My Burnout Was Predetermined

Yours probably was, too.

Written by Paige, edited by Courtland. Note: this post is long, and the email may cut off. We recommend reading in the app.

The first Burnout Book Club reads.

If your job is everything, what do you have left after you burn out and quit?

When I quit my job I was suddenly cut adrift. My career had been a cornerstone of my identity for decades. I had laid my values, my sense of purpose, and my life’s meaning onto the bedrock of this career. I built it because I needed it. My career had to meet all of my existential needs as a human—it had to be the source of meaning, a place I did good in the world, on top of being the vehicle that paid me. It had to sustain me spiritually while it sustained my livelihood materially.

In its absence, I assumed I had other things in life that would immediately take the place of this career. Surely, I had other aspects of my identity. I was a mother, after all. How naïve—I could never expect my child (a toddler!) to fill so many of these voids in my identity. No, it took months of work to build a complete self. It took over a year to recover from the burnout and the workplace trauma. At this point, nearly two years since I quit, I am still working on creating a new and different life for myself.

In the process of finding my way, two books deeply influenced my thinking. One revealed an explanation; the other offered me a new way to move forward.

Diagnosing my burnout

Anne Helen Petersen (or AHP as readers call her) is an authority on millennial burnout. Deep in my burnout era, I found AHP’s 2019 piece in Buzzfeed: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Finally, I understood my behaviors and feelings were not my own personal problems or failings, but symptoms of a larger cultural issue. And I realized there is a lot more to the story of burnout.

I had assumed that I had personally failed—at adulthood, at finding my life’s purpose—and this book showed me that it’s the system. It is not my (or your) failure at this game of life. It is the system that’s to blame.

The article quickly led me to her book, Can’t Even, which grew out of the Buzzfeed article. In the book, AHP interviews a diverse cross-section of millennials, and puts their (our) experience into the larger social, political, and systemic context. Story after story showed millennials optimized for success, and never finding it. It is not an entirely comforting read; the subject of millennials and our relationship with work is indeed depressing.

While I don’t recommend reading it right before bed, I consider Can’t Even to be essential reading for anyone feeling burned out. I saw myself reflected in so many of the interviewees in the book. I was relieved to learn that my struggles during my educational and employment trajectory were not a result of my own personal inadequacies or my socioeconomic status.

It’s not you, it’s everyone

As millennials, we were taught to think of ourselves as embodied resumes. We were taught that college would lead to a good job, a good income, and enable us to achieve all the adult milestones (buy a house, save for retirement, have kids, etc.). We suffer from a kind of dissonance: we continue to work hard toward this dream, yet none of the circumstances that would allow this dream to happen exist anymore. The efficiency that we were optimized for has not led to better jobs, better pay, or better benefits. Instead, we continue to find ourselves trapped by work, because we were convinced that our work would be the source of all meaning in our lives.

We were conditioned to believe that we must love and be passionate about our work, and that work should also “do good” in the world. And we hoped that if we had such passion, these jobs would compensate us adequately. In reality, this was a setup for career exploitation. AHP calls these jobs “lovable jobs,” which I find darkly humorous, because I spent my career in, and chasing, lovable jobs. And I got burned out and quit. Those jobs never loved me back.

What if fulfillment does not come from your dream job? What happens when your lovable job doesn’t love you back? AHP writes that, “Burnout occurs when all that devotion becomes untenable--but also when faith in doing what you love as the path to fulfillment, financial or otherwise, begins to falter.” (Can’t Even, p. 75).

Okay, so I quit my job and immediately found fulfillment and a new purpose in my life in motherhood. Right?

Just kidding. It would be disingenuous to say that I quit my job to be with my child, which might be the more palatable explanation in the eyes of society. Yes, I had become a mother and that helped me to realize how I did not want to show up for my son—burned out, disillusioned, and constantly on edge. But I quit so that I could be with myself again, perhaps for the first time since I was a teenager. To uncover my true self, and my true paths to fulfillment.

Who was I before burnout?

I’ve been on the millennial treadmill so long I can hardly remember when I first got on, starting slow and eventually running at full speed.

