Millennials: Pursuing Happiness and Avoiding Burnout

Last week a writer from the millennial generation, Anne Helen Petersen, published an essay, “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. My millennial daughter recommended it to me. She said Petersen’s article captured the way she and many in her age group feel about life.

Petersen’s article is a good read that captures the real pain—the burnout—that millennials are feeling today.

Before any conservatives out there automatically dismiss her article because it’s on the liberal Buzzfeed website, just read and actively listen to the experience she describes. There is a lot to learn.

Baby Boomers and GenX people may be tempted to dismiss Petersen’s work as millennial whining. Don’t.

The burnout she talks about is real. This is not whining. The pain is being experienced by many in her generation. I think Petersen has done a very good job of describing that pain and grounding it in good stories and examples.

We need to listen because we care about our millennials and because her article can provide us some important insights and lessons about life.

Millennial burnout is telling us that something is off the tracks. We need to fix that.

I’ll give a synopsis, but make sure you read Petersen’s article. It is long and well-worth the time spent. You need to feel the burnout through her writing. It’s the burnout of a generation.
Synopsis
The article begins by describing the burnout in terms of having to chase endless items on to do lists. This endless chase is exhausting and eventually paralyzing. Petersen was doing the important, even difficult tasks, “But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job any easier or work better, I avoided it.”

Through the rest of her piece, Petersen describes what she believes are the cause and history of the burnout.

Much of it is about how Petersen believes millennials were optimized by their parents to win in life. They weren’t allowed the dangerous activities of previous generations like playground jungle gyms or riding bikes without helmets. No teeter-totters or BB guns. Unstructured play became play dates. Unchanneled energy got medicated. Intensive parenting. Moms who became momma-bears and over-protected their kids.

And then there were the expectations. Petersen says,

“Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about . Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.”

Petersen and millennials clearly think meeting those expectations is increasingly hard or impossible. They are loaded with college debt.  Many had to live with their parents after college graduation. As she says:

"It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t ."

And social media makes it worse. Petersen says:

"One thing that makes that realization sting even more is watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it . I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children,