposite. The idea that your generation is the first to have "lower expectations" or to experience a recession just when you have been unleashed from the ivory tower is also true of Xers. I graduated college the first time in 1993, and neither myself, nor my peers, could buy a "thinking" job. Google that recession. It felt very similar to 2008. We filed as office temps, or waited tables, or tended bar, or worked retail. Your "burnout" is our "slacker culture." Good article. But not new. My suggestion is to cultivate some friends about 10 to 20 years older than you, too. I am 47. I'm not going to get social security, either, and I will need it before you. We have more in common than you suspect.

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Rainer Evans

you studied liberal arts? "Well theres your problem"

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Toni Bishop

I found this article interesting and relatable -- but you know what? I am firmly in the Gen X category and I am financialy stable with no children and yet, I STILL feel all of the ennui and angst of that insurmountable to do list! Maybe there's more to this whole thing?

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Michele French

Millennials are not alone in this. I fear a certain amount of paralyzing anxiety is entering everyone's life. The times are so uncertain. Most older people probably won't admit that they are afflicted with this behavior as well. I'll confess on behalf of my generation (I'm 74) that I have nagging,embarrassing tasks I haven't gotten around to for years. A little over four years ago I found two books in the parking lot of a neighborhood pizza parlor. They belong to the Sacramento Public Library (about 90 miles away) and I have yet to return them. This is only one of many examples of tasks I seem to be too enervated to accomplish.

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Constantine Zachariadis

Get off social media and you will have plenty of time to do everything that needs done without burning out. Internet browsing & social media should consume only a small % if your free time and it should be considered leisure time just like older folk used tv viewing for that. You need to unwind. If social media does not allow you to unwind, if it feels like another 'task' then that says something significant about it.

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Maria Riordan

This was so great, thank you. We needed to see we were not alone in this. You were right to call it "background music", a pre-condition for everything else, because whatever we attempt to do with this, like "stop", "breathe", "meditate", it just becomes a part of the paradigm, gets transformed by it and builds itself naturally into the dominating order of things. I'm from the other part of the world but I guess it's the same everywhere now. Seeing things as they are is the first step. Then we can detach.

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Jan Martens

As a father of 4 millennials, trying to get them out of the status quo, and not being American.

I recognize many common traits with my children, who blame their burn out state on me individually. I read Buck Jenkins' comment: gen X was to cool to care about anything.

Although we cared about parental optimization. I think it's good to mention that at the start of the nineties, the Japanese economy was standing out. We learned about people who worked much harder as we did and children studying even harder. No time wasted on revolt.

Then came competing China and climate issues telling the Western world not to take his society model as sustainable. We as individuals and surely as a society have to accept that we probably need to take a few steps back.

Meanwhile here are some results of coping our way with globalization.

Each generation revolts and creates a model as not to do what's been done to them. Nobody can predict what millennials' children will do.

With or without welfare.

The article also helped me to see a bit through all those efficiency apps, where you get in very easy, but opting out is difficult.

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Robin Esther

Wow I feel like wet dumpster garbage.

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Von Lichtenstein Vodrick

the author's experiences are not universal

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Alexander Boschkov

*American Millenials

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Quincy Guidry

You can read. Congrats.

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Maria Patoka

I'm not American, but I agree with author of this article in everything, except voting, in my country we don't register. You are 18, and you get invitations to go and vote from voting committee.

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Kyle Harwood

WHAT SUMS UP THIS ARGUMENT IN ONE WORD IS THE LACK OF 'RESPONSIBILITY'. THE AUTHOR DEMONSTRATS HER MILLENNIALNESS BY BLAMING EVERYBODY AND EVERYTHING FOR HER UNHAPPINESS AND UNFILLMENT. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP ISNT TO BLAME FOR YOUR SAD LIFE. YOU AND YOUR LEFTIST IDEOLOGY IS TO BLAME. GROW UP AND GET SOME RESPONSIBILITY YOU LEFTIST CRYBABY MILLENIALS.

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Cyan James

Imagination and empathy can help understand why it can seem like certain people struggle with responsibility. Sure, not everyone is doing their best all the time -- welcome to being human! But we don't all exist with the same tools and capabilities, so being curious about someone else's internal set-up can help us better be responsible together. "People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder." From https://medium.com/.../laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01

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Robert Letchworth

Writing in all capitals truly accentuates your logic and doesn't make you appear unhinged at all.

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Sarah Oak

Kyle, are you okay? There's no need to shout.

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Anna Frohling

rich coming from someone too lazy to use the shift key

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Marie Jones

HELLO I ALSO LOVE TO WRITE IN ALL CAPS! EVERYTHING WE SAY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS! YAY!

