There Are No Girls on the Internet - Why We're All Burnt Out

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

This episode is a little different than the usual ones. Bridget is feeling out of sorts and is joined by Anne Helen Peterson, author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation and editor of Substack's Culture Study to talk about why so many of us are feeling burnt out and what can be done about it.Get Anne's book: https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Even-Millennials-Burnout-Generation/dp/0358315077How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole : https://www.wired.com/story/how-work-became-an-inescapable-hellhole/How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation:https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-workCheck out Anne’s Substack Culture Study: https://annehelen.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio 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. 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. In her viral BuzzFeed essay called How Millennials became the Burnout Generation, and Helen Peterson 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. 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. I let emails go unreplied, then feel awkward about how long it spends insiplied, so they just go unanswered. 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 modification from friends wanted to confirm a Zoom party for this weekend. 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

that was ultimately posted to make myself feel better about my life in the first place. And all of it ends up feeling like a lot of distractions. 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. How did we get here? Anne Helen Peterson writes, burnout and the behaviors in weight 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. And 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. 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. But our generation was supposed to have it easier than our parents did. And technology was supposed to make our lives better and more fulfilled, not worse.

So why are so many of us burnt out? What's going on? I am Anne Helen Peterson, and I write culture study for Substack. So one of the reasons why I was so excited to speak to you today is because I just really have not been like in a good place, I guess. I've been feeling stuck. I've had a hundred kind of work things to do online, emails to reply to these kind of social obligations on Zoom

that somehow leave me feeling like more drained than when I started. And the main thing is like nothing was getting done. You know, I would write these to-do lists and like they would just carry over, you know, day by day. And when I read your, the excerpt of your book in Wired, which will put on the show notes, it really just struck me. You know, you start with this rundown of your digital diet. And it was this very familiar and also exhausting mix of, you know,

little task where you feel like you're kind of never working, but at the same time, always working. And so 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, 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? You know, a lot like what you just described. I mean, we weren't in the pandemic, but like 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. Like there were the things that just gave me so much shame because they kept recycling like one week after another

that like onerous task that really isn't probably that hard, but like just felt like insurmountable. But then also just like little things like the pittaly stuff of life that just kept always being there. And I think, you know, for me that is the best description of how burnout feels is that everything becomes like a task to complete instead of, you know, your life to live.

Like there's no highs and no lows. And that's why, you know, there are lots of intersection. with like depression and burnout and that sort of thing. But I think that it burnout feels to me at least different in so much as it is so related to your attitude towards work. 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, you know, the kind of jobs that your parents would be excited to brag about you having.

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

So that's like everything from taking pictures of your equally cool job mates, like in your cool office space, to, you know, even just like taking a picture that describes, like, 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. God, that really resonates with me. Something that you write about in your piece that I didn't even, 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. And so even if you are not working, what you're posting on social media, you know, if you're a journalist, you want to show, you don't want to use Twitter to show that you're with it, that you're smart, that you're reading good things. and that you're influencing others to read good things and have good takes. 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 of what is and isn't work. And that we're always sort of working. And it's fucking exhausting. Yes. Well, the way I think of it is that like work, the contemporary like feeling of work, like it just seeps into every corner of your life. And when we don't have very good boundaries about like the space between work and non-work, that makes it easier for it to slip into like, 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 a.m. Right. Or I'm like feeding my kids and I'm just going to like casually scroll through my Slack messages. It just slips into all of those places. And of course, the pandemic has has made that. slipperyness even, you know, more so. Yeah, 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, you know, 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. Yes, absolutely. Like everyone I know who, who has, has recuperated a commute time by having to be at home, they, they are not like using it to, oh, I'm just like having some quiet reading time or I'm meditating or I'm trying to be really present with my kids, you know, any of those things that like our best selves would want to devote that time to. Instead, we're just pushing more work into it. And this certainly happened to me when I moved to Montana in 2017, you know, I was like, oh, I'm going to have.

so much more time to be outside, beautiful Montana, like, it's going to be amazing. I'm not going to be on the train all the time, like work from home, going to be great, and instead I just worked more than I had worked in years. So being in beautiful Big Sky Montana didn't make you feel less burnt out? I mean, in some ways, right? Like, I, for me, one of the hard things, the, like, daily hard things about living in the city was that, like, just from the way that I grew up, I grew up in rural Idaho, So, like, being out of the city and in outdoor spaces is, like, very nourishing and replenishing to me. And it was so hard to find that, like, I mean, I love the parks in New York.

