BIG NEWS! We’re doing our first ever LIVE taping of There Are No Girls on the Internet at Unfinished Live on Sep 23 and 24th at the Shed in NYC and virtually.
Go to live.unfinished.com and use promo code TANGOTI
Have you seen the new Amazon Prime doc LulaRich, all about the rise and fall leggings scam LulaRoe? Later this week, we’ll be joined by Roberta Blevins, former LulaRoe mentor turned anti MLM advocate featured in the documentary.
But in the meantime, let’s revisit our conversation with Anne Helen Peterson, author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation to discuss some of the societal forces that lead to women being easy prey for scams.
Get Anne's book: https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Even-Millennials-Burnout-Generation/dp/0358315077
How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole : https://www.wired.com/story/how-work-became-an-inescapable-hellhole/
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work
Check out Anne’s Substack Culture Study: https://annehelen.substack.com/
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production of My Heart Radio and Unbust Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is there Are No Girls on the Internet. Here everyone, I am back and I wanted to share a few quick updates with you. I'm so excited to say that we're gonna be back with new weekly episodes for our new season, dropping in just a few weeks, and I cannot wait. But in the meantime, I just had to come back in your earbuds because I just finished that new Amazon Prime documentary Lula Rich, and I am dying to talk about it. So, for those of you who don't know, Lula Rich is a documentary all about Lula Row, the multi level marketing scheme that sold leggings and big dreams of successful entrepreneurship to millions of millennial women across the country. But basically it was too good to be true because it turned out to be a total scam. And truly, there is nothing I love more on this planet than a documentary about a scam. So later this week we'll have a very special episode featuring Verberta Blevins, the former Lula Row mentor turned multi level marketing awareness advocate featured heavily in the documentary, and hearing Roberta story and all the other women's stories in the Lula ro documentary really got me thinking about the kinds of societal conditions for women that allowed for these women to get scammed by Lula Row. You know, we basically live in a world where if you're working mom, there just is not a lot of support. It's a world of precarity and scarcity. But at the same time, we also live in our world that tells women that we need to do it all. We have to be hashtag girl losses, you know, be successful entrepreneurs, raise our families, be good partners, while also being expected to advertise how great event now we're doing. Doing all of that incompatible stuff on a picture perfect, meticulously curated Instagram feed. It is way too much, and it creates the kind of conditions that can really lead to women being easy prey for scams like Lula Row. Conditions like feeling like you have to be perfect all the time on social media or advertising or branding yourself all the time on social media, Conditions like feeling like you have to do it all, and conditions that lead to burnout. So ahead of our episode this week, breaking down lu La Row and the documentary lu La Rich. I wanted to revisit my conversation with Anne Helen Peterson, author of Can't Even How Millennials became the Burnout Generation? And if you just can't get enough with Ann and I, you can check us both out at Unfinished Live, where I will be doing my very first ever live taping of There Are No Girls on the Internet. Unfinished Live as a convening of technologists, journalists, artists and change makers in person at the Shed in New York City and happening virtually on September. It's gonna be two days of talks about how we can all use ethical tech to build a fairer economy and a stronger democracy alongside the leading mind shaping that future. I'll be there alongside other speakers like and Helen Peterson, Charlie Worzel of Galaxy Brain, Sophia Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppress, Shin and Glitch, CEO of Neil dsh Just go to live dot Unfinished dot com and use promo code tangoti for more information. This is gonna be a little bit different of an episode than what we usually do because things aren't normal, and I don't feel normal, and you probably don't feel normal either, if you're anything like me. A combination of never ending to pressing news, I r L events and connections being replaced with more time sitting in front of the computer, and the overall creeping feeling of mounting instability has left to you feeling drained, exhausted, distracted, unmotivated, and burnt out. In her viral BuzzFeed essay called how Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and Helen Peterson writes, if exhaustion means going to the point where you can't go any further, burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days, weeks, or years. Burnout isn't just one thing, it's everything. For weeks, I've had a list of things to do that I just can't seem to get done. They roll over to the next week, and I tell myself, we'll do them then, but I don't. I've had a package in the corner of my room that I've meant to return for months, my personal email inboxes where correspondence goes to die. I let emails go unreplied, and then feel awkward about how long it's been since I've replied, so they just go unanswered. While I'm working on this very episode, there's a chime an email added to my seemingly unending inbox. A work Slack message knocks for attention. In the background, a group text motification from friends wanted to confirm a zoom party for this weekend. I'm already feeling out of sorts, so I check Instagram to see if anyone left a nice comment on a picture that I posted of myself appearing to look very