"Can't Even": older millennials are burning out themselves (and their kids) on overwork. Surely, in these times, the work ethic needs a reset

Photo by Hernan Sanchez on Unsplash

Interesting book review in the New Statesman of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. The author, Buzzfeed journalist Anne Helen Petersen, wrote the book from her own experiences as a work-obsessed freelancer - but has expanded it to a wider analysis of how the millennial generation, particularly its older cohort, has responded to ever more precarious times by heading for burnout:

Many older millennials, including Petersen, who was born in 1981, entered the job market around the time of one of two financial crises: the bursting of the dot com bubble in the early 2000s and the 2008 financial crash.

The effects remain far-reaching. Millennials will be the first generation in history to end up poorer than their parents. Many will never own a house. Stable, full-time employment is declining, while the top 1 per cent grow ever wealthier. 

The result is a generation of people who associate work with precarity. To keep their heads above water, they do what they have always been taught: work. “As parents, you set your kids up for the system, to arrive at a stable income, a stable future,” said Petersen. “But that means not teaching them the value of rest.”

The modern workplace only exacerbates this tendency. “Contemporary capitalism is predicated on exponential growth. In order to produce those sorts of returns, it demands increased production and decreased costs, over and over again. And what does the individual have to do in order to produce in that manner?

“You become obsessed with optimising yourself – and our obsession with productivity is all about cutting as much waste from our lives as possible, so that we become as close to work robots as we possibly can.”

And so work “expands” beyond the boundaries of paid hours, occupying our entire lives. It affects leisure time, and sleep. It intertwines an individual’s value as a worker and their value as a person. What is left is an endless, exhausting feeling of flatness. “It’s our contemporary condition,” writes Petersen. But it is no way to live.

Critics of Petersen’s work argue that these are the excuses of “entitled” millennials. Earlier generations have lived through hardships and recessions, Petersen said, and while these experiences are not unique to millennials, “they have consolidated as a defining component of the millennial generation”.

However, the influence of digital technology – the development of email extending work beyond the office; the pressures social media puts on users to perform perfect, optimised lives – is distinctive to millennials and subsequent generations.

Petersen was finishing the final edits on Can’t Even in December 2019 when Covid-19 emerged in China. Instead of inserting commentary into each chapter about how the pandemic would add to burnout – among “key” yet vastly underpaid workers, and in the difficulty of separating one’s work and personal lives – she put an author’s note at the beginning of the book:

“I want to invite readers to think of every argument in this book, every anecdote, every hope for change, as amplified and emboldened. Work was shitty and precarious before; now it’s even more shitty and precarious. Parenting felt exhausting and impossible; now it’s even more exhausting and impossible.”

More here. See also this excellent interview with the author on Guernica:

There are people like us who think it’s fucked up, but there are others who aren’t putting a critical lens on it. So it just wafts over you and that ideology becomes normalized. Thinking about someone who loves working all the time, I think it’s less “I love having little self outside of work” and more that they love winning.

There are people who have become obsessed with being the best. And not because they love banking or consulting, but because they are addicted to that stability, which they can’t find unless they work all the time.

I do think we could find it if we inject stability through other means. Through a safety net, or through Universal Basic Income. You allow people to do things that are nourishing to them, to their communities, that are better or more innovative for society.

Next, on Aeon, a major essay from a younger scholar, re-examining yet again the puzzling persistence, despite our abundantly productive societies and economics, of the work ethic. Maybe it’s because it’s become a substitute for good jobs:

The work ethic is easily weaponised these days, because it has a great affinity with what it means to be successful in a capitalist society. But the fact that the work ethic is also based on practice, and requires a lot of upkeep, is evidence that it might not be as sturdy as it seems on the surface. It’s that vulnerability that offers us some hope of transcending it.

If it’s ever truly renounced, it will happen only after work itself is no longer something we do all the live-long day to generate private profit, but something brought firmly under social control, to satisfy human need. We can’t escape the contradictions of some necessary work, but we can remake the institutions and jobs that promote a work ethic.

For that, we need to revive labour’s forgotten fight, a movement for shorter hours to revalue our time. An ambitious movement to reduce the role of necessary toil in our lives will be the struggle of a lifetime, and it will happen only in fits and starts over many years – day by day, hour after hour.

More here. And a finally, a reference to one of A/UK’s co-founders 20 year mission to suggest something better than the work ethic…