They're great. I love parks just in general. Fantastic. They are not the same as, like, being in the middle of nowhere. And it was just, you know, I didn't have a car. It was just so hard to get into those spaces from New York. So I did have that, like, available, you know, to me in Montana on a daily basis. and especially on the weekends.

But at the same time, like, I think the pictures that I was taking on social media of, like, all of this beauty, were a way of trying to tell myself a story of how much more balanced my life was, right? Like, you're telling the world, but you're also telling yourself a story with your social media. When, in truth, like, I was just working all the time. I was traveling constantly for my job and also for, like, go speak at colleges and that sort of thing. And oftentimes I think people who do travel a ton, it's easy to frame that traveling as like glamorous life, right? Like here I am in first class.

And you're like, the only reason you're in first class is because you travel so much so you get upgraded. And like the only difference in first class is that like your legs don't hurt by the end of the flight. But again, you tell yourself a story in order to like not feel like crap about what the daily existence of your life. like let's take a quick break another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite unhumor me with robert smigel and friends me and hilarious guests from jim gaffigan to bob odin kirk to daviderman help make you funnier this week my guest s nL's mikey day and headwriter streeter sidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter the worst singer in the group the worst yeah me is there anything to the idea

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. And we're back. So yeah, 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 our run in the woods into an opportunity for self-optimization.

They are the needy. and most selfish entity in 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. And my God, that really, I mean, 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 it's not on social media,

did it even really happen? Like 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? Yeah, absolutely, right? And of course it happened because what actually matters is how it made you feel. But I think we've gotten so distance from that. Like, the only way to know how it made us feel is how we're able to present it. And if you're like, oh, I didn't get any good photos of that. It's such a, like, it doesn't matter, right? What actually matters is the time that you spent with other people, the time you spent by yourself in, like, 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.

Right. And 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. Like you write about how, you know, 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. And, you know, I'm a podcaster. I mostly do it because that's a medium that I love. But I feel this pressure to sort of, you know, be using the podcast to, or using the medium to sort of like pitch myself as a product instead of just like exploring a medium that I love. And I feel like we've gotten to a place where even the things that were 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, you know, do something to do it. It has to be a business entity. Or be that we're doing it only to be consumed by others on social media. And it really, it kind of robs us of this opportunity for actual reflective leisure time. Yeah, totally. I think for reflective leisure time, which, you know, I oftentimes, there's like different kinds of leisure and everyone has to know what is nourishing for them. And some of us like we've forgotten, right? Like we've spent so much time mediating it that you're like, what do I actually like? Right? Like if you, if you're only doing it for yourself, what do you want to do? And that's that's hard to recover, I think. And then it also, it robs you. of, you know, reflection just in terms of like change. You know, I've thought a lot about some of the frustration that people have about what to post about Black Lives Matter, right?

Like, do I, like, okay, so the Black, the Black Square is wrong. But what should I post? Is this being too much? Is this not being enough? Like, if I'm a Black person, do people look to me to like figure out what I'm posting? And are they like, weird it out if I'm not posting? 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? 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 like, oh, I posted this, do you think it's right? and then B, the feeling of being sort of like looked to for, you know, a model of what people should or shouldn't be posting. I've got so much sort of tension and anxiety around that, that opening Instagram or opening my social media just, it added this, you know, 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 like I

will use the platforms that I feel comfortable using but I can't I can't this is I can't show up like this online it's just too draining yes yes like you're trying to deal with like what's actually happening in the world and then you have to drain deal with like the secondary annoyances like even if you're not intending to like sign on and be annoyed like there is just things that people are going to be doing that are like going to be like you said tension like 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?

