Agreement :)
I think that a big part of the burnout is our generation’s connectedness being higher in general, and many people not leaving work at work.
The entire push towards efficiency and productivity has also made a lot of us feel like we can’t disconnect from the office at home.
This is not atypical for a lot of very high level positions in most companies. The bigwigs are on call, but they get compensated for it. Supervisors, partners, executive positions all expect to be working this hard, but it has trickled down to your lower level college educated employees.
I have been very lucky to have supervisors that understand the importance of a work life balance, but I see a lot of people my age connected to their work as if they are some sort of managing partner. Kids right out of college taking work laptops home, taking meetings in off hours, etc, working unpaid OT just to stand out.
This isn’t something that every generation hasn’t done in the past. There have always been over-achievers, but I feel that right now, it is something that is becoming more and more expected of everyone. The bar keeps getting set higher and higher.
And I am guilty of this too. Do I get a bit peeved when a colleague is out for vacation and I need them to send a document? Do I get irrationally happy when I see that they checked their work email from home during vacation with an update? It is like we are all wired this way now.
Yuuupppp.
There is no off switch. There is no 40 hour week. There is no escaping.
The magic box we have in our pockets is a leash. Our curse. I was glad this weekend when our corporate Slack was doing an upgrade, and hence was down. It was relatively quiet then.
Average annual hours worked for white men in the U.S. has been pretty flat for decades. See page 11 here. Life/work balance is actually better now than it ever has been, which has mostly meant that men have taken on a higher share of household work, which may partially account for that feeling of burnout…
I remember when I got my first cell phone way back in the mid 90s. It was the same one that Mulder and Scully used in the early seasons of the X-Files. It was so amazing. You could go anywhere and still call anyone.
It took about a week before I discovered it also meant that work could call me on the bus ride home and ask me to turn around.
It’s only gotten worse from there.
It’s far easier to say than to do, but I eventually managed to make it clear that I was not going to read emails, PMs, etc after hours or on the weekends. If someone needed me urgently they could call, but I would work on the assumption that if they didn’t call then it could wait until Monday.
I have a friend, slightly older than myself, born in '66 (does that make him a first wave Gen-Xer or a trailing edge Boomer? shrug) who was talking to me recently about a millenial couple in his department at a large financial institution who had a first child and both the husband and wife took the full four months of parental leave offered by the employer. And my friend was riffing on the idea that “if they are not need in those jobs for four months, maybe they are not needed at all…”, which IMO is a typical attitude of the older generation of managers.
I pushed back pretty hard on him, saying that may be the way it’s viewed by some in management, but that’s a truly shitty way to organize a society. I used the example he had given some years before of being an associate attorney at a big firm and one of the partners said “an associate is just a billing machine; if the machine doesn’t produce the required hours, I yank it out and replace it.” That was an accurate summation of the way some big firm management sees things, but again, a truly shitty way to set up society.
I think one big aspect of millenial burnout is that the all of the default assumptions, customs, practices, attitudes, etc., that have built up over the years to support the existing power/business/employment structure is, in the context of creeping inequality and the expansive impact of technology, faced with the rising awareness of social issues, creating massive conflict.
After my discussion, my friend realized, yeah, a society that punishes parents for bonding with their kids is pretty crappy and we need to re-examine those core assumptions and policies. But as a guy over 50 with no kids he had literally never thought about it that way.
Millenials are getting hammered by economic changes, especially inequality, while at the same time, awareness of some of the default “rigging” of our society is rising. I believe that set of countervailing forces is key to the conflict affecting many millenials.
Not true at all. Look at those charts. Work hours, for those working, has risen slightly. But the real driver has largely been the number of weeks worked.
In other words people are taking less time off.
But the big change is the number of women working. There are far more two income households now than in the 70’s.
But the decrease is when you see non earners lumped with earners.
So people who are working are working more, and taking less time off. A larger share of men are not working. More women are working.
So the numbers show many things happening at once. But the breaking of the barrier between work and not work is absolutely occurring. Those working, especially younger workers, are working more hours for less pay, and with greater expenses.
This thread is making me realize (even moreso, I mean) how lucky I am to have a job that respects work-life balance and that problems, aside from the most dire of emergencies, can wait until Monday. I hope I never have to get back into the corporate rat race.
I could make more money elsewhere, but it ain’t worth it.
I have so many feelings about this.
I don’t know that I ever worked a 40-hour week professionally until my current job (at a Fortune-50 megacorp). Overtime was just expected. It’s not like I actually had office hours to accomplish all my responsibilities to any more than the most basic of levels. I could work the unpaid overtime, or I could find a different job.
My last job - my first development job - was truly absurd. I ended up working 60-80 hours weeks to try and keep up with the insane demands and I was drowning. The whole team was. The whole company “culture” was this “Rise and grind!” “Eat sleep hustle repeat!” (those were the lunchroom posters, literally) bullshit that works I guess for commission-based sales people or the investors/C-suiters who stand to make literally millions if they can sell the company at the right time.
Yo, you’re paying me a salary. And pitching your poorly defined bonus package as part of the compensation, except that you have LITERAL FUCKING COMPANY RULES that bonus goals must be accomplished outside of your core working hours aka your 40-hour week.*
It is not worth my fucking health to improve your chances of pulling in a seven-figure payday at some point in the future which I don’t even have a piece of. Fuck you.
(*) After reiterating the point about bonus goals being outside working hours over and over, the fuckers were super surprised that our team thought that bonus goals were supposed to be accomplished outside working hours at my exit interview. The general counsel being present surely had nothing to do with that. Eat my ass, you pricks.
