{"id":30626,"date":"2019-11-27T09:52:28","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T17:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/?p=30626"},"modified":"2020-03-30T16:38:23","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T23:38:23","slug":"are-they-nuts-or-do-they-see-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/education\/education-co-lab\/education-co-lab-blogs\/third-party\/are-they-nuts-or-do-they-see-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Are They Nuts, Or Do They See Reality?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Opening Insights: They Didn't Start the Fire<\/h2>\n

So this is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but with a bunch of millennials
who don\u2019t know how to mail things.<\/em>
MATT FULLER<\/p>\n

Millennials see reality, but they\u2019ve been conditioned to believe that they can\u2019t do anything about it \u2013 so, they don't. Instead, their anger grows. The essay below, by Anne Helen Peterson, describes the world that millennials live in, and it's not an inviting place. A system that's been built around them, partly to control them, but also partly built as a result of them, has taken over every aspect of their lives. Are they pissed off? Damn right!<\/p>\n

It's no small wonder that a Shadow Culture™<\/sup><\/em> of Deceive, Divide and Conquer has emerged to wreak havoc on our nation. Examine Peterson's essay on Millennial Burnout to expand your understanding of cause and effect.<\/p>\n

Informational Insights: An Explicit Explanation<\/h2>\n

The following article was published by BuzzFeed News, offering \"breaking stories and original reporting on politics, world news, social media, viral trends, health, science, technology, entertainment, and LGBTQ issues.\" It was written by Anne Helen Peterson, \"a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News.\"<\/p>\n

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I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to register for<\/strong> the 2016 election, but it was beyond the deadline by the time I tried to do it,\u201d a man named Tim, age 27, explained to New York magazine last fall. \u201cI hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety.\u201d Tim was outlining the reasons why he, like 11 other millennials interviewed by the magazine, probably wouldn\u2019t vote<\/a> in the 2018 midterm election. \"The amount of work logically isn\u2019t that much,\u201d he continued. \u201cFill 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\u2019m not enthusiastic about it.\u201d
 
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 \u2014 even though, as he noted, his struggle in this case was caused in part by his ADHD \u2014 triggered the contemporary tendency to dunk on millennials\u2019 inability to complete seemingly basic tasks. Grow up<\/em>, the overall sentiment goes. Life is not that hard.<\/em> \u201cSo this is the way the world ends,\u201d HuffPost congressional reporter Matt Fuller tweeted<\/a>. \u201cNot with a bang but with a bunch of millennials who don\u2019t know how to mail things.\u201d
 
Explanations like Tim\u2019s are at the core of the millennial reputation: We\u2019re spoiled, entitled, lazy, and failures at what\u2019s come to be known as \u201cadulting,\u201d a word invented by millennials as a catchall for the tasks of self-sufficient existence. Expressions of \u201cadulting\u201d do often come off as privileged astonishment at the realities of, well, life<\/em>: that you have to pay bills and<\/em> 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 \u2014 or, as a Bustle article<\/a> admonishes its readers, \u201ceverything is hard if you want to look at it that way.\u201d
 
Millennials love to complain about other millennials giving them a bad name. But as I fumed about this 27-year-old\u2019s post office anxiety, I was deep in a cycle of a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I\u2019ve come to call \u201cerrand paralysis.\u201d I\u2019d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it\u2019d 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 \u2014 one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going \u2014 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 \u201cinbox of shame.\u201d
 
It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t I get it together \u2014 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 \u2014 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\u2019t send them \u2014 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\u2019s absorbed hundreds of dollars in clothes that don\u2019t fit because he couldn\u2019t manage to return them. Errand paralysis, post office anxiety \u2014 they\u2019re different manifestations of the same affliction.
 
For the past two years, I\u2019ve refused cautions \u2014 from editors, from family, from peers \u2014 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<\/em> stuff done \u2014 of course I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It\u2019s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it\u2019s not a temporary affliction: It\u2019s the millennial condition. It\u2019s our base temperature. It\u2019s our background music. It\u2019s the way things are. It\u2019s our lives.
 
That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can\u2019t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I\u2019m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I\u2019ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time<\/a>. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it \u2014 explicitly<\/a> and implicitly<\/a> \u2014 since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it\u2019s 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\u2019s the question we keep asking \u2014 and keep failing to adequately answer. But maybe that\u2019s because it\u2019s the wrong question altogether.
 
