How Did Generation Y Become The Burnt-out Generation?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Why do we burn out and don't even know about it? Short translation of an article by Ann Helen Petersen, a BuzzFeed News reporter.

Over the past decade, the term "millennials" has been used to describe all the good and bad things about young people. Meanwhile, millennials have matured: the youngest are now 22, the oldest is 38. But they continue to say that they are spoiled, lazy and cannot grow up in any way. Growing up means living independently: paying bills, going to work, buying and preparing food, remembering that all actions have consequences. Growing up is hard because life is not easy. Although it all depends on your attitude to this.

Our parents always did everything that was supposed to be done, while they did not always like what they did. But they did it anyway. But why, then, for us, simple deeds in one action are so painful? Why is it so difficult to sharpen knives, take shoes to a shoemaker, make an appointment with a doctor, answer letters? What is it about them that brings us into a "task stupor" when the tasks from the list of tasks for a week wander from sheet to sheet and haunt us for months?

And none of these things take a lot of time or effort. And you don't seem to be messing around, you are not mired in seasonal depression - no, you are writing a dissertation, planning a trip, preparing for a marathon. But as soon as you get to everyday activities, you start avoiding them.

All these tasks can be reduced to a common denominator: yes, they are useful and necessary, but they will not radically change life. These are things that will require more from you than they will give as a result, and they lead to a stupor.

And the more you try to analyze this stupor, the more features of burnout will appear. Burnout as a diagnosis was first mentioned in 1974 and was defined as "physical and mental collapse due to overwork or stress." A related term to burnout is exhaustion, but when exhausted, a person finds himself at the point where he can no longer move forward, with burnout, he reaches this point and continues to push himself forward: days, weeks, months.

Let's try to unwind the spiral: so why are you postponing routine tasks? You are burnt out. Why are you burnt out? Because you have imposed on yourself the idea that you have to work all the time. Where did this idea come from in your head? From childhood - everything around is hidden and clearly expressed just that.

When risk management - a business practice aimed at reducing the likelihood of an adverse outcome - migrated into the educational process, parents began to issue a clear set of rules for what you can and cannot do. Children's play has undergone optimization, a free schedule of the day is allowed only for a nursery group, parents began to perform their duties intensively, and even the unrestrained flow of children's energy was tamed with medications and called hyperactivity.

Children learned to get by without things that didn't help them get closer to success. And they learned: college students, apparently the same yesterday's graduates, in general resemble nerds: they take their studies very seriously, they hardly skip, prepare at night, worry about grades, freeze at the thought of graduation, any creative task puts them to a dead end. They are scared, but why? They have been guided throughout their lives and are now awaiting new guidance. They are convinced that the first job will determine their future career, that work cannot be easy and fun, that life cannot be enjoyable, that life is an endless sequence of optimizing everything that happens, if you stop to rest, everything will collapse.

On the surface, it worked. We didn't try to break the system because we were raised differently, we tried to defeat it. The system was not fair, but a flywheel was launched in my head: "if you optimize yourself, you can become one of the few who will win it." Then the stereotype became stronger, which became the source of burnout: everything that is good is bad, and everything that is bad is good: rest is bad, because you do not work, you work all the time - good, because this is the only way to achieve success.

Optimization has become an integral part of the millennial's life: yoga pants have to fit both for the subsequent Skype meeting and for picking up the baby. Online services were created to save us time to work.

People increasingly ask themselves such conditions in which they cannot "jump off" - they cannot admit that they are tired and rest. Instead, they continue to move even when all safety stocks have run out.

Social networks came to the "help". We know that virtual reality is sometimes very far from everyday life, but how to stop comparing yourself to the perfect picture? And what to do if you have not found a balance between work and family, you cannot clearly build a work and vacation schedule, if you don’t have the strength to serve dinner for yourself and you run into pizza from the nearest cafe to work? The best way to convince yourself that you are experiencing this is to demonstrate to others. And now we are one step further from the longed-for calmness. The burnout is getting worse.

Okay, now what? Need to meditate more, rest more often, delegate more, do self-care, or set timers to stay on social media? How to redo all your daily activities and cure your burnout? There is still no answer - are we just asking ourselves the wrong question?

There are several ways to look at the problem of "task stupor". Many of the "paralyzing" tasks cannot be optimized (for example, sharpening knives), others have too many options (for example, finding a doctor in a new city where you recently moved), and some of them are just boring.

Yes, these are not the most rational reasons to avoid things that still need to be done, but stupid ones are just a sign of burnout. The person goes all out, or just hides to avoid all the tasks on the list.

Burnout cannot be cured by a seaside resort, meditations, books from the series "how to take life into your own hands", cooking courses and anti-stress coloring pages. There is no solution to burnout. You cannot optimize it and force termination. It cannot be prevented. The only solution is to accept that this is not an acute infection, but a chronic disease, so you need to identify the main features and find the root.

To accurately describe the burnout of millennials - you need to be aware of the diversity of the current reality - we are not just graduates, parents, workers. We are in debt, we work many hours, and we do not have one job, we are not paid much, but we are fighting to achieve what our parents had, we are physically and mentally unstable, but we were told that if we work hard it is good will win and we will live. Our blue dream: the to-do list will finally end, or at least decrease significantly.

Our main value for society is the ability to continue working after being burnt out, so you shouldn't expect someone to help you figure it out. It is unlikely that there will be a clear plan of action to "tame" burnout, but you can start by honestly answering the question of what tasks you immediately perform, and which you postpone, and why. And yet, try to extricate yourself from the trap "all that is good is bad, and that which is bad is good." And no, this is not a goal for a year, not a task for a week - this is an approach to life, by implementing which, you can save yourself from burnout and enjoy not only optimization, but also life in general.