The Origins of Millennial Burnout
How helicopter parenting and technology created a generation obsessed with work and unprepared for adulthood
What is exhausting the Millennials? A series of recent articles argues that we’re too burned out to handle basic tasks, that the economy is failing us, and that we’re too overinvested in our jobs. Anne Helen Petersen began the conversation with a BuzzFeed essay asserting that the always-on, frenetic pace of modern life is overwhelming us. She excuses Millennials from apparently lazy or entitled behavior — “ghosting” from jobs, chronic tardiness, not scheduling dentist appointments or registering to vote — on the grounds that our energy has been depleted coping with the anxieties of daily life.
Indeed, Millennials’ financial situations are often precarious. In his concurring response to the Buzzfeed essay, Noah Smith at Bloomberg documents the declining market for humanities degrees and the rising ratio of student debt to wages. Going into debt for a diploma that doesn’t impart employable skills is not a recipe for low stress. More and more Millennials work in the gig economy or as freelancers — not knowing where their next paychecks will come from, and navigating details historically left to employers like paying for health insurance and filing business taxes.
For salaried employees, though, our jobs aren’t obviously worse than our forebears’. Surely we face less risk than a farmer who could lose a whole crop from unseasonal frost. Instead, our positions may be distinguished by their combination of high expectations and low autonomy. On the assembly line, you perform one task consistently for your shift and then leave work at the factory and go home. Management might pay extra in a crisis to incentivize overtime, but it’s not your problem if production is behind schedule. Salaried knowledge workers, on the other hand, have unpredictable hours subject to managerial whims and abrupt deadlines. We can’t clock out when we’re done working — if the trading algorithm or website server fails, it must be fixed. If the client is unhappy or the shipment might be delayed, we have to get on the phone and fix it ASAP. As manual jobs become automated and everyone moves into some version of “management,” we all begin to face the pressure of being on the hook for the company’s financial success.
Perhaps we’re trading off boredom for stress. Our jobs are ostensibly less mind-numbing, but more soul-taxing. Maybe the only jobs left — the ones that can’t be automated — require more concentration than can be sustained for 40+ hours a week by a well-adjusted human. Disengagement and pressure at work have both risen to unhealthy levels. Researchers are accumulating evidence that stress from our jobs is literally killing us. Employees are spending more time at the office, are more stressed, and have fewer guaranteed benefits like pensions or guaranteed health insurance.
These trends are true for all generations, however; Millennials are not the only age cohort facing job instability and poor work-life balance. If anything, we have it better — a series of studies shows that employers discriminate against older workers, who are delaying retirement to augment pension funds that were decimated by the economic crisis. The Urban Institute reported that contemporary employment is even more precarious for older workers, who experience layoffs and forced retirements then struggle to retrain for new jobs. Market shifts are affecting all participants, not just Millennials. So while gig capitalism and knowledge work may be stretching our generation thin, they can’t entirely explain phenomena specific to us. Two trends that have uniquely affected us are helicopter parenting and digital technology.
In her book How to Raise an Adult, Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims identifies several forces that incubated high-touch childrearing. The widely-reported child abductions of the early 80s, the Cold War fear that our students did less schoolwork than the Soviets, and the rise of scheduled and monitored playdates all motivated parents to get more involved. College administrators purportedly popularized the term “helicopter parent” in the early 90s when the children of Baby Boomers began postsecondary education. One administrator hypothesized that Boomers’ intense approach to parenthood had its roots in the population bulge that defined their earlier generation. Boomers’ childhoods were dominated by fierce competition of a crowd for limited spots, and they were determined that their offspring would fare better than they had.
We grew up being shepherded to piano lessons and tennis camps for our “personal development” instead of working at the family store (or just playing outside). Mom and Dad planned our schedules and kept us to them, ensuring that homework was done on time (whether by us or them). Once we moved out to college, helicopter parents really earned their moniker by calling constantly on newly ubiquitous cell phones and harassing professors about their students’ subpar grades. Choosing classes, fixing plumbing, and managing finances were now joint activities instead of the sole purview of a newly independent adult.
A multitude of social critics and psychologists have argued for half a decade that helicopter parenting is harmful — from William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep to Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind. There’s a correlation between helicopter parenting and mental health challenges. Our generation has grown up without prophylactic stress, not immunized to the monotony and difficulty that often come with real life. We now call these tasks “adulting” — all the things our parents used to do for us, like waking up for an early meeting or cancelling an unused subscription. Moreover, we were told that we could be anything when we grew up, from famous author to movie star. It can be painfully disillusioning to spend precious time cooking dinner when you expected to be engrossed in the intellectual stepping-stones toward becoming the next JK Rowling or Mark Zuckerberg.