For the last decade,<\/strong> \u201cmillennials\u201d has been used to describe or ascribe what\u2019s right and wrong with young people<\/a>, but in 2019, millennials are well into adulthood<\/a>: 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\u2019re not feckless teens anymore; we\u2019re grown-ass adults, and the challenges we face aren\u2019t fleeting, but systemic.
 
Many of the behaviors<\/a> attributed<\/a> to<\/a> millennials<\/a> are the behaviors of a specific subset of mostly white, largely middle-class people born between 1981 and 1996. But even if you\u2019re a millennial who didn\u2019t grow up privileged, you\u2019ve been impacted by the societal and cultural shifts that have shaped the generation. Our parents \u2014 a mix of young boomers and old Gen-Xers \u2014 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 \u2014 both in terms of health and finances \u2014 than the one that had come before.
 
But as millennials enter into mid-adulthood, that prognosis has been proven false<\/a>. 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<\/em> more student debt. The \u201cgreatest generation\u201d 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\u2019ve got venture capital, but we\u2019ve 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<\/em> at turning a profit, the next generation needed to be positioned to compete. We couldn\u2019t just show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep<\/em> 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<\/em><\/a>, Malcolm Harris lays out the myriad ways in which our generation has been trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace \u2014 first in school, then through secondary education \u2014 starting as very young children. \u201cRisk management used to be a business practice,\u201d Harris writes, \u201cnow it\u2019s our dominant child-rearing strategy.\u201d Depending on your age, this idea applies to what our parents did or didn\u2019t allow us to do<\/a> (play on \u201cdangerous\u201d 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 \u201coptimizing\u201d children\u2019s play, an attitude often described<\/a> as \u201cintensive parenting.\u201d 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 \u201980s and early \u201990s 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\u2019t do internships in high school or in college, because they weren\u2019t yet a standardized component of either experience. I took piano lessons for fun, not for my future. I didn\u2019t 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 \u201cBest Colleges.\u201d
 
But that was the beginning of the end of that attitude \u2014 toward parenting, toward children\u2019s leisure time, toward college selection. And not just among bourgeois, educated, stereotypical helicopter parents: In addition to \u201cintensive parenting,\u201d millennial parents are also characterized by \u201cvigilante\u201d parenting behaviors, where, as sociologist Linda M. Blum describes, \u201ca mother\u2019s unyielding watchfulness and advocacy for her child [takes] on the imperative of a lone moral quest.\u201d
 
Recent research <\/a>has found that \u201cvigilante\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 These younger kids, what dorks, we were way cooler<\/em> \u2014 but not until I returned to campus years later as a professor did I realize just how fundamentally different those students\u2019 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\u2019d been guided closely all their lives, and they wanted me to guide them as well. They were, in a word, scared<\/em>.
 
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\u2019t 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\u2019t<\/em> want to do \u2014 a suggestion that prompted wailing. \u201cBut what\u2019ll I tell my parents?\u201d she said. \u201cI want a cool job I\u2019m passionate about!\u201d
 
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 \u201cgood job\u201d) that\u2019s also impressive to their peers (at a \u201ccool\u201d company) and fulfills what they\u2019ve been told<\/em> has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you\u2019re 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\u2019s the theory. So what happens when millennials start the actual search for that holy grail career \u2014 and start \u201cadulting\u201d \u2014 but it doesn\u2019t feel at all like the dream that had been promised?
 
Like most old millennials,<\/strong> 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\u2019t as extensive as the 2008 crisis, but it tightened the job market and torpedoed the stock market, which indirectly affected millennials who\u2019d been counting on parents\u2019 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 \u2014 I was stultifyingly bored and commuted an hour in each direction \u2014 but it was the last time I remember not<\/em> feeling burned out. I had a cellphone, but couldn\u2019t even send texts; I checked my email once a day on a desktop computer in my friend\u2019s room. Because I\u2019d 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\u2019t save much, but had money for movies and dinners out. I was intellectually unstimulated, but I was good at my job \u2014 caring for two infants \u2014 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\u2019s programs, MBAs. It wasn\u2019t because we were hungry for more knowledge. It was because we were hungry for secure, middle-class jobs \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 and taught that if we just worked harder, it would work out.
 
