Burnt-Out and Running On Fumes

PART 1: Are we talking about the economy or people?

Nataliya Vaitkevich, Pexels

If you’re under 40 and live in America, you’ve probably noticed that even in the face of two once-in-a-generation meltdowns, you’re pestered to optimize to an economy that isn’t optimized to benefit you. Technocrats and financiers swaggered through the post-Recession epoch with voluntary austerities and institutional cynicisms. Young Americans adapted to the cruel, dissociated horror that followed by posing as doll-eyed rise-and-grinders, lusting for Monday mornings with a desperate giddiness to it. The #girlboss stood as an aspirational archetype for a generation that tried to game a luridly rigged system. Some of us cast away our Type-A defects and unapologetically lashed ourselves to white-collar vocations, in hopes our career narrative arcs would bend toward a set of canonical initials — SVP, CEO — before the bleary delusion bottomed out. The less privileged were herded into the gig economy or underappreciated service work.

In her viral BuzzFeed essay, Anne Helen Peterson describes Millennials as the “Burnout Generation,” an almost-willfully exploited cohort that’s been proselytized into a cult of performative workaholics through change-the-world messaging. “I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few,” she writes. “I just believed I could continue to optimize myself.” Careerism is a prison sentence of pathological productivity, a spiritual dimension where our identities slowly fuse with our employers.

Forbes’ “30 Under 30” lists tantalize with conspicuous metrics of success. Technology, once hailed by economist John Maynard Keynes as the liberator of the workforce, has blurred the lines between free time and company time. The phone is a tether to the desk, a portal into a Panopticon surveillance scenario. LinkedIn and Instagram have mutated into a tedious and ubiquitous competition to project the enviable mix of work hard and play hard — the ineffable glow of achievement that prompts people to comment, I want your life. It all amounts to a vacuous, cushy hell of morning coffees, bottomless inbox slogs, Amazon Fresh, networking events, boot camps, and spending crowded subway commutes leering at ads that tell us “Sleep Deprivation Is Your Drug of Choice.”

The Great Recession was an assault on America’s economy; Covid-19 is a referendum on the American Dream. It was either a grim apotheosis or a stark reckoning with our relationship to work and the glaring shortcomings of hyperindividualism. It arrived like the weather—inarguably and implacably, first from above then everywhere. As American capitalism became a robust and vicious satire of itself, it revealed a society that was profoundly diseased well before a rampaging coronavirus devoured its organs. 

Americans worked 248 more hours than British workers in 2018, 423 more than Germans, and 106 more hours than workers in Japan, a country that coined a word for “death by overwork.” In the Netherlands, employees clock in about 29 hours a week, earning an average of $47,000 a year, exactly what Americans earn on average, despite working 41.5 hours a week. In the U.S., 11% of full-time employees work over 50 hours a week and 13 million have more than one job. It has been argued that America is looping back to the Gilded Age, with the gig economy a form of vassalage. Uber treats their employees as whipped sleddogs, and it arrives with such tumescent brazenness that the veneer of professionalism couldn’t prettify any of it. Four in five hourly retail workers in the U.S. have no reliable schedule from one week to the next, and instead, their hours and shifts are set by algorithms that reduce breaks and pauses in service to maximize profits for investors.

For decades, slavish devotion to work has stood in as a metonym for virtue, with American culture masking toil glamor with enough ideological fuzz to give it a vexingly persistent appeal. In this panicky, historic clusterfuck, however, the do-what-you-love difference-making ethos feels more like a grim spirit holding us all hostage to a fragile, gilded, and unforgiving economy. America has responded to a homicidal pandemic with reflexive cruelty and wild avarice, staggering into a slow-roll through preventable discordance. As it so stridently reminds us, life-hacking a multi-front crisis is a uniquely Millennial graft, in ways that both flatter and put the lie to a number of treasured American myths. Even the more credentialed evangelists can’t quite bootstrap their way through this. 

The consecutive and concurrent failures to manage this pandemic were horrifying, even if they followed and amplified each other in predictable ways. The system and almost everyone within it were set up to fail, even if Trump’s weird lies and wild negligence were his own unique political failings. As the country everywhere was sickened, burning, starving, poisoned, bludgeoned, or evicted, these problems were exacerbated by national atrophy and institutional impotence. The chaos that resulted was haphazardly leveraged by the powerful for advantage and profit. Meanwhile, as oligarchs like Jeff Bezos jolted further up the skyward slope of this K-shaped recovery, companies like Amazon cracked down on warehouse dissent and grudgingly doled out pandemic hazard pay to those who were “essential” in preventing America from turning into a full-blown Hunger Games ordeal.

