Millennials: A Generation of Burnouts or Marathon Runners?

Since graduating college in 2016 and moving to New York City, I have held four positions at three different tech companies, lived in three apartments across two boroughs, and taken two different standardized tests in order to apply to three different types of graduate programs. And after all this, I still cannot tell you with certainty what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Ironically, I am currently employed as both a career coach at a professional school and an independent college advisor, providing guidance and support to many millennial students and career-changers who are trying to map out their own, often uncertain, futures as well.  As much as I try to avoid confirming millennial stereotypes, from an outside perspective it certainly looks as if I am part of the uncommitted and entitled workforce that characterizes my generation. However, I greatly value my last few years of both personal and professional exploration and believe that there are positive trade-offs to our current job market that is often described as simultaneously unstable and suffocating.

Earlier this month, I

was introduced to author Anne Petersen’s essay, How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, featured in BuzzFeed News. In it, Petersen describes the various social, economic, and technology-driven developments that have resulted in a generation that is in a consistent state of psychological burnout. I have certainly experienced and can relate to Petersen’s assertion about the millennial experience. I am just as guilty as my peers of “errand paralysis,” including paying the neighborhood wash-and-fold to do my laundry, becoming distressed when my landlord asked me to mail a check every month versus paying over Venmo and using MealPal instead of taking five minutes to pack my lunch in the morning. Further, despite my company’s consistent promotion of work-life balance and encouragement to practice self-care, I still feel guilty for ignoring student requests after hours and even during periods of paid-time-off.  

While it is clear that Petersen did a thorough job diagnosing the problem and describing what the feeling of chronic burnout is like, she failed to offer any tangible solutions. Her inability to recognize many of the positive elements the digital era has had on items including millennial’s ability to find a meaningful career and the digital promotion of increased and more accessible psychological services cannot simply be overlooked. While macro-level issues have undoubtedly presented millennials with unique challenges, we as a generation have far more tools, resources and responsibility to help achieve professional success and emotional well-being than those before.

Petersen’s essay paints a rather hopeless picture of millennials' role in today’s digital economy. In her view, capitalism and the creation of enterprise technology have fostered a world in which young professionals are largely helpless to their circumstances. Since the market no longer values employee loyalty, young professionals are forced to job hop and move around the country. In addition, the traditional means of applying for a job have been pushed out in exchange for LinkedIn, social media, and other “systems of optimization,” millennials are yet again forced into building a digital presence and are exhausted having to constantly manage their personal brand online. They are helpless to the technology that greedy companies have put in place to maximize their work as they have no ability to set boundaries with their phones and computers. The self-help industry is not helping, but rather, exploiting the problem. Therapy and psychiatric drugs just serve to erase the feelings. But hey, this is what millennials were handed. And as she concludes, until a political revolution, overhauling capitalism takes place, what is one to do other than to continue to feel chronically burnt out?

Each generation is defined by the values and viewpoints of the world they share. When I think about my grandparents’ generation, the traditionalists or silent generation, the way they were raised, their reasons for going to college, and what they were looking for in professional life, I appreciate the challenges they faced were drastically different from the hurdles my generation struggles with today. At age 22, my grandparents got married and began to start a family less than two years later. This was, after all, what was socially expected of them at the time. Now, if one is to think about the economic consequences of this life path, it is easy to understand why finding a job that offered stability and a considerable wage may be more important than choosing a profession that gave them meaning. It is easy to see why job-hopping and career switching would be viewed as an unstable and reckless decision since young professionals had a family and children to support at home. The concept of one’s twenties being a time to explore and find oneself was rare. Loyalty to one’s family, one’s community, and one’s company were the foundation for survival and growth in a technology-free world. So in turn, employers valued and rewarded these attributes. Not so in this generation.

Technology, despite its obvious shortcomings, has opened up a world in which millennials have more options in how they choose to work and live their lives than ever before. From Petersen’s perspective, millennial culture is largely rooted in economic desperation which is further exacerbated by invasive technology. Some of the consequences of this include an unstable career path, non-existent work-life balance, resulting in a constant feeling of burnout. However, she fails to consider that technology has actually offered millennials more options and a wider perspective, which makes the appeal of settling for any one job or partner less essential.

So sure, one could make the argument that the lack of stable, high-paying jobs today is forcing people to wait to get married and start families. But even if the quality of jobs were the same as decades ago, would millennials suddenly choose to get married younger and start families in their early twenties? Or rather, have pushes towards gender equality in the workforce caused marriage to be seen as an outdated institution (particularly since the divorce rate for those 50 and older has doubled since 1990)? And yes, one could make the argument that millennials are forced to job hop because they do not have the option to work for companies that reward their loyalty. But again, if the quality of jobs were the same as decades ago, would millennials suddenly choose to work at one or two companies for the rest of their lives? Or rather, would they prefer the freedom to work at many different companies in order to find a professional environment that aligns with their personal value system?

Petersen contends that millennials’ endless quest to find work that they are passionate about is what ultimately drives them to burnout. This search for “the perfect job” encourages millennials to pursue additional, expensive education to their financial detriment. However, in contrast, Ashley Freeman, a leadership coach and corporate trainer who works closely with millennial professionals, has another take: that being forced to work in a job that is unsatisfying, even if one is good at it, is actually one of the strongest causes for burnout. As she explains:

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