Transcript of episode 015 -

Why we’re all burnt out

Bridget Todd (00:04):

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio, and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. This is going to be a little bit different of an episode than what we usually do. Because things aren't normal, and I don't feel normal, and you probably don't feel normal either.

Bridget Todd (00:27):

If you're anything like me, a combination of never-ending depressing news, IRL, events, and connections being replaced with more time sitting in front of a computer, and the overall creeping feeling of mounting instability, has left you feeling drained, exhausted, distracted, unmotivated and burnt out.

Bridget Todd (00:45):

In her viral BuzzFeed essay called, How millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen writes, "If exhaustion means going to the point where you can't go any further, burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going. Whether for days, weeks or years."

Bridget Todd (01:02):

Burnout isn't just one thing, it's everything. For weeks, I've had a list of things to do that I just can't seem to get done. They roll over to the next week, and I tell myself, I'll do them then, but I don't. I've had a package in the corner of my room that I've meant to return for months. My personal email inbox is where correspondence goes to die.

Bridget Todd (01:21):

I let emails go unreplied, then feel awkward about how long it's been since I've replied, so they just go on answered. While I'm working on this very episode, there's a chime, an email added to my seemingly unending inbox. A work Slack message knocks for attention in the background. A group text notification from friends wanting to confirm a Zoom party for this weekend.

Bridget Todd (01:41):

I'm already feeling out of sorts, so I check Instagram to see if anyone left a nice comment, on a picture that I posted of myself appearing to look very centered and chill. It was ultimately posted to make myself feel better about my life in the first place. All of it ends up feeling like a lot of distractions.

Bridget Todd (01:56):

At night, instead of going to sleep. I doomscroll social media until I pass out. Ready to wake up and start the whole thing over in the morning. Is this what my life was meant to be like? Everything, from work obligations, to leisure activities, feeling like a task vying for my attention that I'll never get done.

Bridget Todd (02:14):

How did we get here? Anne Helen Petersen writes, "Burnout and the behaviors and way that accompany it aren't in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It's not limited to workers in acutely high stress environments, and it's not a temporary affliction. It's the Millennial condition. It's our base temperature. It's our background music. It's the way things are. It's our lives."

Bridget Todd (02:38):

That realization recast my recent struggles. Why can't I get this mundane stuff done? Because I'm burnt out. Why am I burnt 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 reinforced it, explicitly and implicitly, since I was young.

Bridget Todd (02:59):

Her essay about millennials and burnout was so impactful, she turned it into a new book called Can't Even, How millennials Became the Burnout Generation. In it, she describes that familiar and exhausting feeling of what she calls errand paralysis. Being so overwhelmed that you're not able to get any of these tasks in life done, so you're left feeling perpetually stuck.

Bridget Todd (03:19):

But our generation was supposed to have it easier than our parents did. Technology was supposed to make our lives better and more fulfilled, not worse. Why are so many of us burnt out? What's going on?

Anne Helen Petersen (03:33):

I am and Helen Petersen, and I write culture study for Substack.

Bridget Todd (03:38):

One of the reasons why I was so excited to speak to you today is because I just really have not been in a good place, I guess. I've been feeling stuck, I've had 100 kind of work things to do online, emails to reply to. These kind of social obligations on Zoom that somehow leave me feeling more drained than when I started. The main thing is nothing was getting done.

Bridget Todd (04:02):

I would write these to-do lists, and they would just carry over day-by-day. When I read the excerpt of your book in WIRED, which we'll put on the show notes, it really just struck me. You start with this rundown of your digital diet, and it was this very familiar and also exhausting mix of little task. Where you feel like you're kind of never working, but at the same time, always working.

Bridget Todd (04:29):

I guess my question for you is, I know that when you first started writing your BuzzFeed piece that later became the book Can't Even, it was a kind of a way for you to grapple with your own issues around burnout, and feeling sort of burnt out all the time. What did that feel like for you? What did that look like for you?

Anne Helen Petersen (04:49):

A lot like what you just described. We weren't in the pandemic, but I felt like social interactions weren't nourishing. They just felt like another thing on my to-do list, and I felt like that to-do list was never ending. They were the things that just gave me so much shame, because they kept recycling, one week after another. That onerous task that really isn't probably that hard, but just felt insurmountable.

Anne Helen Petersen (05:17):

But then also just little things, like the piddly stuff of life that just kept always been there. I think, for me, that is the best description of how burnout feels, is that everything becomes a task to complete, instead of your life to live. There's no highs and no lows.

