Understanding Millennial Burn-out | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, let's try some new technology.

00:00:02.880 | I want to do a CalReacts to the News segment.

00:00:08.420 | We actually have the article right here on screen.

00:00:11.620 | So for those of you who are watching this segment at youtube.com/calnewportmedia, you

00:00:16.820 | will be able to actually see what I'm doing.

00:00:20.380 | You'll also be able to see all the sparks and smoke when this goes terribly awry.

00:00:24.220 | All right, so here's the article.

00:00:26.780 | This was sent to me by a listener by Elizabeth Klein.

00:00:32.340 | It's from February of 2021, and it is titled A Catholic Response to Workism, Colon, How

00:00:40.920 | to Lose at Life.

00:00:44.860 | So this is a Catholic response to issues about work and overwork.

00:00:48.900 | Because I wrote so much about this topic, especially in my New Yorker column last fall,

00:00:53.260 | I found it interesting.

00:00:55.660 | I'm not going to go through this whole article, but I'm going to point out a few points that

00:00:59.460 | are made up front and then I'll give you my reactions to them.

00:01:02.300 | But let's start here in the beginning with a couple.

00:01:06.180 | A couple key notes are being made by the author.

00:01:09.260 | So the author says for everyone, for the vast majority of humans, life is not very glamorous,

00:01:16.900 | involves doing a lot of boring and tedious things like paying taxes or cooking dinner

00:01:20.300 | or sweeping the floor.

00:01:23.180 | But she points out that these everyday tasks seem in particular to vex millennials.

00:01:31.260 | This generation, she goes on to say, has suffered from widespread ridicule for laziness and

00:01:37.860 | the inability to grow up.

00:01:40.820 | But somewhat paradoxically, millennials also seem exhausted.

00:01:44.220 | All right, so this is a common thing we hear, but I want to point it out as part of the

00:01:50.660 | setup for this article.

00:01:53.480 | She goes on to say, when talking about us millennials problems is that we are already

00:02:01.260 | I'm learning this technology pretty quickly.

00:02:02.700 | Or for those who are just listening, you're seeing me highlight things left and right

00:02:07.140 | that I don't mean to highlight because I learned a technology.

00:02:10.340 | Elizabeth also says millennials are frustrated at being unable to obtain the same level of

00:02:15.180 | material wealth enjoyed by their parents.

00:02:18.060 | All right, so that's the setup.

00:02:20.740 | The article isn't going to go into saying why this is or what's wrong with millennials,

00:02:25.300 | but that is the setup.

00:02:26.300 | So let me just start with this before we get into the why.

00:02:30.060 | I will say in general, I have heard this a lot.

00:02:32.500 | I'm not super convinced.

00:02:35.620 | The issue here is I say almost everything being said here, I'm sure it could be said

00:02:38.380 | about just about every generation.

00:02:40.380 | A lot of these claims are just made.

00:02:43.420 | Are millennials unusually exhausted?

00:02:45.620 | Are we unusually vexed by having to do small tasks like more so than other people in our

00:02:50.540 | age?

00:02:51.540 | I don't know that that's true.

00:02:53.020 | I know it's widely said.

00:02:54.540 | I don't know that that's true.

00:02:56.300 | What about this idea, which I hear all the time, that we're frustrated that our parents

00:02:59.100 | have more money and houses than we do?

00:03:02.100 | Again, I'm not super impressed by that claim.

00:03:06.400 | What is the biggest predictor of how much money or wealth you're going to have?

00:03:11.260 | Well, one of the biggest predictors is how old are you?

00:03:13.500 | How long have you had to actually make money?

00:03:16.100 | How long have you had to actually trade up your house three or four times?

00:03:18.940 | How long have you had to be putting money into your retirement account?

00:03:22.060 | So I don't think it's some unusual thing that 70 year old baby boomers have nicer houses

00:03:26.740 | and more money than their 30 year old kids.

00:03:31.180 | And I'm sure that's true of every generation that, oh, my parents, we've been around a

00:03:35.940 | lot longer, have more stuff than I have than when I'm younger.