On the surface, it did<\/em> work out. The economy recovered. Most of us moved out of our parents\u2019 houses. We found jobs. But what we couldn\u2019t find was financial security. Because education \u2014 grad school, undergrad, vocational school, online \u2014 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<\/a> 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 \u2014 debt that I rationalized, like so many of my generation, as the only means to achieve the end goal of 1) a \u201cgood\u201d job that would 2) be or sound cool and 3) allow me to follow my \u201cpassion.\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t try to break the system, since that\u2019s not how we\u2019d been raised. We tried to win<\/em> 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\u2019s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset. I\u2019d worked hard in college, but as an old millennial, the expectations for labor were tempered. We liked to say we worked hard, played hard \u2014 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 \u201cEverything that\u2019s good is bad, everything that\u2019s bad is good\u201d: Things that should\u2019ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should\u2019ve felt \u201cbad\u201d (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\u2019s program, graduate students\u2019 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 \u2014 a \u201cright to work<\/a>\u201d state, where unions, if they existed at all, have no bargaining power. I was paid enough to cover a month\u2019s 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\u2019t have to take out loans had partners in \u201creal\u201d 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 \u2014 the first in which eligible graduates could apply for forgiveness \u2014 just 1% of applications were accepted<\/a>.
 
When we talk about millennial student debt, we\u2019re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American \u201cinstitutions\u201d like home ownership<\/a> or purchasing diamonds<\/a>. It\u2019s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you\u2019d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be \u201cworth it\u201d \u2014 worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization \u2014 isn\u2019t.
 
One thing that<\/strong> 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\u2019t \u201creal,\u201d but that doesn\u2019t mean we don\u2019t 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<\/em>. 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\u2019s always there. Periodically, it\u2019s photographed as a space that\u2019s fun or zany, and always rewarding or gratifying. But most of the time, it\u2019s the thing you\u2019re getting away from: You worked hard enough to enjoy life<\/em>.
 
The social media feed \u2014 and Instagram in particular \u2014 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\u2019t. Posting on social media, after all, is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we\u2019re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don\u2019t feel<\/em> the satisfaction that we\u2019ve been told we should receive from a good job that\u2019s \u201cfulfilling,\u201d balanced with a personal life that\u2019s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you\u2019re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.
 
For many millennials, a social media presence \u2014 on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter \u2014 has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The \u201cpurest\u201d example is the social media influencer<\/a>, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self<\/a> online. But social media is also the means through which many \u201cknowledge workers\u201d \u2014 that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information \u2014 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 r\u00e9sum\u00e9s and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren\u2019t the only ones who do this, but we\u2019re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.
 
\u201cBranding\u201d 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 \u201coff the clock\u201d 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 \u2014 in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories \u2014 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 \u201creal\u201d workplace. Email and Slack make it so that employees are always accessible, always able to labor, even after they\u2019ve left the physical workplace and the traditional 9-to-5 boundaries of paid labor. Attempts to discourage working \u201coff the clock\u201d misfire, as millennials read them not as permission to stop working, but a means to further distinguish themselves by being available anyway.
 
\u201cWe are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,\u201d Harris, the Kids These Days<\/em> author, writes. \u201cEfficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.\u201d
 
But as sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg points out<\/a>, that efficiency was supposed to give us more<\/em> job security, more<\/em> pay, perhaps even more<\/em> leisure. In short, better jobs.
 
Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we\u2019ve proven ourselves to be, the worse<\/em> our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn\u2019t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn\u2019t 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\u2019t see another option. We don\u2019t quit. We internalize that we\u2019re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.
 
All of this optimization<\/strong> \u2014 as children, in college, online \u2014 culminates in the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location: burnout. \u201cBurnout\u201d was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of \u201cphysical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.\u201d Burnout is of a substantively different category than \u201cexhaustion,\u201d although it\u2019s related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can\u2019t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.
 
What\u2019s worse, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task \u2014 passing the final! Finishing the massive work project! \u2014 never comes. \u201cThe 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\u2019t be silenced,\u201d Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes<\/a>. \u201cYou feel burnout when you\u2019ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.\u201d
 
In his writing about burnout, Cohen is careful to note that it has antecedents; \u201cmelancholic world-weariness,\u201d 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 \u201crelentless change.\u201d In the late 1800s, \u201cneurasthenia,\u201d or nervous exhaustion, afflicted patients run down by the \u201cpace and strain of modern industrial life.\u201d Burnout differs in its intensity and its prevalence: It isn\u2019t an affliction experienced by relatively few that evidences the darker qualities of change but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the<\/em> 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 \u201ckilled.\u201d<\/a> We\u2019ve \u201ckilled\u201d diamonds because we\u2019re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it\u2019s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months\u2019 salary for a diamond engagement ring. We\u2019re killing antiques, opting instead for \u201cfast furniture<\/a>\u201d \u2014 not because we hate our grandparents\u2019 old items, but because we\u2019re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don\u2019t have. We\u2019ve exchanged sit-down casual dining (Applebee\u2019s, TGI Fridays) for fast casual (Chipotle et al.) because if we\u2019re 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 \u2014 like athleisure \u2014 speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they\u2019re 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<\/em>.
 
