How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
In this article, Anne Petersen talks about millennial burnout and how our society and culture is no longer working for us:
“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.'”
There’s a reason why an entire generation is feeling burnout: exhausted without any payout. It’s because they are burned-out from working nonstop, being on the clock at all hours, without any meaning or higher purpose. Our current culture and system are not working for us because it wasn’t designed with individuals or communities in mind. It wasn’t designed to make people content or happy or strive for higher values or meaning. It was designed to increase productivity, efficiency, and consumption, and on all of those metrics, it’s working. Just look at the millennials, who are working non-stop, to try to win at a broken system.
As Anne Petersen says, “We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.” Maybe it is time to stop trying to win at a broken system, and break the system instead, and then create a new system to replace it.