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. Like I knew what I was doing. Like I, in my day job, I work for a feminist organization that was very much involved in, you know, a lot of the movement for Black Lives stuff. So I know that I was like doing the work there. I know that I was showing up at protests and like helping.

where I could. I also going out physically for protest was a little bit tough for me because I'm immunocompromise and so that was the whole thing. And so once I told myself, you know, I know in my real life where I stand and what I'm doing. And 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. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing, right? Like you were figuring it out, like, you were actually figuring it out for yourself instead of figuring it out like vis-a-vis your reactions to other people's social media accounts, right? Like, that to me is, is really difficult for a lot of

people to arrive at. They're so out of practice at, like, authentically figuring out their stance and how they want to position themselves. Does that make sense? It makes so much sense. And 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 a demonstration or something. And 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. And so how do you signal it without. overly signaling it. So, I mean, I think like being especially like people who are, how do I put this? I think spending some time with yourself to actually figure out, you know, do, how do I perform in a way that actually expresses my allyhood instead of, or like my devotion to this cause, instead of thinking about how do I signal my devotion to this cause. Does that make sense?

Definitely. Yeah. It's. funny. I mean, 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 like signaling that we are working and not actually doing the work. So it's like, oh, I'm thumbs up my coworkers comment or I'm dropping in a link. 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. be like doing the thing. Yep, exactly.

Well, and that's, it just, if you take up all this time signaling instead of actually doing, like that it evacuates, like, it evacuates your actions of any sort of intent or power, I think. And so whether that's Slack, like you don't have time to work because you're so busy trying to show that you're working on Slack. I cannot tell you how great it is not to be on Slack. Like obviously I miss like chatting with my co-workers. But when I left BuzzFeed in August, like suddenly there wasn't that thing that made me feel like, oh, I guess I should like I haven't said anything for like half an hour. I guess I should like say something.

It's just compulsory. And that is I think what's oftentimes frustrating. Is that like, yes, I was working. I didn't need to do a thumbs up like you said. Yeah. And I think as like creative professionals, it can be so fraught because. because, you know, nobody just sits down in front of their computer and, like, a perfect draft just spills out of you in the, you know, in 20 minutes or something. But I do feel like the time that you spend thinking and sitting in front of your computer and, like, ideating or whatever, that's all part of it.

But it can feel kind of fraught. It gives me this, like, anxiety where it's like, oh, I have to like overperform to show that I work, that I was actually working that and not just goofing off. And it is kind of a part of me, like, telling myself that I'm not goofing off, even though somewhere deep down I know it. It's like this constant thing that's such an added distraction from just getting my fucking work done. Well, and I think we oftentimes told ourselves stories about work has to look like a certain sort of thing, right? Like instead of work can also look like staring into space, work can look like taking a walk. Work can work like not working. And that has been really hard to, especially those of us who work in creative fields, that's really hard.

to understand. Because to us, work is you are sitting in front of the computer and you are doing something on that computer screen. And it doesn't have to be that way. So I want to talk a little bit about how did we get to this place? You know, when I read your piece, it really resonated with me. And 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, this Aaron paralysis. You can't. get anything done. How did we, how did millennials get to this place where we're all so burnt out? Well, I think the way that I try to position in the book is so much of it has to do with instability, with precarity. And so that's what bonds, people who are, you know, working three

different gig jobs right now and people who are essentially middle class but are super over indebted, both in terms of student debt and consumer debt and still really struggle. to figure out, like, how am I going to cover rent next month or how am I going to find child care next month? And 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, like they can, you know, 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 like feeling like you have to work all the time.

