Yet the more work we do, the more efficient weâve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security - 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 donât see another option - All of this optimization â as children, in college, online â culminates in the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location: burnout. - You feel burnout when youâve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.â - there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which canât be silenced, - It isnât an affliction experienced by relatively few that evidences the darker qualities of change but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the contemporary condition. - We hustle so hard that weâve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals 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). Weâre 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 isnât always visible â because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because âovertimeâ now means replying to emails in bed â the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded. - The thing about American labor, after all, is that weâre trained to erase it. - A recent study found that mothers in the workplace spend just as much time taking care of their children as stay-at-home mothers did in 1975 - Less domestic labor takes place overall, but that labor still largely falls on the woman - Itâs more to do with what French cartoonist Emma calls âthe mental load,â or the scenario in which one person in a family â often a woman â takes on a role akin to âhousehold management project leader.â The manager doesnât just complete chores; they keep the entire householdâs schedule in their minds. - Millennial parenting is, as a recent New York Times article put it, relentless. - But much of self-care isnât care at all: Itâs an $11 billion industry whose end goal isnât to alleviate the burnout cycle, but to provide further means of self-optimization. At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isnât a solution; itâs exhausting. - To adultâ is to complete your to-do list â but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends. - Thatâs 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. - Other tasks become difficult because of too many options, and whatâs come to be known as âdecision fatigue.â - Other tasks are, well, boring. Iâve 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 itâs widespread among âknowledge workers.â As Caroline Beaton, who has written extensively about millennials and labor, points out, the rise of the âknowledge sectorâ has simply âchanged the medium of monotony from heavy machinery to digital technology. - 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.â - My refusal to respond to a kind Facebook DM is thus symptomatic of the sheer number of calls for my attention online - 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 millennialsâ work habits: They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. - far more likely is that theyâre bad at work because of just how much work they do â especially when itâs performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness. - Living in poverty is akin to losing 13 IQ points. - To be poor is to have very little mental bandwidth to make decisions, âgoodâ or otherwis - steadiness isnât a word we use to describe contemporary American life - Pundits spend a lot of time saying âThis is not normal,â 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 isnât a place to visit and come back from; itâs our permanent residence. - You donât fix burnout by going on vacation. You donât fix it through âlife hacks,â 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 donât fix it by reading a book on how to âunfu*k yourself.â You donât fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or âanxiety baking,â or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats. - The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is â not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease â and to understand its roots and its parameters - Weâre 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 weâll begin thriving. - But individual action isnât enough. Personal choices alone wonât 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 - itâs folly to imagine it will come from companies themselves. Our capacity to burn out and keep working is our greatest value.