00:03:38.260 | So I just want to lay out that foundation that I'm not acceding the ground that is made

00:03:42.580 | the beginning of this article, not acceding the ground to this argument that, of course,

00:03:45.900 | us millennials are all vexed and overwhelmed and upset at our parents and worried about

00:03:51.060 | our prospects.

00:03:52.220 | I'm not sure that exactly matches a lot of my day to day interactions, but, you know,

00:03:55.460 | that could be true.

00:03:56.460 | It could be true for other people.

00:03:58.580 | But let me just start with that.

00:03:59.780 | All right.

00:04:00.780 | So why is this the case?

00:04:03.460 | There's a couple options given here.

00:04:04.780 | There's three points in particular that I want to point out.

00:04:07.220 | All right.

00:04:08.220 | So first, this article talks about Anne Helen Peterson's viral Buzzfeed article, How Millennials

00:04:15.380 | Became the Burnout Generation.

00:04:17.260 | She went on to publish a book about this as well.

00:04:19.740 | The book was called Can't Even.

00:04:22.700 | So this was an article that did a lot for promoting this idea that millennials have

00:04:28.900 | a hard time doing small tasks.

00:04:33.300 | Here is Helen's argument or Anne's argument rather.

00:04:37.260 | All right.

00:04:38.260 | So she puts forward the idea that millennials basically work all the time and that they

00:04:41.540 | are non-working.

00:04:42.540 | They are busy trying to excel in other ways.

00:04:46.660 | So she goes on to say, drinking enough water, going to the gym or running a marathon, eating

00:04:50.100 | at trendy restaurants and then sharing all these experiences on social media for the

00:04:53.780 | perfect Instagram life.

00:04:55.260 | So I'll label this number one.

00:04:57.020 | This is point number one.

00:04:58.020 | We'll come back to that.

00:04:59.540 | All right.

00:05:01.380 | The argument is pointed out here about what's going on with millennials actually comes from

00:05:06.220 | the Ezra Klein show.

00:05:09.080 | So there was a interview Ezra did with Anne Helen Peterson, but also with Derek Thompson,

00:05:15.100 | who wrote an article about workism for the Atlantic.

00:05:18.580 | And it reiterated some of these big ideas.

00:05:22.220 | But what was interesting is, according to this author, this conversation took a surprising

00:05:29.940 | turn.

00:05:31.540 | So here we go.

00:05:32.540 | Near the end of the podcast, the discussion takes a surprising turn.

00:05:36.660 | And that turn is towards religion.

00:05:39.420 | All right.

00:05:42.540 | So that takes a surprising turn towards religion.

00:05:45.980 | Derek Thompson goes on in that interview to talk about, and I'm going to highlight this,

00:05:53.780 | but he goes on to comment.

00:05:56.780 | This was unprompted by Ezra.

00:05:58.980 | When you are religious, you do not require the social feedback loop.

00:06:02.580 | You do not need a public performance of your life to make it valuable.

00:06:05.020 | All right.

00:06:06.020 | So let's make this our second point.

00:06:07.820 | It's interesting about trying to explain what's going on with millennials, this notion that

00:06:13.220 | maybe it is religion that is missing.

00:06:16.940 | Millennials that are religious have an outlet.

00:06:21.740 | This drive towards wanting to live a good life, they now have an outlet for that.

00:06:27.340 | And they don't have to try to simulate it with performative action online, etc.

00:06:35.020 | There's one final point given in this article.

00:06:38.960 | This comes from the author herself.

00:06:43.500 | And this is the focus on capitalism.

00:06:48.140 | So we usually get back here.

00:06:50.120 | She says, "As capitalism has become the religion of most Americans, so the measures of the

00:06:56.580 | worth in our lives has become our product."

00:07:02.940 | So capitalism is the focus here.

00:07:08.020 | She goes on to elaborate, "My life has become a brand.

