Millennials are burned out. “Train to succeed”

The answer is often that we are dealing with the “snowflake generation,” delicate and sensitive beings who are not used to hard work… but is this really true?

Such an approach is a popular way to deal with problems not only in relation to representatives of the younger generation. In the age of training, biohacking and consulting literature, it is very easy to come to the conclusion that the problem lies in ourselves – that the source of our fatigue lies in us, because we treat life incorrectly or simply because we are not strong enough. Therefore, when the topic of student fatigue comes up, there is a debate about the physical weakness of today’s children and adolescents. When we start talking about fatigue in a relationship, the answer is that this is the fault of modern narcissism and too high expectations for a partner. When someone raises the topic of parental fatigue, they will hear that it is a consequence of overprotection and constant interference in school affairs. And when the issue of fatigue returns, the equally old narrative about the demands, disloyalty and lack of gratitude to the employer, which characterizes modern employees, returns.

In other words: from this perspective, the problem is primarily our unrealistic expectations or weaknesses, not the reality we live in. Especially since, in the words of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, we seem to be living in the best of all possible worlds, and certainly in the best of times in human history – so there is nothing to complain about!

In this vein, the titles of best-selling guides and TikToks suggest that the problem with the modern world is not the economic system, the multinational corporations that exploit us, or the broken institutions of the state, but rather we. We also suggest that the solution is simply more work (on yourself). Too often we are not told the most important thing: that even the hardest work we can do will not fix a broken system.

Well, because there is another possibility. Anne Helen Petersen draws attention to this. In the title of her book: I can’t even It raises an important question in the context of the fatigue that accompanies us today. We can translate it into Polish as: “How did the millennial generation become a burnout generation?” In the introduction I can’t evenReferring to this issue, the author says:[wypalenie] It is not a personal problem, it is a social problem.” The loss of strength, the fatigue, and finally, the exhaustion that we feel more and more, have their origin in the form of society in which we have to work. Our problems are therefore largely the result of the transformations that have taken place in the education system, the labor market and the ways of spending leisure time in recent decades, and these transformations are in turn the result of the social, political, economic and cultural changes to which the successive technological revolutions have contributed, giving them their current form.

Without trying to shed light on all these processes and understand how they contribute to our increased fatigue, we will not be able to regain our strength and renew ourselves – both individually and as a society. And if so, where should we start?

Fatigue, what is it?

Given the amount of talk about burnout in recent years, one might get the impression that it has been in our culture since the beginning—as if it is an inherent element. It seems that if we have always worked in one way or another, we have also experienced this condition as people.

Burnout, however, is a relatively new phenomenon. It was first diagnosed in psychology in 1974. Herbert Freudenberger gave this name to the physical and mental breakdowns that occurred at the time and were the result of overwork. Although this psychologist pointed out that we had seen something similar in our culture before (the gloomy global boredom diagnosed by Hippocrates, and the Renaissance perplexity of “constant change” or neurasthenia from the late 19th century, characterized by a constant feeling of fatigue), burnout had something unique about it. The main issue turned out to be the “breakdowns” that distinguish burnout from exhaustion. An exhausted person has no strength to work – he gets to a certain place and stays there, unable to do anything more. Burnout is something different: it means that when we reach a point where we no longer have the strength to do anything, we ignore it and force ourselves to keep doing something. We often stay in this state for days, weeks, and sometimes years.

So burnout is a state that comes after a tremendous effort, working on something important to us, when we feel, on the one hand, an urgent need to acknowledge that our work is finished, but on the other hand, it is accompanied by the belief that we could, and even should, be doing something else.

“You feel burnt out when you know you’ve exhausted all your internal resources and yet you can’t free yourself from the compulsion to keep working,” writes Josh Cohen, a psychologist who specializes in the subject. The experience of burnout is experienced as improving ourselves to the point that we become like a machine—a robot executing an endless list of tasks, despite the dull feeling of exhaustion during sleep or even on vacation.

How can we explain the emergence of this phenomenon in the 1970s? It can be linked to the emergence of a number of events that are linked in one way or another to what is called late capitalism, as sociologist André Sahag points out. […] After the period of dominance of physical labor (modernity) and intellectual labor (late modernity), there came a moment when there was an expectation to involve the individual completely in the labor process, leaving nothing for himself (postmodernity). This process of exploitation of human labor could go no further, because there was nothing left to exploit.

But this prediction didn’t come out of nowhere. The best way to see the sources of the current situation is through younger generations—particularly millennials, the people born in the decade after burnout was first diagnosed—who have been raised on a cult of (personal) success. To achieve that, you had to fully engage yourself from an early age—which is why professional athletes have to start at age three, and we worry about academic proficiency from kindergarten. To succeed, you have to start working as early as possible, and do it for as long as possible, with as much force and intensity as possible, to paraphrase the title of a Daft Punk song.

The compulsion to work constantly, which is associated with fatigue, and which we cannot resist, results primarily from the focus on ultimate success (in life) that we have learned from an early age. “Work hard (in school) to get into college, work hard in college, work hard at work, and you will succeed” – goes the story that later generations have heard for decades.

According to her, if we work hard enough, we will win (whatever that means) or at least live in prosperity and happiness. But over time, it turns out that it is impossible to “win” in this system we live in, because the system itself is broken and instead of ultimate success, it offers a feeling of exhaustion.

Part of Mikołaj Marcela’s book “You Don’t Have to. From the Cult of Achievements to the Burning Generations” published by Znak Publishing House.