So I asked myself: What did it feel like to not be burned out? I can reach back in my memory to a time when there weren’t constant calls for my attention. When every moment was not filled with work, or the potential for more work. When I didn’t believe that everything I did had to be in service to my career aspirations.

I am an old millennial. I spent most of my childhood in unstructured play with a few activities, playing outside or in the basement with my sister, making up elaborate games for our dolls. My parents did not make us pursue sports or other activities if we didn’t like them after trying a few times. As a result, my days were not over-scheduled and I had a lot of free time for play, reading, and drawing. As a teen, I loved drawing. I taught myself how to use Photoshop on my dad’s clunky desktop PC. I taught myself how to draw, learning from anime and manga. I loved sketching and drawing with chalk or oil pastels.

In high school, my friends and I would pick up Jones Soda at Sheetz and watch anime on Friday nights. We filled our CD binders with elaborate mixed CDs we had made for each other. I decorated the CD-Rs with a fine-point Sharpie. We chatted on AIM over dial-up internet after school. We hung out at the mall. Out late at night, we ate pie from the bakery case of the 24 hour diner. We took long, meandering drives through quiet suburban streets in my friend’s boat-like Lincoln. I didn’t have a cell phone. As long as I came home by curfew, my time was my own. I had a part-time job at Panera, working on the sandwich line or, when I was lucky, at the coveted bakery counter. No sitting in front of a computer. No phone in my pocket. During the summer I lounged at the neighborhood pool before my shifts.

Reflecting on all this, it struck me how far I had to reach back—actual decades—to find a me who wasn’t living in service to my narrow career and life goals. None of what I recall as joyful and meaningful had anything to do with my career trajectory or optimization for that career path. All of these creative joys, these unspooling hours of time with friends, these wild and free nights slowly fell away as I prioritized the serious business of success.

Could I have pursued something outside the prescribed college-to-job path? Could I have found fulfillment in something nontraditional?

There is no clear answer here, among the “what ifs.” After all, pursuing my passion left me burned out, and I believe some level of burnout is inevitable for most millennials. Millennials are taught to be human machines, productive at any cost. Stepping off this treadmill has forced me to do the hard work of examining my values and rebuilding my identity.

Rebuild with intentionality

So if burnout is inevitable, and systemic, what could I do next? Can’t Even ends with a bit of a bummer: the solution offered is to change the system. But I can’t change the system when I am burned out. Bummer, indeed. Another book offered a new perspective and a way forward.

Designing Your Life (DYL) teaches readers how to apply design principles to their lives and careers. It embraces ideation, iteration, and failure as part of the necessary path to building the life you want. It shows how you can be intentional in directing your life down the path you want. It teaches you to notice what aspects of your work and life light you up and shows you how to lean into those things. It encourages you to bring others into your design process, brainstorming your new life path.

Friends, I read that book and my poor millennial brain blew a fuse. Like, wait, so… I can have an actual say in what I do for my career? I can make a plan based on a mind map of what delights me, and those delights are actually worth following? Mind. Blown.

What about optimization? What about the perfect resume? What about monetizing everything that we do? I am a millennial and this doesn’t compute.

What really made me short-circuit when I read DYL was this concept that we could be intentional in our careers and our lives. That idea seemed wildly radical, and it made me question if I had intention in my career thus far. At the time, I thought I did. I thought I was making the sensible choice, choosing my major for college. I thought I was making choices all along, nudging myself down a path and changing course at times to be more in alignment with my goals.

Reflecting on my path, I’ve realized my choices were confined by cultural expectations. The “choices” I made were highly constrained, made within a very narrow band of options that became more limited over time. So many doors had already been closed that the ones remaining open barely represented a variety of paths at all.

Just like other millennials, I made choices for my career based on what turned out to be outdated advice from adults in my life (see: financial crisis, etc.). With limited options for well-paying employment and a lot of student loans, as well as the unrealistic expectation that my job should be my passion, my path was narrow. It also only allowed room for one passion.

With this narrow career path, and this set of cultural and societal circumstances, my burnout was predetermined. Of course I would get burned out if I put all my eggs into the career basket. I left little to no room in my life for pursuit of other passions. Motherhood is not the one basket either; expecting our children to provide our sense of purpose is too much weight to place on them.