In the same way our parents’ hand-holding habituated us to a life of self-fulfillment, technology provides both handheld convenience and entertainment. Scientific advances have, over the years, replaced most forms of physical labor. We may be reaching an asymptote when, like the humans in Wall-E, we can avoid almost any nuisance we like. All desiderata can be delivered to our doors at a click, and everything from job applications to apartment hunting — to even some jobs themselves — can be done from the cushy comfort of the couch.
In the hours when we’re not working, we have a ready supply of distractions. As the first device generation, we toted Gameboys to school in cars with TV screens. Text messaging meant we never had to go an hour without notes from our friends. Now, of course, we have Netflix and Snapchat on our smartphones. Nary a second passes that I can’t fill with amusing content or communicate with almost anyone.
Technology companies have designed their products to feel as necessary as air or water, rewarding us for each ounce of attention we provide. Never mind the participation trophies at the soccer game, I can get a gold star for memorizing a Spanish word three days in a row or taking more steps than yesterday. The feedback loops on our apps are so short we get a dose of dopamine as soon as we complete a task. Facebook and Instagram enable immediate reactions from our peers so we know if avocado toast or chicken & waffles is a cooler brunch.
Social media also takes the “grass is greener” effect to a whole new level. We see the idealized versions of everyone else’s life; it looks like they are all traveling to exotic places with gorgeous romantic partners, funded by their fulfilling and well-paying jobs. The Internet, moreover, gives us access to a whole new world of opportunities. We can browse jobs at the most prestigious companies in the most Edenic cities, dreaming about life as an investment banking VP or a catamaran repairman. On Tinder, we can scroll through endless images of beautiful people who we could someday end up with. Opportunity costs have existed forever, but it’s only in our era that the fear of missing out (FOMO) and decision paralysis have become catchphrases.
Between technology and our upbringing, there’s a much simpler explanation for Millennials’ errand neglect than capitalism-fueled burnout. Errands are boring, and we have a low tolerance for boring. Our parents ensured that we spent our time developing marketable skills instead of enduring drudgery. They shielded us from routine tasks like calling the phone company about an incorrect bill that now feel insurmountable.. We are accustomed to constant entertainment, and to digital interfaces designed to make engagement as effortless as possible. Paperwork doesn’t give us praise or hearts or thumbs-up. It requires sustained attention and delayed gratification.
Petersen’s description of her own experience is consistent with this story. “Other tasks,” she says, “are, well boring. I’ve done them too many times. The payoff for completing them is too small.” Our generation bemoans “adulting” because being an adult means doing a lot of mundane, uninteresting things that no one applauds. To some degree, then, we do need to “grow up and get over it.” Either decide that mailing in your ballot is not worth your time and don’t do it, or decide that it is worth your time and do it. It is hard to sympathize with someone who thinks it is important and just cannot endure the tedium of licking an envelope and purchasing stamps.
These are only the small failures of our generation, however. The real issue that these articles raise is not Millennials’ failure to do chores. They point to a deeper disillusionment with our lives, a pervasive malaise that is harder to pin down. We seem to be striving ever harder for some version of idealized success — a success that is starting to look suspiciously unsatisfying. Emblematic of this strain is the number of hours we’re working and the extent to which we seem to glorify (over)work.
Erin Griffith’s NYT piece asking, “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” brands this glorification as “toil glamour” and speculates about its potential causes. Maybe capitalist titans’ propaganda is convincing us that we’ll all be happier if we work harder and make them richer. Maybe in our gradual disassociation with organized religion we’re seeking spiritual meaning in our careers. Or maybe this is all a devious innovation of the same tech companies that got us to play FarmVille for five hours a day — give them laundry and meals at work and they’ll never leave!
Her examples of the extent to which people identify with their jobs is consistent with what I’ve felt and witnessed among my friends. The explanations for why we obsess over work are less convincing — I doubt it’s a conspiracy of the über wealthy to get more labor out of their employees. Instead, they may be the greatest victims of the trend — the article even quotes an interview with Marissa Mayer, then CEO of Yahoo, describing how to plan bathroom breaks strategically during a 130-hour workweek.
The real problem, for CEOs and associates alike, is that we have unrealistic expectations from life — and not just at work. We internalized the childhood advice that we could do anything we put our mind to, thinking that if we got good grades and climbed the corporate ladder then we could become astronauts or the President. Motivational speakers tell us to follow our passion, fall in love, and change the world. If we just lean in then we can work longer hours and still be more involved with our kids than our own parents were. Falling short of those ideals just means we need to invest more to achieve better returns — or burn out.