centered and chill that was ultimately posted to make myself feel better about my life in the first place, and all of it ends up feeling like a lot of distractions. At night, instead of going to sleep, I doom scroll social media until I pass out. I did to wake up and start the whole thing over in the morning. Is this what my life was meant to be? Like? Everything from work obligation is to leisure activities feeling like a task vying for my attention that I'll never get done. How did we get here? And Helen Peterson writes burnout and the behaviors in weight that accompany it aren't in fact something we can here by going on vacation. It's not limited to workers in acutely high stress environments. And it's not a temporary affliction. It's the millennial condition. It's our base temperature, it's our background music, it's the way things are, it's our lives. And that realization recast my recent struggles. Why can't I get this mundane stuff done because I'm burnt out? Why am I burnt out? Because I've internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea because everything and everyone in my life reinforced it explicitly and implicitly since I was young. Her essay about millennials and burnout was so impactful she turns it into a new book called Can't Even How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. In it, she describes that, famili, you're an exhausting feeling of what she calls aaron paralysis, being so overwhelmed that you're not able to get any of these tasks in life done, so you're left feeling perpetually stuck. But our generation was supposed to have it easier than our parents did, and technology was supposed to make our lives better and more fulfilled, not worse. So why are so many of us burnt out? What's going on? I am Anne Helen Peterson, and I write culture study for stub Stack. So one of the reasons why I was so excited to speak to you today is because I just really have not been like in a good place. I guess I've been feeling stuck. I've had a hundred kind of work things to do, online emails to apply to, these kind of social obligations on Zoom. That's somehow to leave me feeling like more drained than when I started. And the main thing is like nothing was getting done. You know. I would write these to do lists and like they would just carry over, you know, day by day. And when I read your excerpt of your book and Wired, which will put on the show notes, it really just struck me. You know, you start with this rundown of your digital diet, and it was this very familiar and also exhausting mid of you know, little task where you feel like you're kind of never working but at the same time always working. And so I guess my question for you is, I know that when you first started writing your buzzbe piece, that later became the book Can't Even. It was a kind of a way for you to grapple with your own, uh, you know, your own issues around burnout and feelings sort of burnt out all the time. What did that feel like for you? What did that look like for you? You know, a lot like what you just described. I mean, we weren't in the pandemic, so like I felt like social interactions weren't nourishing. They just felt like another thing on my to do list. And I felt like that to do list was never ending. Like there were the things that just gave me so much shame because they kept recycling, like one week after or another, that like owners task that really isn't probably that hard, but like just felt like insurmountable um. But then also just like little things like the piddally stuff of life that just kept always being there. And I think, you know, for me, that is the best description of how burnout feels, is that everything becomes like a task to complete instead of you know, your life to live, like there's no highs and no lows. And that's why, you know, there are lots of intersections with like depression and burnout and that sort of thing but I think that it burnout feels to me at least different insomuch as it is so related to your attitude towards work. What are the attitudes about work that you dig into? Is this idea that our jobs have to be both the filling and also quote good jobs, you know, the kind of jobs that your parents would be excited to brad about you having. And you say that social media has really had a hand in building up these fantasy jobs that we should be striving to that are simultaneously both really cool and good jobs. Yeah, I think that younger people have internalized this idea that like jobs should be cool right in some capacity, that whatever your job is, whether it's a passionate job or a job that is like you know on the outside, you're like, oh, I'm just like making deals and like having cool drinks after work. I don't know like people have. It's hard to describe a cool job, you know when you see it. And the way that a job becomes cool is oftentimes through our mediation of it through social media. Right, So that's like everything from taking pictures of your equally cool job mates, like in your cool office space too, you know, even just like taking a picture that describes like how meaningful and rewarding and fulfilling your work is. We are always representing our jobs as I think, far more fulfilling and cool than they actually are. God, that really res dates with me. Something that you write about your piece and I didn't even I did not even really notice I was doing it until I read your piece. Was the way that so not only do we have to have our jobs look cool on social media, but we also have to sort of be constantly using social media to brand ourselves in a kind of way. And so even if you are not working, what you're posting on social media, you know, if you're a journalist, you want to show you want to use Twitter to show that you're with it, that you're smart, that you're reading good things, and that you're influencing others to read good things and have good takes. But that is actually work, and so it sort of