Anne Helen Petersen (05:37):

That's why there're lots of intersections with depression and burnout, and that sort of thing. But I think that burnout feels, to me at least, different in so much as it is so related to your attitude towards work.

Bridget Todd (05:52):

One of the attitudes about work that you dig into is this idea that our jobs have to be both fulfilling, and also, quote, good jobs. The kind of jobs that your parents would be excited to brag about you having. You say that social media has really had a hand in building up these fantasy jobs that we should be striving to, that are simultaneously both really cool and good jobs.

Anne Helen Petersen (06:12):

I think that younger people have internalized this idea that jobs should be cool, in some capacity. That whatever your job is, whether it's a passionate job or a job that is on the outside, you're like, "I'm just making deals, and having cool drinks after work." I don't know, people have ... it's hard to describe a cool job when you see it. The way that a job becomes cool is oftentimes through our mediation of it through social media.

Anne Helen Petersen (06:44):

That's everything from taking pictures of your equally cool job mates, in your cool office space, to even just taking a picture that describes how meaningful, and rewarding, and fulfilling your work is. We are always representing our jobs as, I think far more fulfilling and cool than they actually are.

Bridget Todd (07:08):

God, that really resonates with me. Something that you write about in your piece that I did not even really notice I was doing it, until I read your piece. Was the way that, so not only do we have to have our jobs look cool on social media, but we also have to sort of be constantly using social media to brand ourselves in a kind of way.

Bridget Todd (07:27):

Even if you are not working, what you're posting on social media, if you're a journalist, you want to use Twitter to show that you're with it, that you're smart, that you're reading good things. That you're influencing others to read good things and have good takes.

Bridget Todd (07:41):

But that is actually work, and so it sort of creates this weird thing where your leisure time and your work time are kind of blended. Because you have to be branding yourself, even though that's not work that you're necessarily being paid for. We've kind of just blurred these lines, and what is and isn't work, and that we're always sort of working. It's fucking exhausting.

Anne Helen Petersen (08:02):

Yes. Well, the way I think of it is [inaudible 00:08:04] work, the contemporary feeling of work, it just seeps into every corner of your life. When we don't have very good boundaries about the space between work and non-work, that makes it easier for it to slip into, "Oh, I just woke up in the morning, I'm going to roll over and open up my phone, and check my email right now at 6:00 AM." Or, "I'm feeding my kids, and I'm just going to casually scroll through my Slack messages." It just slips into all of those places. Of course, the pandemic has made that slipperiness even more so.

Bridget Todd (08:41):

How do you think the pandemic has really made this worse? I know, I was reading a piece earlier that said that the time that we have saved by commuting, by people who work at home now, we've just filled that with more work. We haven't filled that with leisure time, or rest, or something else. We've just used that time, however much that time that would have been that we would be commuting to an office, that's just more work time now.

Anne Helen Petersen (09:04):

Yes, absolutely. Everyone I know who has recuperated a commute time by having to be at home. They are not using it to, "Oh, I'm just having some quiet reading time," or, "I'm meditating.," or, "I'm trying to be really present with my kids." Any of those things that our best selves would want to devote that time to. Instead, we're just pushing more work into it.

Anne Helen Petersen (09:29):

This certainly happened to me when I moved to Montana in 2017. I was like, "Oh, I'm going to have so much more time to be outside beautiful Montana, it's going to be amazing. I'm not going to be on the train all the time. Work from home, going to be great." Instead I just worked more than I had worked in years.

Bridget Todd (09:51):

Being in beautiful big sky Montana didn't make you feel less burnt out?

Anne Helen Petersen (09:56):

In some ways. For me, one of the hard things, the daily hard things about living in the city was that, just from the way that I grew up, I grew up in rural Idaho. Being out of the city, in outdoor spaces is very nourishing and replenishing to me. It was so hard to find ... I love the parks in New York, they're great, I love parks just in general, fantastic. They are not the same as being in the middle of nowhere.

Anne Helen Petersen (10:24):

I didn't have a car, it was just so hard to get into those spaces from New York. I did have that available to me in Montana on a daily basis, and especially on the weekends. But at the same time, I think the pictures that I was taking on social media of all of this beauty, were a way of trying to tell myself a story of how much more balanced my life was. You're telling the world, but you're also telling yourself a story with your social media.

