Ezra Klein - Best of: Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle

Question 1

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

“Errand paralysis” - rolling over a task, one week to the next

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.

Boomers had the golden age of capitalism; Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics. And millennials? We’ve got venture capital, but we’ve also got the 2008 financial crisis, the decline of the middle class and the rise of the 1%, and the steady decay of unions and stable, full-time employment.

When we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.

Answer 1

In the 1950s, a British civil servant coined the term Parkinson’s Law to explain the phenomenon that “work expands to fill the available time.” The rule first described the seemingly infinite busywork of government bureaucracies. But it might also apply to housework. Expectations rose, and work expanded to fill the available time.

This story offers one explanation for why leisure hasn’t much increased for many rich workers in the 21st century. We’d collectively prefer more money and more stuff rather than more downtime. We are victims of the curse of want.

A lot of modern overwork is class and status maintenance—for this generation and the next.