creates this weird thing where your leisure time and your work time are kind of blended because you have to be branding yourself even though that's not work that you're necessarily being paid for it. Kind of we've kind of just blurred these lines of what isn't isn't work, and that we're always sort of working and it's sucking, exhausting. Yes, well, the way I think of it is that, like work, the contemporary like feeling of work, like it just seeps into every corner of your life. And when we don't have very good boundaries about like the space between work and non work, that makes it easier for it to slip into like, Oh, I just woke up in the morning, I'm going to roll over and open up my phone and check my email right now at six am, right or I'm like feeding my kids and I'm just gonna like casually scroll through my Slack messages. It just slips into all of those places. And of course the pandemic has has made that slippery noess even you know more so, Yeah, how how do you think the pandemic has really made this worse? I know I was reading a piece earlier that said that the time that we have saved by commuting by people who you know, work at home, now we've just filled that with more work. We haven't filled that with leisure time or rest or something else. We've just losed that time. However much that time it would have been that we would be commuting to an office, that's just more work time. Now, yes, absolutely, Like everyone I know who who has recouped rated a commute time by having to be at home, they they are not like using it to Oh I'm just like having some quiet reading time, or I'm meditating, or I'm trying to be really present with my kids, you know, any of those things that like our best selves would want to devote that time too. Instead we're just pushing more work into it. And this certainly happened to me when I moved to Montana in two seventeen. Um, you know, I was like, Oh, I'm gonna have so much more time to be outside beautiful Montana, Like it's going to be amazing. I'm not going to be on the train all the time, like work from home going to be great. And instead I just worked more than I had worked in in years. So being in beautiful Big skuy Montana didn't make you feel less barred, doubt, I mean in some ways right Like I for me, one of the hard things that like daily hard things about living in the city was that like just from the way that I grew up, I grew up in rural Idaho, like being out of the city and in outdoor spaces is like very nourishing and replenishing to me, and it was so hard to find that. Like I mean, I love the parks in New York. They're great. I love parks just in general, fantastic. They are not the same as like being in the middle of nowhere and um, and it was just, you know, I didn't have a car. It was just so hard to to get into those spaces from New York. So I did have that like available you know to me in Montana on a daily basis and especially on the weekends. But at the same time, like I think the pictures that I was taking on social media of like all of this beauty, we're a way of trying to tell myself a story of how much more balanced my life was. Like you're telling the world, but you're also telling yourself a story with your social media when in truth, like I was just, um, I was just working all the time. I was traveling constantly for for my job and also for like go speak at colleges and that sort of thing. And and oftentimes I think people who do travel a ton, it's easy to frame that traveling it's like glamorous life right, Like, here I am in the in first class, and you're like the only reason you're in first classes because you travel so much that you get upgraded, and like the only difference in first classes that like your legs don't hurt by the end of the flight. Um, but again, you tell yourself a story in order to like not feel like crap about what the daily existence of your life is. Like, let's take a quick rate and we're back, So yeah, you say, um. Part of the problem is that these digital technologies, from cell phones to Apple watches, from Instagram to Slack, encourage our worst habits. They stig me are best laid plans for self preservation. They ransack our free time. They make it increasingly impossible to do things that actually ground us. They turn out run in the woods into an opportunity for self optimization. They're the neediest and most selfish entity in every interaction I have with others. They can compel us to frame experiences as we are experiencing them with future captions, and to conceive of travel as worthwild only when documented for public consumption. And my god, that really, I mean it's true. Sometimes I feel like I cannot have an experience if it is not filtered through social media, and that this sounds really fucked up, but that at times it's almost as if if it's not on social media, did it even really happen? Like if I have a lovely experience in the woods, or a lovely experience while camping or hiking, and I'm the only person who knows that it happened, did it even really happen? Yeah? Absolutely right, And of course it happened, because what actually matters is how it made you feel. But I think we've gotten so distance from that, Like the only way to know how it made us feel is how we're able to present it. Feel like, oh, I didn't get any good photos of that. You know, that's such a like it doesn't matter, right, What actually matters is the time that you spend with other people at the time you spent by yourself in like a beautiful space. But somehow for it to to seem important, to seem like it was worth our time not working, we have to make frame it in a certain way for public consumption, right. And another thing that you write about that I I really like is the way that we've kind of our hobbies now need to be framed through that kind of framework, Like you write about how you know, when you started gardening as a hobby, if you could, if you couldn't make your garden look