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Kyle Harwood

Robert Letchworth tactical

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Kyle Harwood

Cyan James oh you would be surprised st the harm people choose to do to themselves. Especially when they are given endless excuses to justify their lack of accountability for their life outcome. Excuses don't resolve you of your responsibilities.

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Kyle Harwood

Marie Jones except you have said nothing of substance. You are just upset that I exploited your desire for shiny things

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Kyle Harwood

Sarah Oak always a need to shout. It's so the hard hearing types can hear.

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Tahsim Ahmed

Fantastic article!

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Arthur Bennett

The Grating Generation.

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John Palmer

fighting corporate windmills

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Lev Novak

This is good.

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Rob Miller

#FirstWorldProblems

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Adena DeMonte

I'm sure a lot of millenials and other high achievers feel this way. I can certainly relate. I think one of the biggest challenges is knowing that no matter how hard you try to achieve what you think you're meant to achieve, you'll never be able to afford the same quality of life as your parents. I'm the first to admit I'm in a much better situation compared to many of my peers, due to a mix of privledge, luck, and hopefully a tad bit of real talent/skill, but even with that, I constantly feel hopeless because it's never enough. I have a 5 month old and I hope to give him a good life, and also set him up for his own success by somehow teaching him something I don't yet know: how to find some semblence of stability in order to not be terrified of everything crash and burning at every moment of every second of everyday. I wouldn't trade my life for that of my parents, but I would like to know what it felt like to have a job that was a "forever job" - and to live in an age when the lack of Internet at home meant that while you'd stay late at work to get important projects done, when you went home, you were invested fully in your family and your life. One important bit you've touched on in this story is how lonely we all are in this age of social media -- the isolation only adds to the spiraling anxiety. We may have hundreds or thousands of "friends" on social media, but how many do we really know? Do we have time to see our friends anymore? And what do we TALK about with them, anyway? I've found I've become rather dull -- I can talk about work, I can talk about personal finance, sigh over what crazy thing out POTUS did that day, and perhaps provide commentary on a Netflix series I slept-watched while surviving the first few months of motherhood. I've completely lost myself, which may be part of what being an "adult" is for any generation, but no one mentioned that the reward for doing what we're supposed to is not having a sense of who we are beyond being a robot who must pay the bills and save for a downpayment and get through the "to do" list. To be fair, I used to go to therapy because I disliked myself. Now, I go to therapy because whatever sense of self I once had, is long gone -- I'm trying to be the best robot I can be, while failing at that, and at 35, that's my identity, and my self worth is so entirely wrapped up in how well I can make it through a week with my task list completed. There is no real satisfaction in its competion, only the refilling of the next items on the to do list, the only way to try to get ahead, even though it's impossible. You are just kicking hard below water trying to stay afloat, and hoping no one notices. I thought this was just a me thing, but maybe that's how many of us feel.

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David Ruddle

Great post - funny thing is, there is a strange sense of inferiority even with our Netflix conversations, we know there are probably 1000 Youtube channels on the same topic out there doing a far better job than we are discussing the show lol, even having conversations feels stressful and full of distress when you can't think of witty and original "content" all the time and people begin to drift away from you mentally and you get panicy because you haven't talked to anyone in two days IRL but you just know you lost them.

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Adena DeMonte

David Ruddle exactly! It's like, why bother saying anything, if it's not entertaining or life-altering? Small talk is extremely stressful. Add to the "to do list" planning what you're going to say about the latest show or pop culture event you watched because you'll have to be ready with fresh material!

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David Richardson

I am a millennial, but I'm not idealistic and don't care about societal norms. I didn't bother attending college and I chose not to have children. I work in a factory, yet I bought my house at 21 years old (which I nearly have paid off) and I have no debt. I don't have to worry about completing menial tasks like mailing things because I just set my bill paying up for auto pay. I'm no democratic socialist, I embrace capitalism because I am not stupid or weak!

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Alicia Prevost

Congrats on a good paying job in a factory. As a millenial...I watched a lot of high school friends get good paying factory jobs and then watched the vast majority of factories where I live close up. I still remember sitting in my college economics class the day the main factory in town (and the biggest employer) announced closing and the discussion we had on how it would effect the economy. The biggest employer in town now are call centers, that pay a tiny tiny bit above minimum wage and people who thought they were set after school still struggle to make ends meet. So...yeah...go you?

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David Richardson

I live in Newton, Iowa, where the Maytag corporation was founded. Maytag paid well, but I knew better than to work there because I could tell the business was not sustainable, and sure enough they were bought out and closed down by Whirlpool. Not all factory jobs are equal.

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David Ruddle

Good for you for not buying into the college meme, always the unhappiest people went to college. Government should #resetthedebt at least forgiving the interest accrued on our loans, if not outright forgiving them all. If that ruins the financial aid system, so be it, we need to understand as a people debt for things that don't provide constant income flow is moronic.

