“The Burnout Generation🔥”

You think millennials face unique obstacles. Let’s start with what you’ve described as one of the most dramatic factors for them: graduating from college when the economy was in a free fall.

I didn’t understand that burnout is actually a sense of hopelessness, and one thing that prevents it is a sense of accomplishment. 🏁

There’s an expectation that just because you can be reached, you should be reachable.

Obviously, this affects boomers and people in Gen X, too, but the combination of this and other factors really consolidate around millennials. Burnout has become our base temperature. We’re the burnout generation.

Millennials were competing with a new generation of college graduates for the same low-level jobs.

It’s like the bottom rung of the ladder disappeared for a decade. The whole discourse was to blame millennials for that: “Oh, they’re lazy!” “They’re moving back in with their parents!” “They’re entitled!” When all they wanted were the same things that were available to earlier generations.

What it means is that millennials are still dealing with the fallout from this period of stilted growth.

This decade in our lives, when our parents and grandparents were accomplishing the milestones of adulthood, like buying a house or starting a family, those things are still out of reach for many of us.

For a lot of millennials, the combination of graduating during a recession, with huge amounts of student debt and no steady job to pay it off, has created a deep sense of futility.

You end up with a lot of low-level jobs that bleed into each other, and it starts to feel like you’re just checking items off a to-do list without getting anywhere.

It’s like you’re on a treadmill. It’s never going to end. You’re doing all the things you were supposed to do, but you’re never going to hit any of these markers that mean something to you, to society, to your family — you can barely pay the interest on your loans, let alone the principal.

Poverty makes it harder to make good decisions, because decisions that benefit you in the long term often involve sacrifice in the short term — which is hard to do if you’re struggling to survive.

Stability makes it easier to make good decisions.

That’s another big piece of it. Reachability — being reachable.

So much contemporary work is like that. There’s an expectation that just because you can be reached, you should be reachable. Obviously, this affects boomers and people in Gen X, too, but the combination of this and other factors really consolidate around millennials.

Burnout has become our base temperature. We’re the burnout generation.

Thank You for Reading 🌟