Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
It’s the flattening of life into
Anne Helen Petersen • Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
We’re saving far less and devoting far more of our monthly income to paying for childcare, rent or, if we’re lucky enough to somehow get the money for a down payment, a mortgage.
Anne Helen Petersen • Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
“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,”
Anne Helen Petersen • Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
The only way to move forward is to create a vocabulary and a framework that allows us to see ourselves—and the systems that have contributed to our burnout—clearly.
Anne Helen Petersen • Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.
Anne Helen Petersen • Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
“You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”
Anne Helen Petersen • Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system—of American capitalism and meritocracy—or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.
Anne Helen Petersen • Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
find ourselves worse off than our parents. The overarching trend of upward mobility has finally reversed itself, smack dab into the prime earning years of our lives.