00:07:12.780 | This is why millennials can both seem to be obsessed with work and not yet value hard

00:07:16.820 | work at all."

00:07:17.900 | So there's this notion of there's a capitalist impulse.

00:07:21.020 | We'll make this point number three.

00:07:22.500 | There's a capitalist impulse that gets us to constantly want to somehow support our

00:07:27.180 | brand.

00:07:28.500 | And so we're not going to tolerate efforts that don't directly do that.

00:07:31.900 | And we have a hard time.

00:07:32.900 | All right, so we have three arguments here.

00:07:34.060 | We have three arguments for why supposedly millennials are exhausted and having a hard

00:07:39.540 | time doing even simple tasks.

00:07:42.420 | Number one is Anne Helen Peterson's argument that we're always trying to optimize performatively.

00:07:48.320 | Number two is Derek Thompson's argument that we don't have religion.

00:07:52.800 | We're trying to fill that hole.

00:07:53.880 | We're not doing a very good job of it.

00:07:55.160 | And number three is it's a capitalist impulse.

00:07:58.720 | Okay, so what do I think about this?

00:08:02.520 | I think of these three options, the person who is probably most on to something is Derek

00:08:07.760 | Thompson.

00:08:09.140 | Point number two.

00:08:11.860 | So let me work through point one and three first.

00:08:14.400 | I'll say why I have some concern about it.

00:08:17.000 | My issue with Anne's argument that it's all about Instagram performance is that I believe

00:08:22.840 | that's a much that exists, but it's a much more narrow tranche of all of the millennials

00:08:27.720 | in this country that it might actually seem if you're someone who is, quote unquote, very

00:08:31.600 | online.

00:08:32.600 | So, yes, there is this hustle culture on Instagram, which honestly, I didn't even really know

00:08:36.940 | about it till enough reporters asked me about it.

00:08:39.480 | So there is a subset of Instagram users that are all about posting these inspirational

00:08:43.560 | quotes, these get after it style quotes, these bragging about how much they're working style

00:08:47.760 | quotes.

00:08:48.760 | There's also a echo of the subculture on YouTube.

00:08:53.600 | In the student space, for example, there's these YouTube videos of people who will study

00:08:57.440 | on camera, usually time lapse for eight, nine hours in a row.

00:09:00.720 | So there is there is a sort of performative a celebration of hustle that does happen online.

00:09:08.000 | But I think it's actually a pretty narrow audience.

00:09:11.400 | Most millennials, especially as they get older, you know, millennials are now in their 30s,

00:09:17.000 | millennials in their upper 20s.

00:09:18.800 | I don't know that so many of them are so plugged into their social media presences as the main

00:09:22.760 | driving thing.

00:09:23.760 | I think as they get older, there's other things going on in their lives.

00:09:26.080 | They're getting married, they're having kids, the more important stuff is happening in their

00:09:28.960 | jobs.

00:09:29.960 | And so I've never been as big of a believer that we can extrapolate the most eye catching

00:09:35.040 | things we see on Instagram to YouTube to an entire generation.

00:09:40.200 | It just doesn't pass the test of matching all of the people I know who are millennials.

00:09:44.720 | You would think if something is a very widespread trend, you would see it popping up at least

00:09:49.480 | at a relatively high background rate.

00:09:51.800 | So I think that might be a little bit exaggerated.

00:09:54.800 | Honestly, most millennials I know of a certain age are mainly just exhausted with social

00:10:00.440 | media.

00:10:01.440 | Now, again, we might be mixing up generations.

00:10:03.560 | We have to be careful about that.

00:10:05.960 | People still use the term millennial to mean everyone who's young.

00:10:10.100 | That's no longer the case.

00:10:11.620 | I'm one of the older millennials born in 1982.

00:10:14.040 | So I'm 40.

00:10:15.800 | The youngest millennials that were in their upper 20s now.

00:10:18.840 | So I mean, sometimes when people say millennials, they're actually talking about Gen Z years

00:10:22.120 | or talking about people who are in their young 20s or teen years.

