It was during the grim first working week of the year, on 5 January 2019, when the academic and journalist Anne Helen Petersen published an essay on BuzzFeed: “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. Petersen argued that millennials are in an impossible position, one where they were promised cool jobs and familial workplaces, but instead got low pay, bad employers, and endless hours – all against the backdrop of economic decline. This, coupled with being told they should be achieving more and more, was inevitably leaving millennials too exhausted to even function.
The article received seven million readers and, to many readers, it came as a relief. The piece signalled the death of the “lean in” era – in which industry figures such as Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg encouraged young women to be more ambitious in the workplace – and recognised the professional pressure many had faced that was turning them into workaholics. Its popularity and salience meant it eventually became the book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, which was published in the UK in January, in which Petersen expands on how the “much-maligned generation” ended up here and how they might be able to get out.
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