The burnout generation: Anne Helen Petersen on the future of work
Here, we tease out some of the issues that will need to be tackled as we face into the “new” normal of working after Covid-19. By Brian Whelan Thursday 6 May 2021, 2:34 PM 6 hours ago 8,433 Views 2 Comments
we are posing the question this month ‘What will the working week look like after Covid-19?’.
The pandemic has upended so many things in our lives – and how we work is just one of them.
For large swathes of workers, it’s meant remote working. For others, it’s meant they remained on the frontlines right throughout the last year.
Just A Pic Of John Abraham Waiting For Wardrobe. We Can t Even. Just A Pic Of John Abraham Waiting For Wardrobe. We Can t Even. The photo from the sets of John Abraham s work-in-progress film has sent the Internet into meltdown, courtesy the actor s fit physique
John Abraham shared this photo. (Image courtesy: thejohnabraham)
Highlights
It features John posing on a couch with nothing but just a pillow on his Set life, he wrote in the caption
New Delhi:
Hello there, John Abraham. The actor, who has just started filming his new project titled
Ek Villain Returns, set the Internet ablaze on Tuesday with his latest Instagram entry. Wondering why his post is becoming an instant hit among his fans? It features John Abraham posing on a couch with nothing but just a pillow on his lap. A room heater is kept next to him. The photo from the sets of his film has sent the Internet into meltdown, courtesy John s fit physique. Sharing the post, John Abraham captioned it: Wait
Millennials are often characterised as fickle, lazy and entitled, said Sian Cain in The Guardian. But in
Can’t Even, the US journalist and academic Anne Helen Petersen suggests that they are in fact victims of “burnout”.
This book, expanded from a BuzzFeed essay that went viral in 2019, suggests that millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) feel overworked and undervalued, “overstimulated” but “alienated” – and permanently anxious, as the prospect of solid jobs and of other social protections enjoyed by previous generations seems to recede.
For Petersen, “burnout” doesn’t signify total exhaustion so much as a “state of emotional paralysis” brought on by feeling overburdened, said Eleanor Halls in The Daily Telegraph.
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There’s no getting around it: Quarantine is making us weird. Humans did not evolve as social animals for thousands of years to sit alone in their houses, communicating solely by typing and talking through a series of small digital boxes.
After almost a year of Covid lockdown, I’ve completely lost the ability to make small talk. I wasn’t
great at it before, but at least I was able to say hi and exchange pleasantries at daycare drop off. Now when I see someone I know in person not even friends! Just acquaintances! I simply stare at them while my eyes slowly well up with tears. You d think Zoom and email and Twitter and TikTok might offer some solace to the contact-starved, but after 11 long months it s getting more difficult to mediate those interactions as well. Alone in our dwellings, we are pure id. We howl back and forth into the social media black hole while we boil yet another pot of ramen for dinner.
In her new book, Can’t Even, American journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes of how Millennials have become “the burnout generation”.
[It’s] feeling that you’ve hit the wall exhaustion-wise, but then have to scale the wall and just keep going. There’s no catharsis, no lasting rest, just this background hum of exhaustion.
The book, recently released in Australia, builds on the viral essay Petersen wrote in 2019.
At its heart, the book is a critique about the nature of modern workplaces and the modern economy.
As Petersen recently told Vox,
There’s a feeling of instability that’s the baseline economic condition for many, many millennials, and it’s enhanced by these other components of our lives that make it harder to turn away from.