Anne Helen Petersen (10:55):

When in truth, I was just working all the time. I was traveling constantly for my job, and also for, go speak at colleges, and that sort of thing. Often times, I think people who do travel a ton, it's easy to frame that traveling as glamorous life. "Here I am in first class," and you're like, the only reason you're in first class is because you travel so much that you get upgraded. And the only difference in first class is that your legs don't hurt by the end of the flight.

Anne Helen Petersen (11:27):

But again, you tell yourself a story in order to not feel like crap about what the daily existence of your life is like.

Bridget Todd (11:39):

Let's take a quick break. And we're back. You say part of the problem is that these digital technologies, from cell phones to Apple Watches, from Instagram to Slack, encourage our worst habits. They stymie our best laid plans for self preservation. They ransack our free time, they make it increasingly impossible to do things that actually ground us, they turn a run in the woods into an opportunity for self-optimization.

Bridget Todd (12:10):

They're the neediest and most selfish entity and every interaction I have with others. They compel us to frame experiences as we are experiencing them, with future captions, and to conceive of travel as worthwhile only when documented for public consumption.

Bridget Todd (12:25):

My God, that really, it's true. Sometimes I feel like I cannot have an experience if it is not filtered through social media. And that this sounds really fucked up, but that at times, it's almost as if, if it's not on social media, did it even really happen? If I have a lovely experience in the woods or a lovely experience while camping or hiking, and I'm the only person who knows that it happened? Did it even really happen?

Anne Helen Petersen (12:53):

Absolutely. Of course, it happened, because what actually matters is how it made you feel. But I think we've gotten so distant from it, the only way to know how it made us feel, is how we're able to present it. You feel like, "Oh, I didn't get any good photos of that."

Anne Helen Petersen (13:12):

It doesn't matter, what actually matters is the time that you spent with other people, the time you spent by yourself in a beautiful space. But somehow, for it to seem important, to seem like it was worth our time not working, we have to make, frame it in a certain way for public consumption.

Bridget Todd (13:32):

Another thing that you write about that I really like, is the way that we've kind of, our hobbies now need to be framed through that kind of framework. You write about how, when you started gardening as a hobby, if you couldn't make your garden look nice enough, quote unquote, nice enough for social media, it's a little, it feels like you didn't really do it.

Bridget Todd (13:50):

I'm a podcaster, I mostly do it, because that's a medium that I love. But I feel this pressure to sort of be using the podcast to, or using the medium to sort of pitch myself as a product. Instead of just exploring a medium that I love.

Bridget Todd (14:05):

I feel like we've gotten to a place where even the things that we're meant to be doing for leisure, are kind of viewed through this lens of either A, having them be some sort of side hustle. Because you can't just do something [inaudible 00:14:19] it has to be a business entity. Or B, that we're doing it only to be consumed by others on social media. It really, it kind of robs us of this opportunity for actual reflective leisure time.

Anne Helen Petersen (14:34):

Totally. I think for reflective leisure time, which, I oftentimes ... there's like different kinds of leisure, and everyone has to know what is nourishing for them. Some of us we've forgotten, we've spent so much time mediating it, they're like, "What do I actually like?"

Anne Helen Petersen (14:53):

If you're only doing it for yourself, what do you want to do? That's hard to recover, I think. Then it also, it robs you of reflection, just in terms of change. I've thought a lot about some of the frustration that people have about what to post about Black Lives Matter. The black square is wrong, but what should I post? Is this being too much? Is this not being enough? If I'm a black person, do people look to me to figure out what I'm posting, and are they weirded out if I'm not posting?

Anne Helen Petersen (15:32):

There's just so much compulsion, instead of people actually trying to figure out, what would it actually look like to be an ally, right?

Bridget Todd (15:38):

Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned this, I felt so much, I don't want to say anxiety, I felt so much something, let's just use the word tension, even though that doesn't even feel like the right word. In the moment that we had around Black Lives Matter and racial reckoning. A, with people asking me, "Oh, I posted this, do you think it's right?" Then B, the feeling of being sort of looked to for a model of what people should or shouldn't be posting. I got so much sort of tension and anxiety around that, that opening Instagram or opening my social media, just it added this, for an already fraught moment for me as a black woman, it added this extra level of just tension, and anxiety that I really couldn't navigate. To the point where I was just like, "I'm not going to engage with this online. I will use the platforms that I feel comfortable using, but I can't show up like this online. It's just too draining."