How we constitute meaningful work and important jobs determines how we organize our economic institutions and economic incentives. These gripping but opaque overwork fables survived for as long as they did because they rationalized our prodromal burnout symptoms and justified the extreme wealth created for a small group of tech and finance executives. “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day,” writes Timothy Kreider. “I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.” 

The mismatch between expectations of fulfilling, life-affirming careers and a shrugging, shuddering reality has produced a nation mired by stasis, boredom, and pointless drudgery. As the economy draws ever closer to a very steep precipice, it has somehow boomed with what sociologist David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs” in the service and administrative sectors. He describes these gigs as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Most jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were temporary. Underemployment reached 14.7% in April 2020. For a while, it was easier to burrow ahead — head down, eyes forward — than it was to turn away from the howling maw of hustlemania and contemplate the alternative.

The federal government’s response looked less like incompetence and more like a flagrant frontal assault, shedding thousands of lives every day in the name of the American Way and various industries’ bottom lines. The fundamental conflicts between capitalism and humanity are no longer confined to the esoteric flourishes of Marxist theory. Under the immense pressure of a sprawling disease, various glaring inequities, and increasingly undeniable societal decline, America’s deliriously hustle-besotted culture first spiderwebbed and then exploded into little phantasmic shards. It’s not just that America hasn’t mustered any sort of institutional understanding of a pandemic that has put overwhelming pressure on every spot where society is weak—although our leaders have, of course, failed at that. There’s a unique opportunity to look across the pebbled remains of the shattered whole, toss the old truisms out the window, and piece together a new consensus around work and baseline standards of living.

In the New York Times, Kevin Roose portrays an immediate economic future defined by “individual YOLO decisions,” prompted by a “deeper, generational disillusionment, and a feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious.” This is a lovely, if not limited, ideal. Most Americans aren’t quitting their jobs because of a few crummy stimulus checks or because of a sequence of half-baked stay-at-home orders that prompted them to stash a couple thousand in discretionary income. Investing in NFTs and meme stocks or job-hopping are luxuries for people who can afford to plunge into risky endeavors with irrational exuberance. Roose’s line of thinking seems to be a rebrand of the digital nomad trend from a decade prior, that young people en masse would harness the internet to travel the world and work from their laptops. Our hustle culture seems to undergo these cringeworthy spectacles of reshaping itself every few years or so, propped up by yuppie guru types who have the financial wherewithal to bankroll their YouTube van life.

Depending on how cynically you interpret these on-the-fly prognostications, it almost seems like these anecdotes function as a narrative building exercise to make the case that young Americans hate stability and every new degradation—from zero-hour contracts to writing for content mills that pay 0.002 cents a word to delivering goods for paltry pay—can be framed as a fun and voluntary social trend synonymous with #motivated and #onthegrind.

Paradigm-shifting public policy is needed to adjust to a more egalitarian understanding of work itself: not as a conduit of status attainment, but a contribution to a society that takes care of basic human needs. In the U.S., there is almost always a racial, economic, cultural, and educational chasm between certain industries. This might explain why so many young Americans identify as democratic socialists and embrace unions, universal basic income, parental leave, pay transparency, subsidized child care, and Medicare-for-All. These various strands weave together to create the fabric of a vibrant and more equitable social democracy.

Our present hysteria is not a necessary condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by acquiescence. This always-be-hustling America is not a towering omnipotent force, but an uncanny and arbitrary social order we produce and re-create each sunrise. The average lumpenprole has put up with a lot, but such overt and unapologetic indifference from a corporate-run government is an insult that’s hard to ignore. Longstanding American venality has always prioritized the profits of soft pink guys and big-business above any other end—and it has only grown less concerned about concealing this fact. In the ways American work culture and broader American life have been warped by blank, self-serving smallness and a single-minded dedication to our own narrow interests, we now see a kind of funhouse refraction of what both can do to a society. In each venue of bloated, wobbling drudgery, the last and greatest hope is that a present that so poorly serves so many cannot possibly be the future. 

Escaping this self-imposed 9-to-5 purgatory would begin with a collective decision to value time and well-being over money and status. And, perhaps more saliently, a conscious understanding that the economy is not some abstracted machine we serve, but a living, breathing community we impact.

---

NEXT:

Work to Death or Starve to Death

---