00:10:26.160 | Now, that's a whole other generation.

00:10:27.760 | This is the generation that grew up with a native use of smartphones and social media.

00:10:32.920 | That's a whole different thing.

00:10:34.400 | But millennials, honestly, I think there's also a strong thread of, you know, they're

00:10:38.040 | on some social media, but it's not a major player in their life.

00:10:41.800 | All right, let's jump ahead to number three, the capitalism critique.

00:10:44.400 | There's a lot of this going on right now.

00:10:47.800 | It's like our entire cultural conversation is, you know, hanging out on campus when the

00:10:54.760 | freshmen are going home, like everyone is taking their first sort of Marxist influence,

00:10:59.640 | whatever critical course.

00:11:02.200 | And now we're confidently explaining to their parents how it's all bourgeois capitalist

00:11:06.000 | influence.

00:11:07.000 | There's a lot of this going on right now.

00:11:08.000 | It's sort of Marxist critiques.

00:11:09.560 | Here's the thing.

00:11:10.560 | There's not like there's something new going on with capitalism, I would say, generationally.

00:11:16.440 | So if capitalism was driving you to these issues, it's not that there's some big change

00:11:21.960 | necessarily that happened in capitalism, let's say, during the last 10 years that wasn't

00:11:26.880 | there 10 years before that or 20 years before that.

00:11:29.600 | So there obviously are issues with capitalism, but I don't think it's the right explanation

00:11:33.440 | for what's different about this generation versus other generations that came before.

00:11:40.920 | It is Derek who I think is on to something.

00:11:42.760 | I think the gap here, the issue here is a meaning gap.

00:11:47.000 | I think this is an issue with millennials.

00:11:49.920 | It's an issue with every generation.

00:11:52.660 | How do you structure a good and meaningful life?

00:11:55.480 | I think most people are willing for a good and meaningful life to have hardships, to

00:12:00.040 | require effort, to require toil, to have ups and downs.

00:12:04.060 | People crave meaning much more strongly than almost anything else.

00:12:09.240 | And there can be an absence of that.

00:12:10.900 | And in the absence of that, I do think people flounder.

00:12:14.960 | I think when you flounder, lots of effects can happen.

00:12:18.240 | Lots of effects can happen.

00:12:19.480 | So yes, you can get burnout on doing seeming trivial tasks.

00:12:23.320 | Back in my student advice days, we used to call this deep procrastination.

00:12:27.240 | If you get sufficiently mismatched between intrinsic motivation and the efforts you actually

00:12:32.360 | have to do, you can shut down your motivational centers and have a hard time doing even basic

00:12:36.640 | things.

00:12:37.640 | It's similar to depressive syndrome, but not quite the same.

00:12:40.000 | There's probably a lot of that going on.

00:12:42.160 | Clearly, I think there is exhaustion issues with work.

00:12:45.600 | Where does that come from?

00:12:46.600 | Well, as I've argued, I think in the modern age of digital knowledge work, we get more

00:12:51.680 | and more ad hoc frequent communication, all the context switching as job roles get more

00:12:55.480 | ambiguous.

00:12:56.480 | It's fundamentally exhausting.

00:12:57.480 | So yeah, I think that really is an issue that's going on as well.

00:13:02.200 | I think people are hungry.

00:13:04.840 | We see strong embraces of all sorts of theoretical frameworks.

00:13:10.680 | For an academic, for example, to see something as obscure and complex as postmodern influence

00:13:17.120 | critical theories, which is in academic circles, is like a very narrow thing.

00:13:21.000 | It's not like most professors in the humanities are coming at their work from a perspective

00:13:25.840 | of a postmodern influence critical theories, but they have a huge impact right now in our

00:13:29.600 | culture at large that you have huge swaths of my generation that is quoting like relatively

00:13:35.880 | subtle, but 15 years ago would have been something you only would have heard in a pretty high

00:13:41.360 | level graduate seminar, pretty subtle theoretical frameworks.

00:13:44.840 | I think it's because it's attached to social justice that seems meaningful.