Sidenote: Welcome to what the destruction of organized labor over the last 50 years has gotten us! Gonna get you fuckers an appointment with Mme G is what it’s gonna get you, you weeping sores on the pestilent asscheeks of society.
That has should have been a hasn’t. I updated my post.
How do you get from A to B here. It sounds like work/life balance is unchanged.
I would also say that the instances I am talking about, interconnectedness don’t count towards hours worked (at least that study was using self-reported work hours) And I think many people that answer a quick email from a colleague on the beach wouldn’t log in that hour to a study, it was just a quick question.
Also, it is interesting in that study that for your typical white male workforce things haven’t changed much, but the racial divide in the numbers is stark for 2016.
Really the only thing that chart says is that, compared to 1979, more women are working now, which isn’t very surprising. Men are generally working at about the same rate. This whole thread is about how Millennials have it worse than folks who came of age during the 80’s or 90’s. The trend of women entering the workforce peaked and leveled off at in the late 90’s, so applies to Gen X as much as it does to Millennials. Look, yes, you Millenialls are worse off than we Gex Xers mostly because of college debt, but y’all don’t work harder than previous generations.
Because men are participating more in child-rearing and other household activities and women are doing that less. Mostly the gender imbalance has been improving.
Since I started my professional career, quite late, I’ve seen two heart attacks, one mental break down, one complete burn out and to many meltdowns to count. I watch people burn out around me all the time.
I have one co-worker, nice and quite ambitious young woman, I’ve met in person once, who calls me and literally cries every few months telling me how she has no life, and then I listen to her volunteer for everything under the sun to try and get that top 5% performance evaluation… and that’s during the good months, not a Go-Live or poor numbers. And while it might be easy to get discontent with the end-users pushing all this, you realize that they’re so overworked they don’t take most holidays off, when their loved one dies, they might take a day or two off, rarely the full bereavement period, and they’ll be up easily until wee hours trying to do work to meet unfair goals.
This problems is across the spectrum, pretty much every working generation here, but the the people in charge, in the higher up positions are still the Boomers.
The problem that some Millennials might have, and I am included with this experience, is we entered a piss poor job market, have been desperate for like anything to get going. The first time i took an interview and realized this was not all or nothing, if I didn’t get it I would be okay in the job I had… best interview I ever had. I was confident, relaxed and probably a tad too candid.
It’s kind of scary the first time you start setting boundaries, and career wise, it can be harmful. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to do it, but I see burnout, and it’s not just falling out of a specific industry, it destroys your physical and mental health.
In the article I linked earlier the author uses productivity vs wage to show that people are working harder for less. Although I guess you could argue that could be from increased automation and not an increase in amount worked.
A thousand times this. Well said.
This is why I’m hoping my current job is my last job.
I mean, if the economy crashes hard enough or Trump starts a nuclear war, our current jobs might be all of our last jobs! :)
This is the best way to sum it up. Because of a lot of us entering the workforce during a high unemployment time (late 2000’s early 2010s) we have had very slow career advancement opportunities, on top of lack of mobility in our fields. I had a colleague, who was very good at his job, was told “you are lucky to have this job” when he asked for a deserved promotion.
That is what it was like in 2008-2014. Be happy you have a job. So, like any hard working american capitalist, we thought, let’s work harder and get noticed, and move up the ladder. But there was nowhere to go. You can do your part and still not get moved up, because of the labor market being depressed, meaning there were more qualified people in the job market looking.
When I lost my job in 2009, I had a co-worker who was in a lower level management position who told me that the mandate was “We don’t do layoffs, so find the people you could stand to lose and fire them (for performance etc), because there are so many more qualified candidates out there in the job market” That was my first job out of college, and I was on a project team that went south and took us all with us.
This is just my personal anecdote, but getting 2 years out of college, and having to switch career paths, I feel like I was behind everyone else for like 2 years. I still feel behind, and I don’t think it will ever go away now.
The worst part is, I did the math year ago when I finally got going professionally. I’ll never make up those lost years. They’re gone. The was prime earning and working your way up years. Lost productivity forever. I feel behind and I am still, still better off than a number of people in my group, my graduating class, and those that got laid off, lost their houses and never really hit that same level again.
As a result, it’s like a sandwich affect, resentment and hey look at how luck they are from the group that wasn’t as unfortunate and hey how come you aren’t at this xyz indicator or mark from the group that didn’t get hit as hard.
I became physically ill for about two weeks when I bought my house, like almost panic level stuff thinking about the recession and worrying it would happen all over again.
No generation has it perfect. Every generation probably thinks they had it worse.
All I know is I know what it’s like to to be unemployed in the worst job market in recent history due to being laid off, for almost 2 years, being hired into a less than minimum wage position and then finally starting again as a professional essentially starting over, keeping in mind your first start was barely a start to begin with, and as soon as you do that you wind up watching people around you working desperately to prove themselves to the detriment of their health and at the same time while your group is being told how easy you have it, how rich you are, and how you don’t know anything about hardship.
I have no answers, but I know I have one co-worker who cries for hours on the phone with me, just let’s it all out, and I assume she does it because she’s that lonely, and there is no way she’s going to be able to maintain that for years on years. She needs to slowdown, but she’s not the only one. Just because there isn’t crying doesn’t mean the burnout isn’t there. She does has physical tells even a virtual can “see.”
But is that any different from any of the past 100+ years, since the days of the industrial revolution and the inception of the production line? Work smarter and work faster.
Isn’t part of the problem that new technology companies don’t follow the example of old industrial companies, in that there are no unions, many people aren’t even technically employees but contract workers. They are treated differently and they don’t get the benefits a unionized employee might get.