Anne Helen Petersen (16:41):

Yes, yes. You're trying to deal with what's actually happening in the world, then you have to deal with the secondary annoyances. Even if you're not intending to sign on and be annoyed, there is just things that people are going to be doing that are going to be, like you said, tension. It's going to create this tension that you don't actually need. Did you feel like not signing, did you feel like you were missing something, or did it feel good?

Bridget Todd (17:08):

That's a great question. It felt good, only when I told myself that I wasn't going to care what people thought on social media. I knew what I was doing. In my day job, I work for a feminist organization that was very much involved in a lot of the movement for Black Lives stuff. I know that I was doing the work there.

Bridget Todd (17:27):

I know that I was showing up at protests, and helping where I could. I also, going out physically for protest was a little bit tough for me, because I'm immunocompromised, and so that was a whole thing. Once I told myself, "I know in my real life where I stand and what I'm doing. If anybody thinks anything good or bad about what I have, or have not posted on social media, that is their problem." Reminding myself of that constantly, and constantly, and constantly, that was the only way that I could show up in a way that felt not shitty.

Anne Helen Petersen (18:02):

Well, and that's the thing. You were figuring it out, you were actually figuring it out for yourself instead of figuring it out vis-a-vis your reactions to other people's social media accounts. That to me is really difficult for a lot of people to arrive at, they're so out of practice. Authentically figuring out their stance and how they want to position themselves. Does that make sense?

Bridget Todd (18:26):

It makes so much sense.

Anne Helen Petersen (18:27):

I think, like you said, right now, because of the pandemic, and because of the difficulty that some people have, who would want to show up in person for a march, or demonstration or something. Then they just physically cannot. That a lot of those messages get mixed, and so you feel a compulsion, like, "I need to somehow signal that I want to be there." How do you signal it without overly signaling it?

Anne Helen Petersen (18:56):

I think being, especially people who are ... how do I put this? I think spending some time with yourself to actually figure out, how do I perform in a way that actually expresses my ally hood? Or my devotion to this cause? Instead of thinking about, how do I signal my devotion to this cause? Does that make sense?

Bridget Todd (19:23):

Definitely. It's funny, You put that so well. I was just reading the part of your essay that's about Slack, and how so much of Slack is signaling that we are working, and not actually doing the work. It's like, "Oh, I'm thumbs upping my coworkers comment, or I'm dropping them a link."

Bridget Todd (19:42):

Social media has, and all of these different technologies have given us ways to signal that we care about the cause, or signal that we're paying attention and checked in. Without actually doing the thing.

Anne Helen Petersen (19:57):

Exactly. If you take up all this time signaling instead of actually doing, it evacuates your actions of any sort of intent or power, I think. Whether that's Slack, you don't have time to work, because you're so busy trying to show that you're working on Slack.

Anne Helen Petersen (20:18):

I cannot tell you how great it is not to be on Slack. Obviously, I miss chatting with my coworkers. But when I left BuzzFeed in August, certainly there wasn't that thing that made me feel like, "I haven't said anything for half an hour, I guess I should say something." Is just compulsory. That is, I think what's oftentimes frustrating. Is that, "Oh, yes, I was working. I didn't need to do a thumbs up," like you said.

Bridget Todd (20:48):

I think as creative professionals, it can be so fraught, because nobody just sits down in front of their computer and a perfect draft just spills out of you in 20 minutes or something. But I do feel that the time that you spend thinking and sitting in front of your computer, and ideating, or whatever, that's all part of it. But it can feel kind of fraught.

Bridget Todd (21:09):

It gives me this anxiety, where it's like, "Oh, I have to over perform to show that I was actually working, and not just goofing off. It is kind of a part of me telling myself that I'm not goofing off. Even though somewhere deep down I know [crosstalk 00:21:22], it's like this constant thing that's such an added distraction from just getting my fucking work done.

Anne Helen Petersen (21:28):

Well, I think we oftentimes told ourselves stories about work has to look like a certain sort of thing. Instead of work can also look like staring into space, work can look like taking a walk, work can look like not working. That has been really hard to, especially those of us who work in creative fields, it's really hard to understand.

Anne Helen Petersen (21:53):

Because to us work is, you're seated in front of the computer, and you are doing something on that computer screen. It doesn't have to be that way.