This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials \u2014 that we\u2019re lazy and entitled \u2014 is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we\u2019ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals<\/em> 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\u2019re 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\u2019t always visible<\/em> \u2014 because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because \u201covertime\u201d now means replying to emails in bed \u2014 the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.
 
The thing about American labor, after all, is that we\u2019re trained to erase it. Anxiety is medicated; burnout is treated with therapy that\u2019s slowly become normalized and yet still softly stigmatized. (Time in therapy, after all, is time you could be working.) No one would\u2019ve told my grandmother that churning butter and doing the wash by hand wasn\u2019t work.<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s known as \u201cthe second shift\u201d \u2014 the idea that women who\u2019ve 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<\/a> 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\u2019t the case: Less domestic labor takes place overall, but that labor still largely falls on the woman<\/a>.
 
The labor that causes burnout isn\u2019t just putting away the dishes or folding the laundry \u2014 tasks that can be readily distributed among the rest of the family. It\u2019s more to do with what French cartoonist Emma calls \u201cthe mental load,\u201d<\/a> or the scenario in which one person in a family \u2014 often a woman \u2014 takes on a role akin to \u201chousehold management project leader.\u201d The manager doesn\u2019t just complete chores; they keep the entire household\u2019s schedule in their minds. They remember to get toilet paper because it\u2019ll run out in four days. They\u2019re 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\u2019 care, making sure bills are paid and neighbors are greeted and someone\u2019s home for a service call and holiday cards get in the mail and vacations are planned six months in advance and airline miles aren\u2019t expiring and the dog\u2019s getting exercised.
 
Women have told me that reading Emma\u2019s cartoon, which has gone viral many times over, brought them to tears: They\u2019d 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 \u201cexperiences,\u201d 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<\/em><\/a>.
 
The media that surrounds us \u2014 both social and mainstream, from Marie Kondo\u2019s new Netflix show<\/a> to the lifestyle influencer economy \u2014 tells us that our personal spaces should be optimized just as much as one\u2019s self and career. The end result isn\u2019t just fatigue, but enveloping burnout that follows us to home and back. The most common prescription is \u201cself-care.\u201d Give yourself a face mask! Go to yoga! Use your meditation app! But much of self-care isn\u2019t care at all: It\u2019s an $11 billion industry<\/a> whose end goal isn\u2019t to alleviate the burnout cycle, but to provide further means of self-optimization<\/a>. At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn\u2019t a solution; it\u2019s exhausting.
 
\u201cThe modern Millennial,<\/strong> for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being,\u201d an article in Elite Daily explains<\/a>. \u201cAdulting therefore becomes a verb.\u201d \u201cTo adult\u201d is to complete your to-do list \u2014 but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends. \u201cI\u2019m really struggling to find the Christmas magic this year,\u201d one woman in a Facebook group focused on self-care recently wrote. \u201cI 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\u2019s just one to-do list superimposed over my already overwhelming to-do list. I feel so burned out. Commiseration or advice?\u201d
 
That\u2019s 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<\/em> many options, and what\u2019s come to be known as \u201cdecision fatigue.\u201d I\u2019ve 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 \u2014 and not just any doctor, but one who will take your insurance, who is accepting new patients \u2014 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s widespread among \u201cknowledge workers.\u201d As Caroline Beaton, who has written extensively about millennials and labor, points out<\/a>, the rise of the \u201cknowledge sector\u201d has simply \u201cchanged the medium of monotony from heavy machinery to digital technology. \u2026 We habituate to the modern workforce\u2019s high intensity but predictable tasks. Because the stimuli don\u2019t 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.\u201d
 
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\u2019s picture of their baby.
 
To be clear, none of these explanations are, to my mind, exonerating. They don\u2019t 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\u2019 work habits: They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs<\/a>. 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\u2019re bad at work because of just how much work they do \u2014 especially when it\u2019s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness.
 
