Unfortunately, the things that are drummed into our heads growing up continue to harass and control us throughout adulthood.

So it’s no surprise that the parental optimization and monitoring that did so much damage to millennials continues to haunt them as adults resulting in mundane task avoidance and burnout.

BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen wrote a very personal essay explaining millennial burnout. Interesting because in spite of being raised in Montana where she didn’t suffer the more extreme versions of optimization found in more urban areas, she still suffers from burnout.

Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.

It’s not the big things that affect her, but the little ones.

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.

72% of Boomers are white, 61% of Gen X is white, but of the 80 million millennials only 56% are white, but a large percentage of that 56% were raised privileged in middle class or better homes.

Many of the behaviors attributed to millennials are the behaviors of a specific subset of mostly white, largely middle-class people born between 1981 and 1996. But even if you’re a millennial who didn’t grow up privileged, you’ve been impacted by the societal and cultural shifts that have shaped the generation. Our parents — a mix of young boomers and old Gen-Xers — reared us during an age of relative economic and political stability. As with previous generations, there was an expectation that the next one would be better off — both in terms of health and finances — than the one that had come before.

But they are not better off, nor is the world they’re inheriting.

A few days later Quartzy’s Jessanne Collins wrote about her own burnout

I related precisely to Petersen when she wrote: “Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.”

and how having a kid changed her thinking.

The strength to say “no”: to pass on things that aren’t worth your time and energy; to skip events you don’t really want to go to but feel like you “should”; to take Instagram with a grain of salt. To not sweat the small stuff, in other words, or at least to reject the notion that by not sweating the small stuff quite as much, we’re not measuring up to some impossible standard.

Much of Boomer and older Gen X attitudes can be traced back to a saying that always chilled me. It went something like, life is a challenge to be overcome.

I preferred a different version that went like this, life is a mystery to be lived, not a challenge to be overcome.

It dovetails nicely with Peterson’s idea that life should be lived, not optimized.

Image credit: Beck Pitt

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019 at 10:45 am and is filed under Culture, Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials
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