Bridget Todd (22:03):

I want to talk a little bit about, how did we get to this place? When I read your piece, it really resonated with me. I think the fact that your BuzzFeed piece went mega viral, shows that we're not alone in having these tasks that pile up, feeling this errand paralysis, [inaudible 00:22:22] you can't get anything done. How did millennials get to this place, where we're all so burnt out?

Anne Helen Petersen (22:28):

Well, I think the way that I try to position the book is, so much that has to do is instability, with precarity. That's what bonds people who are working three different gig jobs right now, and people who are [inaudible 00:22:45] middle class, but are super over-indebted, both in terms of student debt and consumer debt. And still really struggling to figure out, "How am I going to cover rent next month?" Or, "How am I going to find childcare next month?"

Anne Helen Petersen (22:58):

The difference, of course, is that middle class people can oftentimes throw money at a problem, and do have some sort of a safety net. Either in terms of family bonds, they can, you could always move back into that basement, and not everyone has that. But still, what we're trying to do is keep treading water, and so the energy required to keep treading water, oftentimes, that means feeling like you have to work all the time.

Anne Helen Petersen (23:22):

That means taking your leisure time, and optimizing it or monetizing it in some way. That also means throwing a lot of time at parenting, because you're trying to reproduce your own semblance of stability for the next generation.

Bridget Todd (23:40):

It's funny, I know that you've written about the ways that parenting has a lot to do with Millennial burnout. Something I found so interesting is how this cuts across race and class lines. It just looks differently for different people, depending on their background and situations.

Bridget Todd (23:53):

I know, for me, we grew up pretty comfortably. But my mom was the first person in her family to go to college, we grew up in a black southern family. For them, they were like, "We want our kids to not," quote, unquote, "Become statistics. The way to get a way to achieve that is through college and a stable job."

Bridget Todd (24:15):

The same way that upper-middle class white parent who is interested in their kid going to an Ivy League college, it's sort of the same, even though the cultural and racial reasonings for getting there are different. It's sort of the same thing. Where this parenting then sets kids up for this idea that, the most important thing is getting a stable job, going to college, that pathway. It really can lead to kids being raised almost as little adults.

Anne Helen Petersen (24:45):

Totally. A lot of that is motivated, and I try to do this bit in the book. As you said, it's motivated by not wanting your kids to take a step back from where you've gone. Our parents generation, a lot of them had reached that middle class stability. Some semblance of that middle class stability. Sometimes for the first time in their family's history.

Anne Helen Petersen (25:09):

Sometimes that was through going to college and getting a job after that, and sometimes it was through getting a good union job, and having stability that way. The goal is, "Well, I don't want my kids to fall back from where I've come." You try to imprint all of these strategies for success, instability.

Anne Helen Petersen (25:31):

Sometimes too, and I found this in my interviews, it's like, sometimes people's parents didn't give a shit. They were like, "Whatever, you'll figure it out." But the kids themselves really picked up through osmosis, from their peers, from their peers parents, from their teachers, that that was the only way. That they had to turn themselves into a walking resume, even if their parents didn't care.

Bridget Todd (25:55):

I definitely feel that this is reinforced both explicitly and implicitly. We are just told that, this is how you're meant to live life. Your job is meant to be your everything, your identity should be this job, and you should be working 24/7. When you're not working, you should be feeling guilty about not working. Turn whatever, if you enjoy cooking on the weekends, that should be a business or an Instagram page, or something. That you can never just not be, you can never be not optimized for working or something that looks like working.

Anne Helen Petersen (26:32):

Well, and think about that though, what was it, my mom would make bread on the weekends, but she wasn't like, "Oh, I need to try to hustle on the side to make a couple extra dollars." What it was is that, they were able to pay off my dad's student loans, they were able to buy a house in North Idaho. They weren't struggling constantly to cover the costs of raising a family.

Anne Helen Petersen (27:00):

Whereas because of incredible increases in the cost of living, and the cost of childcare, the cost of healthcare, so many families that have dual income streams are still struggling. And are like, "I got to make an extra $50 every weekend by making bread."

Bridget Todd (27:17):

That's something that I think you do a nice job of illustrating, is how, in our generation, millennials and older millennials. A lot of us who graduated into The Great Recession, the dot com burst. Now, the instability of COVID, I feel like so many of us, we have never had the luxury of making choices about our life based on security.

Bridget Todd (27:40):

Every professional choice I've made has been based on scarcity, it's been based on, "My back is against the wall, some calamity is happening that's completely out of my control. I have to make my professional choices based on this scarcity." We have no idea sort of what it looks like to be making a life at a time of stability. I can't even really grasp that.