nice enough quote unquote nice enough. For social media, it's a little it feels like you didn't really do it. And you know, I'm a podcaster. I mostly do it because that's a medium that I love, But I feel this pressure just sort of you know, be using the podcast to or using the medium to sort of like pitch myself as a product instead of just like exploring a medium that I love. And I feel like we've gotten to a place where the things that we're meant to be doing for leisure are kind of viewed through this lens of either a having them be some sort of side hustle, because you can't just you know, do something to do, but it has to be a business entity or be that we're doing it only to be consumed consumed by others on social media, and it really it kind of robs us of this opportunity for actual reflective leisure time. Yeah, totally, for I think for reflective leisure time, which you know, I oftentimes there's like different kinds of leisure and everyone has to know what it is nourishing for them, and some of us like we've forgotten, right, Like we've spent so much time mediating it that you're like, what do I actually like? Right? Like, if you if you're only doing it for yourself, what what do you want to do? And that's that's hard to recover, I think, um, and then it also it robs you of you know, reflection, just in terms of like change, you know, I thought a lot of about some of the frustration that people have about what to post about Black lives matter? Right Like, do I like, okay, so the black the black square is wrong? But what should I post? Is this being too much? Is this not being enough? Like if if I'm a black person, do people look to me to like figure out what I'm posting? And are they like weirded out if I'm not posting? There's just so much compulsion instead of people actually trying to figure out what would it actually look like to be an ally right, Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned this. I felt so much. I don't want to say anxiety. I felt so much something. Let's just use the word tention, even though that doesn't even feel like the right word in the moment that we had around Black Lives Matter and racial reckoning, a with people asking me like, oh, I posted this, do you think it's right? And then be the feeling of being sort of like like looked too for you know, a model of what people should it or shouldn't be posting. I got so much sort of tension and anxiety around that that opening opening Instagram or opening my social media just added this, you know, for an already fraught moment for me as a black woman. It added this this extra level of just tension and and anxiety that I really couldn't navigate to the point where I was just like, I'm not going to engage with this online. Like I will, I will use the platforms that I feel comfortable using. But I can't. I can't. This is I can't show up like this online. It's just too draining. Yes, yes, Like you're trying to deal with like what's actually happening in the world, and then you have to drain deal with like the secondary annoyances, like even if you're not intending to like sign on and be annoyed, Like there's just things that people are going to be doing that are like going to be, like you said, tension, like it's going to create this tension that you don't actually need. Did you feel like not signing, did you feel like you were missing something? Or did it feel good? That's a great question. It felt good only when I told myself that I wasn't going to care what people thought on social media, Like I knew what I was doing, Like I in my day job, I work for a feminist organization that was very much involved in, you know, a lot of the movement for Black Lives stuff, So I know, I know that I was like doing the work there. I know that I was showing up at protests and like helping where I could. Um. I also going out physically in protest for protest was a little bit tough for me because I'm ammunial compromise, and so that was the whole thing. And so once I told myself, you know, I know in my real life where I stand and what I'm doing, and if anybody thinks anything good or bad about what I have or have not posted on social media, that is their problem. Reminding myself of that constantly and constantly and constantly, like that was the only way that I could show up in a way that felt not shitty. Yeah, well, and that's the thing, right, like you were figuring it out, like you were actually figuring it out for yourself instead of figuring it out like visa vir reactions to other people's social media accounts. Right like that to me is really difficult for a lot of people to write out. They're so out of practice at like authentically figuring out their stance and how they want to position themselves. Does that make sense? It makes so much sense. And I think, like like you said, right now, because of the pandemic and because of the difficulty that some people have who would want to show up in person for a march or demonstration or something like and then they just physically cannot um that a lot of those messages get mixed, and so you feel a compulsion like I need to somehow signal that I want to be there, and so how do you signal it without overly signaling it? So, I mean, I think like being especially like people who are how do I put this? Um, I think spending some time with yourself to actually figure out, you know, do how do I perform in a way that actually expresses my allyhood instead of or like my devotion to this cause instead of thinking about how do I signal my devotion to this cause? Does that make sense? Definitely? Yeah, it's funny. I mean, you you put that so well. I was just I was just reading the part of your essay that's about slack and how so much of slack is like signaling that we are working and not actually doing the work. So it's like, oh, I'm thumb nothing my coworkers comment, or I'm dropping in a link. Social media has and all of these different technologies