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Last week a writer from the millennial generation, Anne Helen Petersen, published an essay, “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. My millennial daughter recommended it to me. She said Petersen’s article captured the way she and many in her age group feel about life.
Petersen’s article is a good read that captures the real pain—the burnout—that millennials are feeling today.
Before any conservatives out there automatically dismiss her article because it’s on the liberal Buzzfeed website, just read and actively listen to the experience she describes. There is a lot to learn.
Baby Boomers and GenX people may be tempted to dismiss Petersen’s work as millennial whining. Don’t.
The burnout she talks about is real. This is not whining. The pain is being experienced by many in her generation. I think Petersen has done a very good job of describing that pain and grounding it in good stories and examples.
We need to listen because we care about our millennials and because her article can provide us some important insights and lessons about life.
Millennial burnout is telling us that something is off the tracks. We need to fix that.
I’ll give a synopsis, but make sure you read Petersen’s article. It is long and well-worth the time spent. You need to feel the burnout through her writing. It’s the burnout of a generation.
Synopsis
The article begins by describing the burnout in terms of having to chase endless items on to do lists. This endless chase is exhausting and eventually paralyzing. Petersen was doing the important, even difficult tasks, “But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job any easier or work better, I avoided it.”
Through the rest of her piece, Petersen describes what she believes are the cause and history of the burnout.
Much of it is about how Petersen believes millennials were optimized by their parents to win in life. They weren’t allowed the dangerous activities of previous generations like playground jungle gyms or riding bikes without helmets. No teeter-totters or BB guns. Unstructured play became play dates. Unchanneled energy got medicated. Intensive parenting. Moms who became momma-bears and over-protected their kids.
And then there were the expectations. Petersen says,
“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.”
Petersen and millennials clearly think meeting those expectations is increasingly hard or impossible. They are loaded with college debt. Many had to live with their parents after college graduation. As she says:
“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 .”
And social media makes it worse. Petersen says:
“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.”
Petersen continues:
“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 .”
It seems clear that Petersen and millennials have been told that life is about certain things—like the satisfaction from a good job that’s “fulfilling” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so. So they work harder. Optimize their lives more. Create more tasks for their to-do lists that never end and never lead to the promised satisfaction.
For millennials,
“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,”
When they get exhausted and burned out, they are told to add yet more tasks to their lists—like finding leisure time, doing yoga, meditation. Which adds overwhelming to the already overwhelming.
There is no sense of accomplishment. Just more things to chase. It seems hopeless. There is no solution for it.
Near the end, Petersen clearly puts the blame on what she believes is a system that drives this social reality. She says, “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 ?”
She says that the experience of writing the piece was cathartic, that it made her feel great. And that is good. Now that she understands that her malaise is burnout and that burnout applies to her, she can at least be aware of it and honest with herself.
And she comes to the realization that “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.”
Some Points
Some important points before we move forward.
It is important that you feel the angst that Petersen describes. You can only do that by reading the article.
Avoid the temptation to dismiss the article as millennial whining or judge it from your experiences in life. Read it and listen.
Set aside Petersen’s attack on capitalism as the underlying cause of all this. While I think she is deeply wrong with the cause, let’s not get hung up on that here. If you want, we can address that in a future blog.
Where is Happiness and Meaning?
Now some observations and valuable lessons.
First, when I read the article, what jumped out at me was what appeared to be real and deep unhappiness in life.
In a 7,800-word article about life, the word “happiness” never appears. She uses the word “fulfill” only twice. Once to describe fulfilling a goal. The second time to describe a job that is “fulfilling.”
There is almost no sense that life is about Happiness or fulfillment. In the millennial world, life is about chasing aspirational tasks. It is only at the very end—in the last two sentences—that she mentions deriving joy and meaning from life.
Think about that in lieu of our earlier blogs/podcasts. In my blog, The Meaning of Life: Happiness, we talk about that 70 year Harvard study on happiness. It tells us that happiness exists and comes from high-quality relationships. Not only do good relationships make us happy, but happy people are healthier and live longer. Happiness is a real thing.
It seems obvious, self-evident, that we should all be seeking happiness. What else would you seek? The meaning of life is happiness.
More than anything, this article about millennial burnout comes across as an expression of deep unhappiness.
But the idea that life is about Happiness never occurs in the article. It’s not even on the radar screen. There is only the slightest sense, at the very end, after all the catharsis, that maybe we can derive some joy and meaning from life.
If you don’t have meaning in your life, if you don’t even know that we are supposed to seek Happiness in life, if life appears like a hopeless chase of never-ending tasks with no fulfillment, then of course you are going to be deeply unhappy.
Where is Relationship?
Second, we know that happiness comes from good relationships. When you read the article, how much does Petersen talk about relationship? I can’t find anything where relationship plays a significant role. She mentions a partner. She mentions sharing burnout with other millennials. She mentions working as a nanny, caring for two infants. In an article about life and pain and burnout, relationship plays no role.
Lessons from Millennial Burnout
What can we learn from this?
Let’s start by being clear that I am not blaming Petersen or millennials for their pain. Rather, the blame is on us, the older generations.
How would millennials know that life is about Happiness and meaning if we never told them? How could we do them such a disservice? How could we have failed them that way?
Why didn’t we teach them that life is about Happiness and relationships?
The short answer is, because we didn’t know we were supposed to. That history may be told in a future blog.
Blaming “The System”
In the article, Petersen blames the system for millennial burnout. For many millennials, there is only “the system” and they are its victims. It is little wonder that many millennials are blaming capitalism and the American political system for burnout when that is all they know there to be about life.
The never-ending pursuit of tasks with no deeper reason why? Of course, you’d become burned out.
We’ve lost the understanding that the system—whether it be our American political system or free market capitalism or whatever—the system exists for us as human beings; we don’t exist for the system. That lesson has been lost.
We have failed them there too.
The Isolation of Social Media
Social media can be great tool to get the message out and stay in contact with family and friends.
On the other hand, if you’re miserable and everyone around you on social media appears to be having fun, then social media is only compounding your misery. It won’t build relationships. It will only make you feel more isolated.
Pursue Happiness and High-Quality Relationships
What can we do about all of this?
First, we need to re-organize our lives and culture to focus everything on happiness. We need to reinforce that fundamental framework in our literature, arts, family, media, policies, etc. No matter how simple or sophisticated, we must understand that life is about happiness, not money or cars or fame or anything else.
Second, we need to understand that happiness is about good, high-quality, loving relationships. That starts with understanding and loving yourself, and then practicing good relationships in our families, at work, with friends, and as citizen-leaders in our communities. Everything we do in life should be about developing relationships. About pursuing happiness.
People in good, loving relationships are in the very best position possible for happiness, no matter what life throws at them—cancer, flood, heartache—whatever.
Finally, we need to realize that all the tasks we pursue in our lives, being good students, good children, good parents, good workers, good citizens—we pursue all these tasks not for themselves but because they help us develop good relationships. Because these tasks help us work towards happiness.
What directions and tasks should you pursue in life? What should you drop to avoid burnout?
Just ask yourself: Does this help me build better relationships with myself, my family, my fellow workers or my community? The more it does, the more important it is. The less that it does, the more you should consider dropping it.
Anne Helen Petersen gave us the gift of great insight in her article about millennial burnout. Let’s take her gift to help us end pain by understanding the meaning of life and pursuing happiness through great relationships.