That means taking your leisure time and optimizing it or monetizing it in some way. And 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. Yeah, it's funny. I know that you've written about the ways that parenting has a lot to do with millennial burnout. And 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. I know for me, you know, 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. And for them, they were like, you know, we want our kids to not, you know, quote unquote, become statistics. And the way to get to a way to achieve that is through college and a stable job. And so the same way, an upper middle class white parent who was interested in their kid going to an Ivy League college, it's sort of the same, even though the cultural and racial, you know, reasonings for getting there are different. It's sort of the same thing where this parenting then sets kids up for this idea that like the most important thing is getting a stable job, going to college, that pathway. And it really can lead to kids being raised almost as little adults. Yeah, totally. And a lot of that is motivated. And I try to do this a bit in the book. It's, it is, as you said, like, it's motivated by not wanting your kids to take a step back from where you've gone. Right. And our parents' generation, you know, a lot of them had reached that, that middle class stability, some semblance of that middle class stability, sometimes for the first time in their family's history. And sometimes that was through going to college and getting a job after that. And sometimes it was through. like getting a good union job and and having stability that way. And so the goal is, okay, well, I don't want my kids to fall back from where I've come. And so you try to imprint all of these strategies for success and instability. And, you know, sometimes too, and this, I found this

in my interviews, like sometimes people's parents didn't give a shit, right? Like they were like, whatever, you'll figure it out. But the kids themselves really picked up through osmosis, you know, 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. Yeah, I definitely feel that this is, like, reinforced both explicitly and implicitly. Like, we're just told that this is how you're meant to live life. Like, you're meant to, 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 or, you know, turn whatever, you know, if you're a bake, if you like enjoy cooking on the weekends, that should be a business or an Instagram page or something that you can never just not be, you should ever be not optimized for working or something that looks like working. Yeah. And well, and think about that though. Like what was it, you know, my, uh, like my mom would make bread on the weekends, but she wasn't like, oh, I need to try to like hustle on the side to like make a couple of.

extra dollars. And what it was is that like they were able to, you know, pay off my dad's student loans. Like they were able to buy a house in North Idaho. Like they weren't struggling constantly to cover the cost of raising a family. Whereas because of incredible increases in the cost of living, the cost of child care, the cost of health care, so many families that have like dual income streams are still struggling and are like, okay, I got to make an extra $50. every weekend by making bread. Yeah, that's something that I think you do a nice job of illustrating is how in our generation, millennials and older millennials, like a lot of us graduated into the Great Recession,

you know, 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. Like every professional choice I've made has been based on scarcity. It's been based on my back is against. a wall, some calamity is happening that's completely out of my control. And I have to make my professional choices based on this scarcity. And we have no idea sort of what it looks like to be making a life at a time of stability. I don't even really, I can't even really like grasp that.

No, it's so true. And I think like, especially people who work in more creative fields, like there is this expectation too that like the company you work for is going to fold. Like, you're not going to have any sort of staple job. You can't expect a job to endure in the way that a lot of our parents like started one job and stayed at that job for many decades or like my grandfather, who worked at one company, his entire life, right? And I think that that overarching precarity, so much of it, you know, it comes from entering into the economy as adults during the first great recession

and then also just like expecting the other shoe to drop. Like most millennials I know are not surprised by the pandemic. They're like, we're just waiting for everything to collapse. And to me, that shows a psychology that is conditioned towards precarity, right? It's conditioned towards never feeling like you have a stability. And what that does, I think over the course of, you know, 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. be confident to experiment, to take risks. You know, like 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, right, 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. You know, there are all sorts of things that having even just that modicum of stability permits for people, and we are so deeply unfamiliar with that. So how do we get to a place where instability is not the internalized norm for an entire generation? I mean, create a lot more social safety nets. So 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. And I'm talking about like, you know, pretty basic things like the fact that we have, legislators have just largely defunded so much funding for public education. And so like because you have so much student debt, that makes it harder to, you know, if you lose a job, you're like, well, going to default on these loans, right? But then also just thinking about things like funding for some funding that has never existed, but funding for, you know, funding for things like universal pre-K or even before pre-K, mandatory paternity leave, universal health care, like things that are not alien to most developed countries across the world. Like these are things that actually make life feel like you're not conditioned to precarity.

