All right, Jesse, let's try some new technology. I want to do a CalReacts to the News segment. We actually have the article right here on screen. So for those of you who are watching this segment at youtube.com/calnewportmedia, you will be able to actually see what I'm doing. You'll also be able to see all the sparks and smoke when this goes terribly awry.

All right, so here's the article. This was sent to me by a listener by Elizabeth Klein. It's from February of 2021, and it is titled A Catholic Response to Workism, Colon, How to Lose at Life. So this is a Catholic response to issues about work and overwork. Because I wrote so much about this topic, especially in my New Yorker column last fall, I found it interesting.

I'm not going to go through this whole article, but I'm going to point out a few points that are made up front and then I'll give you my reactions to them. But let's start here in the beginning with a couple. A couple key notes are being made by the author.

So the author says for everyone, for the vast majority of humans, life is not very glamorous, involves doing a lot of boring and tedious things like paying taxes or cooking dinner or sweeping the floor. But she points out that these everyday tasks seem in particular to vex millennials. This generation, she goes on to say, has suffered from widespread ridicule for laziness and the inability to grow up.

But somewhat paradoxically, millennials also seem exhausted. All right, so this is a common thing we hear, but I want to point it out as part of the setup for this article. She goes on to say, when talking about us millennials problems is that we are already I'm learning this technology pretty quickly.

Or for those who are just listening, you're seeing me highlight things left and right that I don't mean to highlight because I learned a technology. Elizabeth also says millennials are frustrated at being unable to obtain the same level of material wealth enjoyed by their parents. All right, so that's the setup.

The article isn't going to go into saying why this is or what's wrong with millennials, but that is the setup. So let me just start with this before we get into the why. I will say in general, I have heard this a lot. I'm not super convinced. The issue here is I say almost everything being said here, I'm sure it could be said about just about every generation.

A lot of these claims are just made. Are millennials unusually exhausted? Are we unusually vexed by having to do small tasks like more so than other people in our age? I don't know that that's true. I know it's widely said. I don't know that that's true. What about this idea, which I hear all the time, that we're frustrated that our parents have more money and houses than we do?

Again, I'm not super impressed by that claim. What is the biggest predictor of how much money or wealth you're going to have? Well, one of the biggest predictors is how old are you? How long have you had to actually make money? How long have you had to actually trade up your house three or four times?

How long have you had to be putting money into your retirement account? So I don't think it's some unusual thing that 70 year old baby boomers have nicer houses and more money than their 30 year old kids. And I'm sure that's true of every generation that, oh, my parents, we've been around a lot longer, have more stuff than I have than when I'm younger.

So I just want to lay out that foundation that I'm not acceding the ground that is made the beginning of this article, not acceding the ground to this argument that, of course, us millennials are all vexed and overwhelmed and upset at our parents and worried about our prospects. I'm not sure that exactly matches a lot of my day to day interactions, but, you know, that could be true.

It could be true for other people. But let me just start with that. All right. So why is this the case? There's a couple options given here. There's three points in particular that I want to point out. All right. So first, this article talks about Anne Helen Peterson's viral Buzzfeed article, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.

She went on to publish a book about this as well. The book was called Can't Even. So this was an article that did a lot for promoting this idea that millennials have a hard time doing small tasks. Here is Helen's argument or Anne's argument rather. All right. So she puts forward the idea that millennials basically work all the time and that they are non-working.

They are busy trying to excel in other ways. So she goes on to say, drinking enough water, going to the gym or running a marathon, eating at trendy restaurants and then sharing all these experiences on social media for the perfect Instagram life. So I'll label this number one. This is point number one.

We'll come back to that. All right. The argument is pointed out here about what's going on with millennials actually comes from the Ezra Klein show. So there was a interview Ezra did with Anne Helen Peterson, but also with Derek Thompson, who wrote an article about workism for the Atlantic.

And it reiterated some of these big ideas. But what was interesting is, according to this author, this conversation took a surprising turn. So here we go. Near the end of the podcast, the discussion takes a surprising turn. And that turn is towards religion. All right. So that takes a surprising turn towards religion.