Relearn & reinvent

DYL is eye-opening to me not just in the career realm, but also when it comes to bringing intentionality to all aspects of my life. What does it look like to be truly intentional in how we build our community and our chosen family? What does it look like to be intentional about how we raise our children—based on what we really want and not what our culture dictates? What does it look like for millennials to pull back the curtain, see the systems that have gotten us so burned out, and to reorient our lives in more personally fulfilling ways?

As individuals alone, we can’t make systemic changes that would prevent burnout for everyone. And yet, I find myself feeling hope when I read DYL. Perhaps intentionality is not a cure for burnout, but maybe it is a balm, a salve for our burned out selves. We can embrace trying and failing, ideating and iterating. We can find ways to follow our delights. We can make a better life.

So what does it look like to recover from burnout and bring more intentionality into every aspect of my life?

For starters, I am relearning how to rest. I exhausted myself in service to my career goals. I relish the chance to steal moments of rest—to put my feet up, read a novel, and not feel guilty about it. I am not optimizing every moment. Millennials have a completely warped sense of work and leisure. We were conditioned to work all the time, even monetizing our hobbies. I am relearning to do things for pleasure—not for productivity or monetization. This is not easy! When I take an art class, my mind immediately goes to setting up my future Etsy store. I am a work in progress.

Inspired by the iteration cycle in DYL, I am working on building an understanding that I can try things out, that nothing has to be THE thing. I have a tendency to jump from one career thing to the next: a degree or certification or some other milestone-inducing activity. Each time, I layer onto this thing my hopes and fantasies that this will be IT. This will be my next career, my next passion, my next purpose. I am trying to unlearn this pattern. (See above: I am a work in progress.)

I am working on untangling my self-worth from my job. I am practicing accepting that I am still a worthy and valuable human even without a career at the moment. I am finding other ways to live out my values in my life outside of work. I know that I am in a pause, and will reinvent my career someday. I am learning to sit with that discomfort. I also know that I cannot throw myself into housework, gardening, or other projects, as though to justify my existence. Chores and home projects will expand to fit the time allotted, so I can’t give them all of my time. I am rediscovering pieces of my identity: I am someone who loves to be with friends, to build community, to be spontaneous, to spend hours in flow working on a piece of writing or art. I am not only my work; I am not only a mother.

I gave up social media. I deleted most of my accounts; simply removing the app from my phone was not enough. Once you get off the treadmill, you do not need to see everyone else who is still on it. I delight in catching up with friends in real life, without having seen their updates on social media first. I actively try to be less responsive via email or text and I put my phone away when I can. Deleting my Instagram and Facebook accounts and silencing alerts on my phone for all other apps has dramatically decreased the demands on my attention.

It feels like a little slice of the pre-adulting times when I allow myself to take a walk without headphones, when I put my phone in the other room and accept that I will take a while to respond to a call or text, when I disappear from the world and the world wide web. I find after I have taken away most of these demands for my productivity or attention, that when I add them back (like a favorite podcast or a gardening project), it is pleasurable rather than draining. Who would have thought I would come to enjoy yard work?

Join us on this journey

This newsletter itself is an example of a creative project that I now have the time and bandwidth for, and it allows me to continue learning and exploring my creativity. I have been on this burnout journey for a while now, and I want to share what I have learned and what resources I have gathered with this community.

There is no simple roadmap for this journey, because it will be different for everyone. As we grow this newsletter, we will explore many different tools for recovering from burnout.

We plan to do a deeper dive into some resources that help us get in better touch with ourselves, such as Designing Your Life and The Artist’s Way. These kinds of guides are useful tools for finding what lights us up, what delights us, and showing us how to build a life on those foundations. We can take a critical look at these (and others) and help walk you through how they can be useful in our lives.

Our newsletter is part of a larger experiment of thinking in public, living differently, and testing ideas for fulfillment rather than seeking out the next treadmill. Our focus is bringing intentionality into our millennial psyche, while learning how to reject over-optimization and to iterate on what brings us joy. We want to create a life that is not based on “shoulds.”

We are slowly doing the work—and we hope this space will help you do yours.