In case you’re not familiar, burnout is basically severe stress and high ideals related to work/your job resulting in feeling exhausted, listless, and unable to cope. Buzzfeed recently published an eye-opening piece about how Millennials became the burnout generation. The whole story is worth a read, but one passage I found particularly relateable was: That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. 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.
The article also explores the impact of social media and how its fueled the burnout phenomenon. Through social media, we’re constantly watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it. For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. But the phone is also, and just as essentially, a tether to the “real” workplace. Email and Slack make it so that employees are always accessible, always able to labor, even after they’ve left the physical workplace and the traditional 9-to-5 boundaries of paid labor. Attempts to discourage working “off the clock” misfire, as millennials read them not as permission to stop working, but a means to further distinguish themselves by being available anyway.
I’m lucky to work for a company where leadership is conscious of making sure no one is overwhelmed by their workload. Rarely if ever am I expected to take work home with me or work on vacation and weekends. That said, even with my incredible job, this article still resonated with me in a lot of ways. If you are ever feeling like you’re on the brink of a burnout-fueled breakdown, bookmark this blog post and revisit some of these helpful charts with simple but effective tricks to combat burnout and prioritize your mental and physical well-being.