It seems like everyone else is finding perfect jobs and partners, having perfect children, and posting pictures of them online. Committing — or settling — is so much harder when a few clicks can show us thousands of alternative lives. Dating apps allow us to search the globe for more attractive people, and job sites contain tantalizing opportunities to make more money at a more interesting organization. Our grandparents were happy to have a steady job and marry the kid next door, but we dream of meeting our soulmate and starting a high-growth company.
With such high hopes, burnout is inevitable. When our identity is contingent on success in so many domains, it’s no wonder that we stretch ourselves thin and try to make every single second “productive.” Social media makes us think that everyone else lives in paradise, and if we could only be a bit more efficient we would be there too. The Buzzfeed essay is exactly right that self-help techniques are perpetuating the problem instead of solving it; as she says, “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 with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking.’”
Petersen’s callout of the self-help industry was immensely cathartic to read. It cashes in on our unrealistic expectations by telling us we really can have it all if only we only optimize our lives with their feel-better-now solution. But the reality is that we are not built to attend back-to-back meetings then party all night — or to watch Netflix alone all weekend. Getting better requires a much more radical shift in both living and in our paradigm.
Many commenters say we need to radically restructure our economic system in order to ease our stress. Petersen points out that the growing interest in socialism is probably related to Millennial discontent and overwork. Our great-grandparents fought hard to get the 40-hour workweek enshrined in law, an idea that almost seems quaint now. There is a strong argument for new labor regulations in our era of perpetual connectivity. More power to the labor force — through unions or similar movements — would increase workers’ autonomy and let them demand wages commensurate with productivity increases. Universal benefits would ease the strain on gig contractors and free college could solve student debt.
Changes in government policy, however, don’t address the full scope of the problem. Millennials have substantially less student debt than we do credit card debt, and that comes from a myopic estimation of our future earning and spending. Our rosy vision of the world is inextricably linked to our sense of ourselves as its center. Indeed, up until now, most of our lives really have been spent on making us happier, smarter, and entertained. We got social, technological and parental rewards for our efforts — and didn’t waste our time on the small things that weren’t rewarded.
Our generation’s narcissism certainly contributes to our intolerance for drudgery, but focusing too much our egotism obscures its less obvious implications. As the center of parental and personalized technological attention, Millennials have become depositories of others’ ambitions instead of actors living out our own ideas. Our dependence on external approval and rewards — whether social or familial — has left us like the boy playing football at a Division-II school because his father dreamed of being in the NFL. We rely much more on extrinsic motivation than on intrinsic incentives to achieve.
This may be what troubled me most about Petersen’s essay, although I agree with much of what she says about intensive parenting and career disillusionment. She described working hard at activities that explicitly promote a very narrow version of success, like publishing stories and planning vacations. But activities that won’t receive public approval or fit into an Instagrammably ideal life, like sharpening knives or responding to personal emails from friends or former students, fell by the wayside. Some of our discontent must come from optimizing for a goal that we can sense will be unsatisfying, or that we don’t truly believe in. We can feel that our priorities are out of whack.
I don’t know if Millennials can successfully rewrite our programming. If we can, it will start with acknowledging that we aren’t in a fairytale. We aren’t on a quest to find our one true love, we aren’t going to change the world, and most of life is boring. We may have to deliberately inure ourselves to tedium, unplug from social media, or abandon side hustles that don’t bring us joy. [1] We will need to reexamine the ambitions we’ve inherited, and broaden our definition of success to encompass a life that meets our needs instead of meeting expectations. I suspect we’ll find something to learn from the ordinary, happy lives of our parents and grandparents.
Perhaps the most enduring difference we can make is to avoid past mistakes with future generations. If helicopter parenting creates dependence, don’t be a helicopter parent. If social media makes kids too focused on the judgment of their peers, limit its use. If constant entertainment prevents maturity, be sure to bore your kids with lectures and monotonous road trips. If aiming for social approval will leave them hollow, teach your kids that others’ opinions don’t define their success. Prepare humanity to face our ever-uncertain future with outward pragmatism and inner resilience.
[1] I wonder of some of Marie Kondo’s popularity comes from her focus on intrinsic satisfaction from your possessions rather than social expectations.
📝 Read this story later in Journal.
🗞 Wake up every Sunday morning to the week’s most noteworthy Tech stories, opinions, and news waiting in your inbox: Get the noteworthy newsletter >