00:13:49.840 | We're looking for meaning.

00:13:51.320 | We see that.

00:13:52.320 | We see it in a completely different context with the rise of conspiratorial thinking,

00:13:56.520 | the QAnon, et cetera.

00:13:59.000 | Look, say what you will about QAnon, but you can't say you don't feel like your life has

00:14:02.800 | meaning when you are stopping pedophile rings that live in secret subterranean tunnels beneath

00:14:08.200 | the city.

00:14:10.160 | You got something that you're locked into.

00:14:11.480 | So I think Thompson is on to something that the meaning gap is probably what's important

00:14:14.960 | for millennials.

00:14:16.680 | What millennials need and what Gen Z needs is some sort of coherent story about how to

00:14:24.240 | build a meaningful life in the face of inevitable suffering and hardship.

00:14:28.720 | I think that is where the huge hunger is.

00:14:30.520 | I see it in the Gen Z college students I teach.

00:14:32.520 | I see it in my millennial peers.

00:14:33.960 | I see it in the generations in between.

00:14:38.240 | This is what I believe people need.

00:14:41.000 | I believe this is probably what the issue is.

00:14:44.560 | I think we see that hunger out there.

00:14:47.920 | I think it's what needs to be addressed.

00:14:49.840 | Now I don't know if the answer is, you know, this particular article comes from a Catholic

00:14:55.200 | perspective and so it might say Catholicism.

00:14:57.560 | I don't think there's a specific answer like you need a religion to do this or this or

00:15:00.920 | that.

00:15:01.920 | But I think that meaning gap, I think that's a big thing that's going on here.

00:15:05.480 | Universities aren't addressing it.

00:15:07.040 | The baby boomer generations aren't passing down this to their kids very well.

00:15:10.760 | They got too distracted with just having a family and living life and trying to figure

00:15:15.200 | out life in their generation.

00:15:17.440 | Everyone has their own things going on.

00:15:19.000 | And but that hunger, I think that hunger is out there and there should be more people

00:15:22.480 | discussing concrete answers to that hunger.

00:15:27.280 | Not one, there could be many, but people should be thinking, how am I structuring my life?

00:15:30.260 | How do I want to structure a deep existence in a world of both shallowness and hardship?

00:15:36.500 | So I think that's what's important.

00:15:38.840 | And the reason why I emphasize that is that otherwise, if we look at some of these other

00:15:43.080 | things being said here, which again, have some foundation in truth, I don't want to

00:15:45.960 | completely dismiss it.

00:15:48.080 | It's easy just to see this through the point of view of like, look, there's nothing these

00:15:51.280 | kids can do.

00:15:52.280 | There's these other influences that are bad.

00:15:56.000 | So you guys sit tight and we'll go write polemics and try to change the circumstances that are

00:16:01.720 | making your life hard.

00:16:03.160 | That can be really disempowering.

00:16:04.880 | And I think that's a thread that goes through a lot of this.

00:16:06.840 | It's sort of, what can we even do?

00:16:09.280 | You know, it's just culture and capitalism and the way our exploitative bosses are trying

00:16:15.880 | to take advantage of us.

00:16:17.840 | And so we need to leave it to like polemical writers to try to change the society and change

00:16:21.520 | the culture.

00:16:22.520 | And in the meantime, we should just, you know, go easy on ourselves, get back on Instagram.

00:16:28.320 | I don't think that's what's going to help people.

00:16:30.800 | We need people to come in and demonstrate in their life.

00:16:33.160 | Here's my structure for a life of meaning amidst inevitable hardship, mental difficulty.

00:16:37.560 | You see these exemplars out there challenge people to stand up and introduce some structure

00:16:43.120 | into their life, to introduce some pursuit beyond the arbitrary or in the moment.

00:16:48.680 | There is such a hunger for that.

00:16:50.520 | Anyways, I'm rambling, but that is where, that's where I land on that.

00:16:56.760 | [Music]

Understanding Millennial Burn-out | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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