The answer is often that we are dealing with the “snowflake generation”, delicate and sensitive beings who are not used to hard work… But is this really true?
This approach is a popular way of dealing with problems not only among the younger generation. In the age of coaching, biohacking and counseling literature, it is very easy to come to the conclusion that the problem is in ourselves – that the source of our fatigue lies within us, because we approach life the wrong way or are simply not strong enough. Therefore, when the topic of student burnout comes up, a discussion about the physical fragility of today’s children and adolescents arises. When we start talking about burnout in a relationship, the answer is that it is the fault of modern narcissism and too high expectations of the partner. When someone brings up the topic of parental burnout, they will hear that it is the result of overprotection and constant interference in school affairs. And when the issue of burnout returns, the equally old narrative of demandingness, disloyalty and lack of gratitude towards the employer that characterizes modern workers returns.
In other words: from this perspective, the problem is mainly our unrealistic expectations or our weakness, and not the reality we live in. Especially since, to quote the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, we seem to live in the best of all possible worlds, and certainly in the best times in the history of humanity – so there is nothing to complain about!
In this spirit, the titles of the best-selling guides and the most popular TikToks suggest that the problem with the modern world is not the shape of the economic system, the international corporations that exploit us, or the broken state institutions, but that we are the problem. We also suggest that the solution is simply more work (for you). They often fail to tell us the most important thing: that even the hardest work we can do will not fix the broken system.
Well, because there is another possibility. Anne Helen Petersen draws attention to this. In the subtitle of her book I can’t even raises a significant question in the context of the feeling of fatigue that is with us today. We could translate it into Polish as follows: “How did millennials become a burnt-out generation?” In the introduction I can’t evenreferring to this question, the author observes: “[wypalenie] It is not a personal problem, it is a social problem.” The loss of strength, tiredness and, ultimately, exhaustion that we increasingly feel have their origin mainly in the way the society in which we have to function. Our problems are therefore largely the result of the transformations that the education system, the job market and the ways of spending free time have undergone in recent decades. These transformations are, in turn, the result of social, political, economic and cultural changes to which successive technological revolutions have contributed, giving it its current form.
Without trying to bring all these processes to light and understand how they contribute to our increasing fatigue, we will not be able to regain strength and regenerate ourselves – both individually and socially. And if so, where should we start?
Burnout, what is it?
Considering how much and how often burnout has been talked about in recent years, one might get the impression that it has been part of our culture since the beginning – as if it were an inherent part of it. And it seems that if we have always worked in one way or another, we also experience this state as people.
Burnout, however, is a relatively new phenomenon. It was first diagnosed in psychology in 1974. Herbert Freudenberger gave this name to cases of physical and mental breakdowns that occurred at that time and were caused by overwork. Although this psychologist suggested that we had already experienced something similar in our culture (the melancholic world-weariness diagnosed by Hippocrates, the Renaissance bewilderment of “constant change,” or the neurasthenia of the late 19th century, characterized by a constant feeling of tiredness), burnout was characterized by something unique. The main issue turned out to be the cases of “breakdowns” that distinguish burnout from burnout. An exhausted person has no strength to work – he arrives at a certain place and stays there, unable to do anything else. Burnout is a different thing: it means that when we reach a point where we no longer have the strength to do anything, we ignore it and force ourselves to keep doing something. Often we stay in this position for days, weeks, and sometimes even years.
Burnout is therefore a state that arises after enormous effort, working on something important to us, when, on the one hand, we feel an overwhelming need to recognize that our work is finished, but on the other hand, it is accompanied by the belief that we can and even should do something else.
“You feel burnout when you know you’ve exhausted all your inner resources and yet you can’t shake the compulsion to keep working,” writes Josh Cohen, a psychologist who specializes in the subject. The experience of burnout is experienced as an optimization of ourselves to the point that we resemble a machine—a robot that performs an endless list of tasks, despite the monotonous feeling of exhaustion during sleep or even on vacation.
How can we explain the emergence of the diagnosis of this phenomenon in the 1970s? They may be associated with the emergence of a series of events that are more or less related to what is called late capitalism. […] After the period of domination of physical labor (modernity) and intellectual labor (late modernity), there came a time when there was an expectation of engaging fully in the labor process, leaving nothing for oneself (postmodernity). This process of exploitation of human labor cannot go any further, because there is nothing left to exploit.
This expectation did not arise out of nowhere, however. The sources of the current situation can best be recognized by younger generations – in particular millennials, i.e. people born in the decade after their first diagnosis of burnout – who grew up in the cult of (personal) success. To achieve this, one had to fully engage in it from an early age – that is why professional athletes have to start at the age of three, and we care about academic skills from kindergarten onwards. To achieve success, one has to start working as early as possible and do it for as long as possible, as hard and as hard as possible, to paraphrase the title of the Daft Punk hit.
And the compulsion to constantly work, which is associated with burnout and which we cannot resist, results mainly from the focus on ultimate (life) success learned from an early age. “Work hard (in school) to get into college, work hard in college, work hard at work and you will succeed” – goes the story that subsequent generations have been hearing for several decades.
According to her, if we work hard enough, we will win (whatever that means) or at least live in prosperity and happiness. Over time, however, it turns out that it is impossible to “win” in this system we live in, because the system itself is broken and instead of ultimate success, it offers a feeling of exhaustion.
Fragment of Mikołaj Marcela’s book “You DON’T NEED IT. From the cult of achievements to exhausted generations”, published by Znak publishing house.
