I want to recommend a lengthy essay at Buzzfeed to you. In it the author, Anne Helen Petersen, outlines what I found the most honest self-appraisal of Millennials I have read to date. She assesses their collective mood as “burned out”:
It’s 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’t 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’t I get it together — 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 — 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’t send them — 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’s absorbed hundreds of dollars in clothes that don’t fit because he couldn’t manage to return them. Errand paralysis, post office anxiety — they’re different manifestations of the same affliction.
For the past two years, I’ve refused cautions — from editors, from family, from peers — 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 stuff done — of course I wasn’t 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’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.
It’s long but read the whole thing.
Most of those with whom I work are Millennials and I find that I get along well with them. Many are young enough to be my grandchildren. IMO their parents, whether Baby Boomers or Gen Xers have not served them well. As a group I find them incredibly cosseted. In many cases they live extremely structured lives and in too many instances their first experience with gainful employment came when they left school and got their first full-time jobs. By that time in my life I had already been working (in the sense of a job) for ten years. I find them incredibly busy without being particularly productive.
They don’t know how to do basic things. If they need to know how to do something they can look it up on Youtube but that doesn’t bring skill or confidence or understanding, things that only come through doing.
By the time they were 20 years old many in my mom’s generation had known real poverty without a government safety net, experienced disease, lived through the Great Depression, gone to war and seen death at first hand, and had to make their own way in the world without support from anybody. That’s burnout. By the time I was a similar age I had been stolen from, fought in the streets, seen overt, nasty racism of a sort unknown today, had ordinary childhood diseases (a concept practically unknown today), taught classes, held a job, punched a clock (literally), and had a dozen of my high school classmates die in Vietnam. Soon I would be working 60 hours a week.
I don’t envy the young people of today. Getting a job was pretty easy when I was their age. I had a sense of determination, purpose, and confidence. I had a country I could be proud of. There was a pervasive attitude of optimism, the feeling that things were getting better. It was far from perfect but things were getting better. Dignity was actually a thing in public life.
Seriously?
“Publishing stories, writing two books, making meals, executing a move across the country, planning trips, paying my student loans, exercising on a regular basis.”
In other words, acting like an adult. And now lamenting basic day to day obligations while admitting that many are self inflicted? The one thing I have sympathy for is the state of the job market. That could be problematic.
Yeah, being a grown-up is tough. I don’t think much of it myself but I’m sort of stuck with it.
Drew, you’re Michael Reynolds’ mirror image.
Steel is tempered by fire.
Git R Done.
Get the bumper sticker, and another for your mirror. Get it tattooed on the backs of your hands.
Oh, and if they think it’s hard to get your ass in gear when you’re young,,,, just wait until you’re old.
I think if you put the lament in the context that they know they are going to do all that stuff, but their jobs and income are going to be worse than that of their parents, it makes a bit more sense. One other thing to remember is that the competition to get into high level programs is tougher than in the past. They are competing with foreign students, who pay full tuition, that we didn’t compete with in the past. Having a summer job is actually a negative when it comes to getting into one of those schools today, which seems different than what it was 40-50 years ago.
I work with a more select group of millennials. I dont really find your complaints to be widely true. I do find that some have unrealistic expectations about work hours and pay. Many start to whine when they have to work over 55 hours a week. They want to have a family life as well as a career.
Steve
Yeah, it’s a long piece. It had some good parts, but much was meandering – which I think is indicative of the problems the author tries to describe. She repeated variations of the word “optimize” continuously and argued that Millenials had been taught to “optimize” their lives in various ways. She believes she is optimizing her life, her work, but clearly, from her descriptions of millennial burnout, that effort failed.
Ultimately, I believe the cause is an inability to properly prioritize. Not only prioritize is the usual sense of identifying the most important and/or urgent tasks, but also in terms of goals and expectations. And, I’m guessing here, but I think that deficit comes from a lack of introspection and self-discipline which comes from a lack of experience at being independent.
And to be honest, I’m guilty of some of what she’s describing. There are times I sit down to do something but end up pulling out my phone and before I know it, an hour has gone by. I have work, a family with significant obligations, a sister with dementia I care for and manage, plus all the usual mundane things. It can be overwhelming and yet I still am apt to make poor choices with my time.
Modern life is full of distractions and temptations and unrealizable expectations. There are so many more distractions for children these days than when I was a kid. I do think it is challenging to manage for many younger adults and, as a parent, it is difficult to teach children how to deal successfully with it. Plus, I think it’s a lot harder to give kids independence today as in many cases it will lead to an unpleasant visit from the police and child protective services.
Creativity? Yes, you really have to force kids into it now. You have to cut them off from technology and media so they can learn to “make their own fun.” When I was a kid there wasn’t much choice. Once the after-school cartoons were over there weren’t many options for me besides playing friends, reading a book, or some other kind of self-play activity (I was into drawing and assembling models).
The other major theme in this piece, left unsaid, is that it is an indictment of the educational-industrial complex. The overpromises of higher education have had real negative consequences.