How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
Young people in the workforce are encouraged to participate in the gig economy. "Busyness" is often lauded as a positive quality in someone's lifestyle, but to the disadvantage of health. Many young people are conditioned by their environments to believe that career and work are the main value drivers in their lives.
But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives.
"The thing about American labor, after all, is that we’re trained to erase it. Anxiety is medicated; burnout is treated with therapy that’s slowly become normalized and yet still softly stigmatized. (Time in therapy, after all, is time you could be working.) No one would’ve told my grandmother that churning butter and doing the wash by hand wasn’t work. But planning a week of healthy meals for a family of four, figuring out the grocery list, finding time to get to the grocery store, and then preparing and cleaning up after those meals, while holding down a full-time job? That’s just motherhood, not labor."