Yesterday, a friend sent me this article by Anne Helen Petersen. I read it while grabbing a quick fast food dinner in between two work meetings. It hit me like an arrow hitting a target, a shock of recognition. I felt incredibly seen. The article is substantial and there are many excellent points made that I probably will need a bit more time to digest, so I’ll just respond quickly here and potentially come back to revisit some further thoughts.
First of all, if you’re like me and feel constantly behind, like you’re never doing enough and like no matter how hard or long you work you can never get clear, you are not alone. There is a name for this condition and it is burnout. It is not unique to a social strata or income bracket, although some may be disproportionately effected. It is, as Petersen asserts, the default condition of the Millenial generation. I’m technically a few years outside that bracket, but I identify intensely with the condition she describes. There are a few characteristics which give rise to it. The first is economic precariousness. We in this age bracket have grown up through a period of changes which are designed to consolidate wealth among the wealthiest and generate or enforce precariousness among the rest. I will write this from the perspective of the United States because this is where I think these conditions are most manifest and it’s also what I understand best. Others around the globe are affected by this but I think if you want to see how bad it can get in a modern post-industrial allegedly-democratic country, take a look at the US. Particularly Europe, you all are not here yet but this may be your future.
The value of economic precarity to the ruling class is that it creates a group of compliant workers. Workers who know that they are one slip up away from falling off the economic ladder into extreme misery and danger. The point of the US system of mortgages, extreme student debt, credit cards and insecure job-tied health insurance is that it creates fear in the work force. If you are constantly running ahead of the economic steam roller trying to pay off high interest rates you absolutely cannot risk losing your job for any reason. This places you at risk of extreme exploitation by the powerful, in this case your employer. A work force of terrified people is easier to manipulate and control. This aids the goals of the powerful in consolidating wealth and power to the top of the pyramid.
The most effective tools of oppression and exploitation are those which the subjects use upon themselves. The psychological conditioning to precarity has been applied relentlessly to this generation, through societal narratives around debt, perpetual education, home ownership, hustle culture, life hacking and personal optimization, on and on. We have created a generation of people who work to exhaustion and beyond. We are constantly running in front of the steam roller of capitalism. We will run until we die, push ourselves beyond the point of exhaustion and keep running. This is the nature of burnout. You work until you can’t work any more, and then you work more. We’ve become a generation of zombies, desperately trying to achieve an experience of restful stability and safety which never comes.t