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Ursula Graham

To put it simply, they've seen their parents fail and struggle during all of it and they don't want to play the same game all over again. It's tiring. Over 40% of the future doesn't believe in capitalism...

Even I, raised in poverty (or below, since my single parent would not accept welfare) to then become an adult and create many successful businesses by myself..... I don't believe in capitalism. It's dead. Just look deep into the eyes of anyone who's been in it for a long time.

It doesn't bring employees any real meaning of care/welfare, it doesn't bring us quality goods that make us actually happy, and it treats the hardest working people like dirt - full stop.

The future generations are learning what really matters, and it's not playing this meaningless money game anymore. Once the numbers flip over to more than half the population, people will start caring more about things that really matter in life like human compassion, helping, sharing, enjoyment, and not burning out on entirely unnecessary tasks of the modern world.

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Greg Ire Claire

💯% accurate . We've been given warning signs from the same generations that are now complaining... We're not trying to repeat the same meaningless empty slave existence, it's not procrastination or anxiety, it's rejecting the bullshit program, stress the system out, make it collapse on itself, while we reserve ourselves an escape route/plan outside the box... Technology will try to force/intimidate Everyone to Comply/Obey.

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Michael Craig

This is all a total joke, a short satire, a comedy right? If not you are a bunch of fucking SISSIES!! Not allowed to play on the "dangerous playground equipment!" Never allowed to have free time or wander aimlessly around town! Always supevised by mommy, always have your cellphone with you, cant go outside and play, you WILL be abducted every time! Motherfucker,I used to hitch hike all over the place when I was 12, started partying, and messing around with girls, had long hair and a mustache when I was 14.. You sissies are 21 and look 12 with out a trace of puberty or whiskers, on your faces. All pale and weak. You millenials are the bigest buch of fucking total weaklings, crying spoiled bitches and cowards anywhere in the world!

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Tracy Thorleifson

Ms. Petersen, you have incisively outlined the headwinds facing your generation. However, it seems you do not grasp the root causes thereof, or the necessary steps to mitigate them. The burnout you so thoroughly document can largely be ascribed to the economic doldrums that greeted your generation as you came of age, doldrums rooted in Democrat economic mismanagement, the product of the Obama adimistration doing it's level best to "fundamentally change America." Yet your prescription for improvement is more cow bell. You may wish to examine the recent troubles in France, and the EU in general, for an emperical baseline on the efficacy of democratic socialism as a system of governance.

In my more cynical moments, I joke that it all only has to hang together for another 20 years or so, after which I'll have attained room temperatature, and a state of supreme disinterest. However, my grandchildren will have to live in a world crafted by *your* generation. I humbly refer you to the works of, Locke, Bastiat, Smith, de Montesquieu, Hayek, and others. Yes, they are charter members of the old dead white guy patriarchy, but in their ideas resides the only hope that your generation will not have to rediscover the hard wisdom of Edmund Burke:

"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."

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Jason Joyner

And yet the economy consistently does better, overall and for individual workers, under Democrats. Every single crash since the Great Depression has been under a Republican government.

The current French riots, are due to raising taxes on the poor to fund tax cuts for the rich and corporations. In other words, exactly what Trump and the republican congress did with their tax plan. Most of the poor and middle class just haven't realized they'll be paying more yet as they mostly eliminated deductions in order to raise taxes, and the poor and middle class haven't filed yet.

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Thomas Keller

I get so sick of hearing people complain about Millenials being lazy. That is the great lie of the decade. It's utter hogwash lie being pumped out by the corporate news outlets to hide the fact of how kids today have gotten ripped off beyond any other generation.

When I was fresh out of college in middle class American, 30 years ago, we paid !/3 what kids today pay, for rent, food, insurance, and other mandatory expenses. And guess what? We earned almost the same salaries (75% of today's salaries). Nobody worked that hard...there was lots of loafing, lots of travel, camping, hitchhiking h…See More

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Caleb Atherton

It's why voting is important. Your number one aim should be to vote. You are young, dumb & broke because your parents & grandparents spent the past 38 years giving the majority of power to republicans who have worked endlessly to take the wealth you create & give it to the wealthiest few. It's called Reagan's Trickle Down Economics. Until you vote relentlessly for democrats & force them to stop the stealing & hoarding of the majoroty of wealth by the minority wealthiest few, this world will continue to default & your lives & humanity as a whole will continue to devolve. That's evolve backwards. Because you are allowing the born-rich wealthiest few to continue to rebuild their plutocracy while dismantling democracy. Sadly, millenials don't get the importance of politcal power nor the value of democracy as the foundation upon which all is built.

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Scott Tricky

Clickbait Trash

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