Anne Helen Petersen (28:01):

No. No, yours is so true. I think, especially people who work in more creative fields, there is this expectation too that like, "The company you work for is going to fold." You're not going to have any sort of stable job. You can't expect a job to endure in the way that a lot of our parents started, one job, and stayed at that job for many decades. Or my grandfather, who worked at one company his entire life.

Anne Helen Petersen (28:31):

I think that overarching precarity, so much of it comes from entering into the economy as adults during the first Great Recession. Then also just expecting the other shoe to drop. Most millennials I know are not surprised by the pandemic, they're like, "We're just waiting for everything to collapse."

Anne Helen Petersen (28:51):

To me, that shows a psychology that is conditioned towards precarity, it's conditioned towards never feeling like you have a stability. What that does, I think over the course of many millions of people, over the course of a generation, and I think it's going to affect Gen Z as well. Is it makes it hard to be confident, to experiment, to take risks.

Anne Helen Petersen (29:15):

When people talk about what having a universal basic income does, or even having health insurance that's not tied to employment. Is what it does is, it allows you to make decisions that make life easier for you. That make it so that you can find a job that doesn't feel shitty and exploitative. It allows you to go back to school if you want to.

Anne Helen Petersen (29:39):

There're all sorts of things that having even just that [inaudible 00:29:42] of stability, permits for people. We are so deeply unfamiliar with that.

Bridget Todd (29:47):

How do we get to a place where instability is not that internalized norm for an entire generation?

Anne Helen Petersen (29:56):

Create a lot more social safety net. The big thing that's changed between our parents and grandparents generation, and now, is that so many of those social safety nets have been eroded. I'm talking about pretty basic things, like the fact that we have, legislators have just largely defunded so much funding for public education. Because you have so much student debt, that makes it harder to, if you lose a job, you're like, "Well, going to default on these loans."

Anne Helen Petersen (30:27):

But then also, just thinking about things like some funding that has never existed, but funding for things like universal pre K, or even before pre K. Mandatory paternity leave, universal healthcare. Things that are not alien to most developed countries across the world. These are things that actually make life feel like you're not conditioned to precarity.

Anne Helen Petersen (30:56):

But I think that we are so obsessed with this myth of the individual. Somehow if the individual can work harder, then you'll get out of precarity. But this is why millennials are having these sort of existential crisis, certainly, myself included. Is you get to this point of your late 30s, the oldest millennials are 39 and 40. You're like, "Wait, I thought, by this point, I would have found some stability." You're like, "Wait a second, I have kids, or I have been in the workforce for almost 20 years. Where's that stability? Why isn't it here yet?" Becoming deeply disillusioned and saying, "Well, this is just broken. We need to fix this entirely."

Bridget Todd (31:42):

Oh, my gosh, it's like, I go back and watch these movies that I loved in the 90s. When I watched them when I was young, and all of the main characters [inaudible 00:31:50] be like 25, and having some fantastic job. Or having a lot of existential dread by the fact that they're not, that they're turning 28, and they don't have their life together.

Bridget Todd (32:00):

Here I am in my mid 30s thinking, "Oh, we thought we were going to have stable jobs, stable partners. Own a house by the time we were 25." That was the framework we were working with?

Anne Helen Petersen (32:13):

What is the one? Isn't it like My Best Friend's Wedding?

Bridget Todd (32:19):

They're in their 20s.

Anne Helen Petersen (32:22):

So funny, so funny. Oh, goodness.

Bridget Todd (32:28):

More after a quick break. Let's get right back to it. The millennial generation is one of the first generations where it's not a given that we'll have things better than our parents had it. Yet, there was this attitude where millennials were all lazy or entitled little brats, we're all whiners. How do we combat those attitudes?

Anne Helen Petersen (32:54):

Well, I do think that the messaging has kind of shifted. Part of that is, of course, that millennials are now at the helm at a lot of different publications. But just the idea that millennials have kind of been screwed, is becoming more popular, I think.

Anne Helen Petersen (33:12):

But then at the same time, I think a lot of it has to do, or the way that we can change minds about this, is actually having conversations with people who are our relatives. People who are older than us that we can actually feel like we can have a real conversation with about, "Tell me about what it was like when you worked your way through college." Which is always the common refrain. Which is like, "I don't know why you took out all the student debt, I managed to work my way through college." You're like, "So how much did you make a semester? How many hours did you work?" Then you're like, "Here's how many hours someone would have to work in order to work their way through a state college today."

