Shalom again!
Since we last spoke, there’s only been two substantial updates to my life.
One is that I finally watched Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (I know, late to the party) and I can’t stop thinking about how the film described the latter half of his life as being like a bird with no place to land. (I am also trying to decipher if the fact that Austin Butler is still speaking in the Elvis accent shows an admirable commitment to the craft or is simply an 11/10 on the cringe scale – I think a little bit of both). Which leads me to substantial update number two…
To rationalize my all-encompassing feelings of Fall overwhelm, I took to google.com for some hard truths:
Is the moon still retrograding or doing something that is making everyone feel out of whack?
Answer: No, that ended 10 days ago.
Are other Taurus’ feeling existential?
Answer: No, that’s just you.
Why have I done nothing today and feel burnt out? Is it the Vid? Low iron? Am I just lazy?
Answer: Much to my surprise, I stumbled upon something rather unoffensive…
Anne Helen Petersen, journalist and author of the forthcoming book “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”, explains how things are different for the generation the world seems to love to hate.
If you’re a Gen Z (and have decided not to bully us for parting our hair too far to the side) you can stick around. Otherwise, you best be leaving. I’m about to explain, in factual terms, why millennials are allowed to be fragile.
Disclaimer: I am a ‘96 baby and therefore considered a Gen Z-Millennial “cusper”. But if you ask my sister or two cousins they will, in no uncertain (but definitely offensive) terms, tell you I have a millennial heart and a millennial soul through and through.
These excerpts are taken from an interview with the author (but reworded by me – so don’t go bashing Anne Helen Petersen for any crass language or theatrics).
Anne thinks that one of the most dramatic obstacles for the millennial generation was graduating from college when the economy was in a free fall.
We’re doing a quick History 101 here. The Great Recession began in 2008, when a lot of millennials were just getting out of school. It was a true match made in hell: mountains of debt + credentials that didn’t get them anywhere. Cue everyone moving back in with their parents or taking on even more debt to get a law degree or go to medical school.
The economy was taking a hiatus in Greece and when it finally decided to come back and recover, millennials were competing with a new generation of grads for the same low-level jobs (gasp!).
“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!’”
Not to play the victim here, but all my people (millennials) really wanted were the same things that were available to earlier generations. We already had to deal with over-plucked eyebrows and skinny jeans. Why are you trying to make our lives harder?
This is giving a lot of “pick me” energy. Why did the recession take a greater toll on millennials than earlier economic downturns had on previous generations?
Take it away Anne:
“A lot of those downturns were followed by a faster recovery, like the recession that boomers experienced in the 1970s. But it’s also a question of what the recovery looks like. We hear a lot about the low unemployment rate right now, but many of the jobs are not very good.
There’s something called the “job quality index” that measures the kind of work people have, and it shows that many jobs today have no stability, security, health insurance — things that earlier generations could take for granted in a job”.
Millennials are still dealing with the fallout from this period of stilted growth. And we get to feel extra f*cked up about it because this is about the time when our parents and grandparents were accomplishing the traditional milestones of adulthood, such as buying a house or starting a family.
What other powers converged to try to ruin our lives?
Don’t get Anne started on the cost of college.
[In the US] many millennials’ grandparents went on the GI bill, so they didn’t have to pay much. (No empathy for the grandparents). Many millennials’ parents grew up during the Cold War, when the government wanted to compete with the Soviet Union, and higher education was heavily funded by taxes. (No empathy for the parents).
It really wasn’t until the 80s that the government cut funding for college and schools began to raise tuition. (Our lives are so hard!). And to top it all off, that was happening just when the “education gospel” started to take root.
What’s the education gospel?
I have never known anything outside the education gospel (unless you’re one of those people who say “Steve Jobs dropped out of school” to justify your own wobbly decision to skirt college).
The education gospel is this idea that the best way to find a job is to have the right academic credentials. There’s a lot of research that undercuts this idea (ahem, Steve Jobs), but it is a “gospel” for a reason. You are to believe it without evidence.
That’s how you end up with a system where you have a whole generation graduating with $200,000 in student loans.
What does Anne mean by “burnout”?
“Growing up, I always thought of burnout as something that happens to a political reporter after, like, 300 days on the campaign trail. They just collapse. I didn’t understand that burnout is actually a sense of hopelessness, and one thing that prevents it is a sense of accomplishment.”
If I was a farmer, my life would be easier. I’d have a long list of tasks to do, blister my hands (I have no idea if that’s accurate), but then eventually have a full-grown crop of tomatoes (this farm analogy is a disaster).
What I’m trying to say is that there is a measurable way of seeing progress. For old, crotchety millennials (such as myself), the combination of graduating during a recession (or for younger millennials, a global pandemic), with student debt and no steady job creates a deep sense of futility. Checking items off a perpetual to-do list eventually loses its allure.
It’s actually not our fault…
There’s this nonsensical rhetoric that millennials are at fault for their circumstance because they decided to go into debt.
Anne calls this the “retributive view” – that if someone has debt they messed up. That it was either a moral failure or an intelligence failure. People are far too keen to tell debtholders “You could have lived on less!” without thinking of the ramifications.
“If you want to find a job it’s helpful to have social connections, especially if you’re a woman. Whether it’s trying to dress at a certain level or buying running shoes to keep your body a certain way, there’s an abundance of data on how much harder it is to get employment if you don’t conform to certain standards. And all of those things cost money…I think the retributive view misses a lot.”
Additionally, technology is ruining our lives.
Our world is, in many ways, increasingly psychotic. I don’t know who signed off on the idea that it is ok to be assaulted by your phone ping at all hours of the day. A workday is 9-5 (and even that is a capitalist spun nightmare) so it baffles me how normalized an 11pm work email is.
Like, I’m trying to watch The Bachelorette, eat a fudgsicle and unwind from said workday that I am now being pinged about?!
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”
Dear God, Anne, tell us it will get better.
It seems we had to push the idea of reachability, and subsequently our degree of burnout, to a breaking point in order to mend. Some workplaces seem to be recognizing the monster that has been created and are talking about 4-hour workdays, 4-day workweeks, and a no-email after 6 p.m. policy.
Anne gave some moderately comfortless words:
“The practice will take more work. It’s going to take a lot to unbreak our brains.”
Until the next.