In recent years, new scientific research<\/a> has demonstrated the \u201cmassive cognitive load\u201d 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, \u201cgood\u201d or otherwise \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019s future, and safety, and employability, less<\/em> stable. Health care and coverage of preexisting conditions is seemingly always in question and\/or in peril, as are women\u2019s reproductive rights. War with North Korea looms. We\u2019ve 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 anxious<\/a> than 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 \u201cThis is not normal,\u201d 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\u2019t a place to visit and come back from; it\u2019s our permanent residence.
 
In his writing about burnout,<\/strong> the psychoanalyst Cohen describes a client<\/a> 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\u2019d 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 \u201cintrigued to find the termination of his employment didn\u2019t bother him.\u201d
 
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\u2019s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive. You don\u2019t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don\u2019t fix it through \u201clife hacks,\u201d 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\u2019t fix it by reading a book on how to \u201cunfu*k yourself<\/a>.\u201d You don\u2019t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or \u201canxiety baking<\/a>,\u201d or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.
 
The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there\u2019s no solution to it. You can\u2019t optimize it to make it end faster. You can\u2019t 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 \u2014 not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease \u2014 and to understand its roots and its parameters. That\u2019s why people I talked to felt such relief reading the \u201cmental load\u201d cartoon, and why reading Harris\u2019s book felt so cathartic for me: They don\u2019t excuse why we behave and feel the way we do. They just describe those feelings and behaviors \u2014 and the larger systems of capitalism and patriarchy that contribute to them \u2014 accurately.
 
To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality \u2014 that we\u2019re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above \u2014 while recognizing our status quo. We\u2019re 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\u2019ll 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\u2019t enough. Personal choices alone won\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 instead of just temporarily stanch \u2014 burnout? Change might come from legislation, or collective action, or continued feminist advocacy, but it\u2019s 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\u2019t felt in a long time: catharsis. I feel great<\/em>. I feel something<\/em> \u2014 which is not something I\u2019ve 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\u2019m seeing myself, the parameters of my labor, and the causes of my burnout clearly. And it doesn\u2019t feel like the abyss. It doesn\u2019t feel hopeless. It\u2019s not a problem I can solve, but it\u2019s 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<\/a> that \u201claziness,\u201d at least in the way most of us generally conceive of it, simply does not exist. \u201cIf a person\u2019s behavior doesn\u2019t make sense to you,\u201d they write, \u201cit is because you are missing a part of their context. It\u2019s that simple.\u201d My behavior didn\u2019t 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<\/a>. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t a task to complete or a line on a to-do list, or even a New Year\u2019s resolution. It\u2019s 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\u2019s life\u2019s actual work.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.buzzfeednews.com\/article\/annehelenpetersen\/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work<\/a> <\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article originally appeared on January 5, 2019 in BUZZFEED NEWS: <\/em>How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Adulting,\"<\/strong> as a verb, is described by Time in this brief and interesting article:
This Is What 'Adulting' Means<\/a><\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Possibilities for Consideration: Angry for Good Reason<\/h2>\n

Millennials are angry, and for good reason. They've been duped, and their humanity has been stripped from them through immoral applications of technology and a national culture of destruction of the family unit. They are conditioned to believe that this backwards life of guilt, anger and fear is normal, and that they're the ones<\/em> who are strange. Up is down and right is wrong and black is white. They don't know what to believe, they just know that something is very wrong.<\/p>\n

Like a dog who is often beaten, but knows he must stick around in order to be fed and have shelter, the modern millennial is conditioned to play the Game of Life.<\/em> It's no wonder that many have simply stopped caring. They don't want to play any more, and it's easy to zero-in on a boss or a politician or a social group to focus their unresovable anger. <\/p>\n

At their cores, the millennials are lacking the spark that makes them human. It wasn't stolen from them or killed off by an aggressor, they just never learned to see it and cultivate it. The process of reinstating their humanity will empower them to come together to solve the problems that affect us all. They will learn to hold accountable the firms and institutions that created our nightmare world \u2013 and change them.<\/p>\n

AwareComm\u00ae<\/sup> has spent the last 25 years implementing the solution to this problem in field applications with incredible success. The solution that reverses the cause of the Shadow Culture™<\/em> has now been made deliverable, transferable and scalable. If you want to learn more about curing the millennial ailments, and preventing the damage caused by millennials, then fill out the SocraticQ below.<\/p>\n

Want to learn more about the Shadow Culture™<\/em>? Click here<\/strong> to see this challenge from the CEO perspective<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Add Your Insight<\/h2>\n

Take a moment and examine\u2026<\/p>\n