Derek Thompson goes on in that interview to talk about, and I'm going to highlight this, but he goes on to comment. This was unprompted by Ezra. When you are religious, you do not require the social feedback loop. You do not need a public performance of your life to make it valuable.

All right. So let's make this our second point. It's interesting about trying to explain what's going on with millennials, this notion that maybe it is religion that is missing. Millennials that are religious have an outlet. This drive towards wanting to live a good life, they now have an outlet for that.

And they don't have to try to simulate it with performative action online, etc. There's one final point given in this article. This comes from the author herself. And this is the focus on capitalism. So we usually get back here. She says, "As capitalism has become the religion of most Americans, so the measures of the worth in our lives has become our product." So capitalism is the focus here.

She goes on to elaborate, "My life has become a brand. This is why millennials can both seem to be obsessed with work and not yet value hard work at all." So there's this notion of there's a capitalist impulse. We'll make this point number three. There's a capitalist impulse that gets us to constantly want to somehow support our brand.

And so we're not going to tolerate efforts that don't directly do that. And we have a hard time. All right, so we have three arguments here. We have three arguments for why supposedly millennials are exhausted and having a hard time doing even simple tasks. Number one is Anne Helen Peterson's argument that we're always trying to optimize performatively.

Number two is Derek Thompson's argument that we don't have religion. We're trying to fill that hole. We're not doing a very good job of it. And number three is it's a capitalist impulse. Okay, so what do I think about this? I think of these three options, the person who is probably most on to something is Derek Thompson.

Point number two. So let me work through point one and three first. I'll say why I have some concern about it. My issue with Anne's argument that it's all about Instagram performance is that I believe that's a much that exists, but it's a much more narrow tranche of all of the millennials in this country that it might actually seem if you're someone who is, quote unquote, very online.

So, yes, there is this hustle culture on Instagram, which honestly, I didn't even really know about it till enough reporters asked me about it. So there is a subset of Instagram users that are all about posting these inspirational quotes, these get after it style quotes, these bragging about how much they're working style quotes.

There's also a echo of the subculture on YouTube. In the student space, for example, there's these YouTube videos of people who will study on camera, usually time lapse for eight, nine hours in a row. So there is there is a sort of performative a celebration of hustle that does happen online.

But I think it's actually a pretty narrow audience. Most millennials, especially as they get older, you know, millennials are now in their 30s, millennials in their upper 20s. I don't know that so many of them are so plugged into their social media presences as the main driving thing. I think as they get older, there's other things going on in their lives.

They're getting married, they're having kids, the more important stuff is happening in their jobs. And so I've never been as big of a believer that we can extrapolate the most eye catching things we see on Instagram to YouTube to an entire generation. It just doesn't pass the test of matching all of the people I know who are millennials.

You would think if something is a very widespread trend, you would see it popping up at least at a relatively high background rate. So I think that might be a little bit exaggerated. Honestly, most millennials I know of a certain age are mainly just exhausted with social media. Now, again, we might be mixing up generations.

We have to be careful about that. People still use the term millennial to mean everyone who's young. That's no longer the case. I'm one of the older millennials born in 1982. So I'm 40. The youngest millennials that were in their upper 20s now. So I mean, sometimes when people say millennials, they're actually talking about Gen Z years or talking about people who are in their young 20s or teen years.

Now, that's a whole other generation. This is the generation that grew up with a native use of smartphones and social media. That's a whole different thing. But millennials, honestly, I think there's also a strong thread of, you know, they're on some social media, but it's not a major player in their life.

All right, let's jump ahead to number three, the capitalism critique. There's a lot of this going on right now. It's like our entire cultural conversation is, you know, hanging out on campus when the freshmen are going home, like everyone is taking their first sort of Marxist influence, whatever critical course.

And now we're confidently explaining to their parents how it's all bourgeois capitalist influence. There's a lot of this going on right now. It's sort of Marxist critiques. Here's the thing. There's not like there's something new going on with capitalism, I would say, generationally. So if capitalism was driving you to these issues, it's not that there's some big change necessarily that happened in capitalism, let's say, during the last 10 years that wasn't there 10 years before that or 20 years before that.