Anne Helen Petersen (33:53):

Those things don't add up. But sometimes you need to sit someone down and be like, "Here's how things have substantively changed." You can do it without turning it into a math lecture, but you can be like, "Here's how the cost of living has changed." Or our raises haven't been accompanied by changes for cost of living or even inflation, that sort of thing.

Anne Helen Petersen (34:16):

But one of the things that I tried to do a little bit, was create a little bit of empathy. By being like, "Boomers were burnt out in some capacity too, because they had grown up in this time of unprecedented economic stability." Then as they entered the job market in the 1970s, they experienced those first waves of precarity, and were responding to them.

Anne Helen Petersen (34:43):

If anything, part of the reason boomers and millennials have such a difficult relationship, is because, I think we are pretty similar in a lot of foundational ways.

Bridget Todd (34:54):

I think that's a good point. I think, having it come down to empathy, and having real conversations about what things looked like. Because, I don't know, I'm thinking about folks who are, the generation after me, and I want them to know we had a hard time. I don't want them to feel as if, I want them to know that if they are struggling to figure it out, that we also struggled to figure it out. I don't want them to feel like they're alone, or that they're a whiner, or that they're. They have some sort of individual failing, if they can't figure it out. Because I do think every generation has their issues with that.

Anne Helen Petersen (35:32):

Totally. Well, and I'm seeing two different kind of discourses come out of Gen Z. One of them is, "You guys were sold a false bill of goods, we are going to reject that bill of goods." It's like, "We actually think you can have a different sort of life, that college maybe isn't the most important thing in the world. That we can do something about climate change, that everything isn't intractable." I'm always heartened by it, by that posture.

Anne Helen Petersen (36:02):

But then I also see some stuff that's like, "Oh, my gosh, why are millennials such whiners? They just need to work harder." I'm like, "Don't you dare." I think hopefully, by creating, not just empathy, but actual solidarity, being like, "It doesn't have to be this way for us, it doesn't have to be this way for you either. How can we work together to change it?"

Bridget Todd (36:30):

You make this point a lot in your work that I love, that sometimes when we feel like we don't have a lot of power, leaning into the collective, whether it's starting a union, which I know more and more young people are supportive of. Or just sharing honest experiences with each other, can really be the antidote to some of the problems that you lay out. The collective.

Bridget Todd (36:48):

Feeling like you're part of a united collective can really make you feel a lot more powerful and less alone.

Anne Helen Petersen (36:53):

Totally. It doesn't fix everything, but it does make you feel like, this is the word, it makes you feel a little less alone. It makes it feel like you're not just fighting this problem on your own.

Bridget Todd (37:04):

So much of the writing and content that I see around burnout, particularly geared toward women, will always have some sort of individual little thing that like, "Oh, this is going to be the silver bullet or the magic bullet that helps you figure it out." Whether it's using your meditation app, or doing your self care manicure. Or quit your nine to five, and be your own girl boss.

Bridget Todd (37:29):

I am my own boss, and I can tell you that my boss sucks. Working for her is not great all the time. I think, it's not these individual choices or actions that are going to save us from something that is systemic, that is bigger than us.

Bridget Todd (37:48):

I think the real issue is capitalism. I guess my question is A, how do we get to a place where we unlearn that it's an, that we are doing something wrong individually, if we are feeling burnt out? B, how can we go forward knowing that the real issue is so much bigger than us?

Anne Helen Petersen (38:10):

It's funny. There was a critique of the book that was like, "This book doesn't talk enough about therapy." I get it, because I do you think that a lot of the neuroses that millennials have developed, a lot of them are things that we need to work through on a personal level, through therapy, if possible. Even though therapy is not accessible to so many people.

Anne Helen Petersen (38:31):

But I also think that we've been taught oftentimes that, "Oh, if you have a problem with this workplace scenario, that's a personal problem." Instead of thinking about, "Oh, well, everyone I work with has this problem with this workplace. Maybe it's a workplace problem." Or, "All of these people feel this same way in society right now," instead of that being a personal problem, it's societal problem. It's not something that you can just work through on your own.

Anne Helen Petersen (39:00):

Also, almost every millennial I know who is burnt out, is either going to therapy or has been going to therapy. It's not like therapy is going to solve those larger issues as well. What we have to think about is, what are these systems that are that are making everything so sucky? What are the systems that make the scenario that leads us to burnout?