But I think that we are so obsessed with this myth of the individual. And 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, right? Like the oldest millennials are 39 and 40. And you're like, wait, I thought by this point, I would have found some stability. And you're like, wait a second. Like, I have kids or I have been in the workforce for almost 20 years. Like, where's that stability?

Why isn't it here yet? and becoming deeply disillusioned and saying, I'm like, well, this is just broken. We need to fix this entirely. 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, they'd be like 25 and having some like fantastic job or like having a lot of existential dread by the fact that they're not, you know, that they're turning

28 and they don't have their life together. And here I am in my like mid 30s thinking like, oh, we thought. we were going to have stable jobs, stable partners, own houses. When the time we were like 25, like that, like that was the framework we were working with. What is the one? Isn't it like my best friend's wedding? She's in, they're like 20, they're like in their 20s. Yes.

Oh, so funny. So funny. Oh, goodness. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.

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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 at it. And yet, there was this attitude where millennials were all lazy or entitled little brats who were all whiners. How do we combat those attitudes? Well, I do think that the messaging has kind of shifted. And part of that is, of course, that millennials are now, like, at the helm at a lot of different publications. But just the idea that, like, millennials have kind of been screwed is becoming more popular, I think.

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, you know, our relatives, who are, or our peer, like people who are older than us that we can actually feel like we can have a real conversation with about, like, here's, tell me about what it was like when you had worked your way through college, which is always the common refrain, right? which is like, I don't know why you took out all the student debt. I managed to work my way through college.

And you're like, okay, so how much did you make a semester? How many hours did you work? And then you're like, and here's how many hours someone would have to work in order to work their way through a state college today. Right. And those things don't add up, but sometimes you need to sit someone down and be like, here's how things have substantively changed. And like, you can do it without turning it into like a math lecture,

but you can be like, here's how the cost of living hasn't changed. change, right? Or like our raises haven't been accompanied by changes for cost of living or even inflation, that sort of thing. But, you know, one of the things that I tried to do a little bit was create a little bit of empathy by being like, you know, boomers were burnt out in some capacity, too, because they had grown up in this time of unprecedented economic stability. And then as they entered the job market in the 1970s, they experienced those first waves of precarity and we're responding to them. And so, like, if anything, you know, 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. 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 think, about folks who are, you know, the generation, you know, 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 struggle 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, you know, they're make, 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. Totally. Well, and I'm seeing.

you know, two different kind of discourses come out of Gen Z. And one of them is like, you guys were sold a false bill of goods. We are going to reject that bill of goods, right? That's like, we actually think you can like 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, you know, everything isn't intractable. So, and I'm always heartened by it, by that posture. But then I also see some some like stuff that's like oh my gosh why are millennials such whiners right like they just need to work harder and I'm like don't you dare um so I think hopefully by creating not just empathy but actual solidarity right 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 you make this point a lot on 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 joining 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, you know, the collective. You know, feeling like you're part of a united collective can really make you feel a lot more powerful and less alone. Totally. And it doesn't fix everything, but it does make you feel like, I mean, this is the word, right? It makes you feel a little less alone. Like it makes it feel like you're not just fighting this problem on your own. So much of the writing and content that I see around burnout, particularly geared toward women, will always have some sort of individual little saying that like, oh, this is going to be the silver bullet or the magic bullet that helps you figure it out.