So there obviously are issues with capitalism, but I don't think it's the right explanation for what's different about this generation versus other generations that came before. It is Derek who I think is on to something. I think the gap here, the issue here is a meaning gap. I think this is an issue with millennials.

It's an issue with every generation. How do you structure a good and meaningful life? I think most people are willing for a good and meaningful life to have hardships, to require effort, to require toil, to have ups and downs. People crave meaning much more strongly than almost anything else.

And there can be an absence of that. And in the absence of that, I do think people flounder. I think when you flounder, lots of effects can happen. Lots of effects can happen. So yes, you can get burnout on doing seeming trivial tasks. Back in my student advice days, we used to call this deep procrastination.

If you get sufficiently mismatched between intrinsic motivation and the efforts you actually have to do, you can shut down your motivational centers and have a hard time doing even basic things. It's similar to depressive syndrome, but not quite the same. There's probably a lot of that going on. Clearly, I think there is exhaustion issues with work.

Where does that come from? Well, as I've argued, I think in the modern age of digital knowledge work, we get more and more ad hoc frequent communication, all the context switching as job roles get more ambiguous. It's fundamentally exhausting. So yeah, I think that really is an issue that's going on as well.

I think people are hungry. We see strong embraces of all sorts of theoretical frameworks. For an academic, for example, to see something as obscure and complex as postmodern influence critical theories, which is in academic circles, is like a very narrow thing. It's not like most professors in the humanities are coming at their work from a perspective of a postmodern influence critical theories, but they have a huge impact right now in our culture at large that you have huge swaths of my generation that is quoting like relatively subtle, but 15 years ago would have been something you only would have heard in a pretty high level graduate seminar, pretty subtle theoretical frameworks.

I think it's because it's attached to social justice that seems meaningful. We're looking for meaning. We see that. We see it in a completely different context with the rise of conspiratorial thinking, the QAnon, et cetera. Look, say what you will about QAnon, but you can't say you don't feel like your life has meaning when you are stopping pedophile rings that live in secret subterranean tunnels beneath the city.

You got something that you're locked into. So I think Thompson is on to something that the meaning gap is probably what's important for millennials. What millennials need and what Gen Z needs is some sort of coherent story about how to build a meaningful life in the face of inevitable suffering and hardship.

I think that is where the huge hunger is. I see it in the Gen Z college students I teach. I see it in my millennial peers. I see it in the generations in between. This is what I believe people need. I believe this is probably what the issue is.

I think we see that hunger out there. I think it's what needs to be addressed. Now I don't know if the answer is, you know, this particular article comes from a Catholic perspective and so it might say Catholicism. I don't think there's a specific answer like you need a religion to do this or this or that.

But I think that meaning gap, I think that's a big thing that's going on here. Universities aren't addressing it. The baby boomer generations aren't passing down this to their kids very well. They got too distracted with just having a family and living life and trying to figure out life in their generation.

Everyone has their own things going on. And but that hunger, I think that hunger is out there and there should be more people discussing concrete answers to that hunger. Not one, there could be many, but people should be thinking, how am I structuring my life? How do I want to structure a deep existence in a world of both shallowness and hardship?

So I think that's what's important. And the reason why I emphasize that is that otherwise, if we look at some of these other things being said here, which again, have some foundation in truth, I don't want to completely dismiss it. It's easy just to see this through the point of view of like, look, there's nothing these kids can do.

There's these other influences that are bad. So you guys sit tight and we'll go write polemics and try to change the circumstances that are making your life hard. That can be really disempowering. And I think that's a thread that goes through a lot of this. It's sort of, what can we even do?

You know, it's just culture and capitalism and the way our exploitative bosses are trying to take advantage of us. And so we need to leave it to like polemical writers to try to change the society and change the culture. And in the meantime, we should just, you know, go easy on ourselves, get back on Instagram.

I don't think that's what's going to help people. We need people to come in and demonstrate in their life. Here's my structure for a life of meaning amidst inevitable hardship, mental difficulty. You see these exemplars out there challenge people to stand up and introduce some structure into their life, to introduce some pursuit beyond the arbitrary or in the moment.

There is such a hunger for that. Anyways, I'm rambling, but that is where, that's where I land on that.