Anne Helen Petersen (39:28):

I'm heartened to actually by even just the willingness for us to say things like capitalism aloud. Even 10 years ago, it was kind of a third rail, like, "Oh, are you a socialist? Oh, are you part of the occupy movement to talk about capitalism as this problem?" Whereas now, and part of it, I think is the success of memes, and even just all over TikTok, and Twitter. You see a very clear indictment of capitalism as the source of a lot of our ills.

Anne Helen Petersen (39:58):

I think that regardless of my personal politics, which are much more radical than anything that I can see us implementing in the United States, in our lifetime. I do think that there are ways to make capitalism work for the worker. And that that is possible, and that there are plans, there're policy suggestions that can make that possible. We can do it, the big first step is regime change.

Anne Helen Petersen (40:23):

Even though it's hokey to say, we have to vote, we have to regime change, and then we have to make some big changes. Be willing to make ourselves amenable to those changes. Not just incremental ones, but things that might feel scary. Because they're going to reorganize our lives, and I think for the better.

Bridget Todd (40:41):

I have to ask, in the excerpts that I read, you talked about feeling so burnt out, and how writing that BuzzFeed piece was in a way trying to kind of come to terms with that. How has that looked like for your personal journey? Are you still feeling that way or where are you at? Give me a check in.

Anne Helen Petersen (41:00):

Well, I'm pretty burnt out in the moment, I think, because I'm trying to wrestle, starting, this newsletter that I'm doing is basically becoming my own shitty boss, like you said. But then also getting this book out into the world, which requires a lot of talking about the book, which I find incredibly gratifying. But it also is time.

Anne Helen Petersen (41:23):

Then trying to think to the future about other big projects, whether that's books or whatever. It was all really amplified for me a couple of weeks ago, when the smoke got so bad out here in the west. I realized that the one release valve that I had, cultivated over the course of just general work stress, but also COVID and quarantine stress, was being able to go outside.

Anne Helen Petersen (41:49):

When that was taken away from me for a week, I was just like, "I have nothing, I'm collapsing under the weight of this house of cards that I built for myself." I think that drove home to me just how fragile things were, the balance was in my life of trying to keep work and some sort of release at the same time.

Anne Helen Petersen (42:15):

But the thing for myself, no, of course, I'm not cured of burnout. But what I can do, is I can recognize burnout behaviors more easily. I can try to see them for what they are, and just kind of not judge them, but be like, "How can I maybe shift a couple of things just quietly in my life, to try to change that?" Talking about it definitely makes it feel better.

Bridget Todd (42:38):

I agree. I have to tell you, your writing and burnout made me feel ... we talked about the collective and feeling less alone. Just knowing that I'm not the only person who feels such incredible shame around my atrocious inbox, or my inability to just get simple shit done, or the package that's been in the back of my car for six months. Just knowing that it's not just me, really gave me the power to just start thinking about it, and talking about it honestly.

Bridget Todd (43:08):

I really feel like you opened up that space for so many people, myself included, to do that. I'm so grateful for your work.

Anne Helen Petersen (43:14):

I think it was something that a lot of us were ashamed of for a long time. Is like we, there was this idea that you had to somehow be like, doing all the shit. You had to be keeping it all together at all times. Even the people who were like, "Oh, I'm so authentic on Instagram," or whatever, that is such a performance of messiness. It's not actual messiness or vulnerability.

Anne Helen Petersen (43:42):

I just hope that we can continue to have this conversation, and all of the different directions it takes us. Also, continue to be really pissed off about it, because I want to use that anger, and use it to push us towards change.

Bridget Todd (43:56):

Where can folks subscribe to the Substack, and keep up with your work online?

Anne Helen Petersen (44:01):

You can go to annehelen.substack.com, or just Google my name in Substack, and it'll come up. I would love to have you there.

Bridget Todd (44:10):

Nothing we're dealing with right now is normal. If you're feeling burnt out, or you can't get anything done, or you can't find any motivation, that's okay. None of us are operating under normal circumstances, and you shouldn't expect yourself to perform like we are.

Bridget Todd (44:26):

How have you been dealing with burnout? Hit us up at hello@tangoti.com, and let us know. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello@tangoti.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoti.com.

Bridget Todd (44:41):

There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer, Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

Bridget Todd (44:55):

If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.