So whether it's using your meditation app or, you know, doing your self-care manicure or, you know, quit your 9 to 5 and be your own girl boss. And I am my own boss and I can tell you that my boss sucks. working for her is not great all the time. You know, and I think, you know, it's not these individual choices or actions that are going to save us from something that is systemic, that is bigger than us. And, you know, I think the real issue is capitalism, you know. And I guess my question is, how, A, how do we get to a place where we unlearn that it's an end of, like, we are doing something wrong individually if we are, feeling burnt out. And B, how can we go forward knowing that the real issue is so much bigger than us? You know, it's funny. So there was a critique of the book that was like, this book doesn't talk

enough about therapy, right? And I get it because I do think that a lot of the neuroses that millennials have developed, a lot of them are things that like we need to work through on the personal level through therapy if possible, even though therapy is not accessible to so many people. But But I also think that like we've been taught oftentimes that like, oh, if you have a problem with this workplace scenario, that's a personal problem. Instead of thinking about like, oh, well, everyone I work with has this problem with this workplace. So maybe it's a workplace problem, right? Like 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. And also almost every millennial I know who burnt out, who is burnt out, is either going to therapy or has been going to therapy, right? Like, it's not like therapy is going to solve those larger issues as well. And so what we have to think about is what are these systems that are making everything so sucky, right? Like what are the systems that make the scenario that leads us to burnout? out. And I'm heartened actually by even just like the willingness for us to say things like capitalism allowed. Like even 10 years ago, it was kind of like a like third rail like, oh, are you a socialist? Like, oh, are you part of the Occupy movement to like talk about capitalism as this

problem? Whereas now like, I mean, and part of it I think is the success of memes and even just like all over TikTok and Twitter. Like you see a very clear indictment of capitalism as the source of a lot of our ills. And I think that like, you know, regardless of my personal politics, which are like 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 are policy suggestions that can make that possible. And we can do it. The big first step is regime change. So even though it's hokey to say, like, we have to vote, like, we have to regime change. And then we can do it. And we can do it. And we

we have to make some big changes and be willing to, you know, 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. So I have to ask, you know, in your, 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 is that, how has that looked like for your personal journey? Are you still feeling that way or where you're at. Give me, give me a check in. Well, I'm pretty burnt out in the moment. I think because I'm trying to

wrestle starting, like this newsletter that I'm doing is basically like 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, right? And then trying to think to the future about other big projects like whether that's books or whatever. And it was all really amplified for me a couple weeks ago when the smoke got so bad out here in the West. And I realized that like the one release valve that I had cultivated over the course of, you know, just general work stress,

but also like COVID and quarantine stress was being able to go outside. And when that was taken away from me for a week, I was just like, I have nothing. Like I'm collapsing under the weight of this house of cards that I've built for myself. And I think that drove home to me, like, just how fragile things were. Like, I, the balance was in my life of trying to keep work and some sort of release at the same time. But, I mean, the thing for myself, like, no, of course I'm not cured of burnout.

But what I can do is I can recognize burnout behaviors more easily. They can try to, like, see them for what they are and just kind of not judge them, but be like, okay, how can I maybe shift a couple of things just quietly in my life to try to change that? And, you know, talking about it definitely makes it feel better. I agree. I have to tell you, your writing on burnout made me feel, you know,

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 like 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. Like I really do like you opened up that space for so many people myself included to do that. So I'm so grateful for your work. Yeah, I think it was something that a lot of us were ashamed

of for a long time. It's like we there was this idea that you had to somehow be like doing all the shit, right? Like that you had to like keeping it all, be keeping it all together at all times. And, you know, even the people who are like, oh, I'm so authentic on Instagram or whatever, like, that is such a performance of like messiness. It's not actual messiness or vulnerability. And so I just hope that we can continue to have this conversation in all of the different directions it takes us and also continue to be really pissed off about it because I want to use that anger and use it to like push us towards change. Where can folks subscribe to the substack and keep up with your work online?

So you can go to anhellen.substack.com or just Google my name and substack and it'll come up. And I would love to have you there. Nothing we're dealing with right now is normal. So if you're feeling burnt out or like 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. How have you been dealing with burnout?

Hit us up at hello at tangoody.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 at tangooty.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangooty.com. 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. Tarah Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. 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. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, reader Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that

shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. What's up, fam?

It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Tolodano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest players. off moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was calling it. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come in too, he's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point

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