have given us ways to signal that we care about the cause, or signal that we're paying attention and checked in without actually be like doing the thing. Yeah, exactly, And that's it. Just if you take up all this time signaling instead of actually doing like that, it evacuates there, Like it evacuates your actions of any sort of intent or power I think. And so whether that's slack, like you don't have time to work because you're so busy trying to show that you're working on slack, I cannot tell you how great it is not to be on slack, Like obviously I missed like chatting with my coworkers. But when I left BuzzFeed in August, like suddenly there wasn't that thing that made me feel like, oh, I guess I should like I haven't said anything for like half an hour. I guess I should like say something. It's just compulsory, and that is I think what's oftentimes frustrating is that like, yes, I was working, I didn't need to do with thumbs up like he said yeah. And I think as as like creative professionals, it can be so fraught because you know, nobody just sits down in front of the computer and like a perfect draft spills out of you and you know in twenty minutes or something. But I do feel like the time that you spend thinking and sitting in one of your computer and like I dating or whatever, that's all part of it, but it can feel kind of rot. It gives me this like anxiety where it's like, oh, I have to like overperformed to show that I worked, that I was actually working that and not to scooping off. And it is kind of a part of me like telling myself that I'm not cooping off, even though somewhere deep down I know it. It's like this constant thing that's such an added distraction from just getting my fucking work done well. And I think we oftentimes told ourselves stories about work has to look like a certain sort of thing, right like instead of work can also look like staring into space, where it can look like taking a walk. Work can work like not working, um, and that has been really hard to especially those of us who work in creative fields. It's really hard to understand because to us, work is you are sitting in front of the computer and you are doing something on that computer screen. And it doesn't have to be that way. So I want to talk a little bit about how did we get to this place? You know, when I ready your piece, it really resonated with me. And I think the fact that your your buzz vpiece went meta viral shows that we're not alone in having these tasks that pile up, feeling this this air in paralysis when you can't get anything done. How did we how did millennials get to this place where we're all so burned out? Well, I think the way that I try to position in the book is so much of it has to do with instability, with procarity, and so that's what bonds people who are you know, working three different gig jobs right now, and people who are estensively a middle class but are super over indebted both in terms of student debt and consumer debt, and still really struggling to figure out like how am I going to cover rent next month? Or how am I going to find childcare next month? And the difference, of course, is that middle class people can oftentimes throw money at a problem and do have some some sort of a safety net either in terms of family bonds, like they can you know, you could always move back into that basement, and not everyone has that. But still, what we're trying to do is keep trading water, and so the energy required to keep trading water oftentimes that means like feeling like you have to work all the time. That means taking your leisure time and optimizing it or monetizing it in some way. And that also means throwing a lot of time at parenting because you're trying to reproduce your own semblance of stability for the next generation. Yeah, it's funny. I know that you've written about the ways that parenting has a lot to do with millennial burn out, and something I found so interesting is how this cuts across raith and class lines. It just looks differently for different people, depending on their background and situations. I know, for me, you know, we grew up pretty comfortably, but my mom was the first person in her family to go to college. We grew up in a black, Southern family. And for them, they were like, you know, we want our kids to not you know, quote unquote become statistics. And the way to get the way to achieve that is through college and a stable job. And so the same way the upper middle class white parent who was interested in their kid going to an ivy league college, it's sort of the same, even though the cultural and racial, you know, reasonings for getting there are different, it's sort of the same thing. Where this parenting then sets kids up for this idea that like the most important thing is getting a stable job, going to college, that pathway, and it really can lead to kids being raised almost as little adults. Yeah, totally, And a lot of that is motivated. And I try to do this a bit in the book. It's it is, as you said, like, it's motivated by not wanting your kids to take a step back from where you've gone, right and our parents generation, uh, you know, a lot of them had reached that that middle class stability some semblance of that middle class stability, sometimes for the first time in their family history. And sometimes that was through going to college and getting a job after that, and sometimes it was through like getting a good union job and having stability that way. And so the goal is, Okay, well, I don't want my kids to fall back from where I've come, and so you try to imprint all of these strategies for success instability, and and you know sometimes too and this I found this in my interviews, like sometimes people's parents didn't give a ship right, like they were like, whatever, you'll figure it out, But the kids themselves really picked up through osmosis, you know, from their kids, their peers, from their peers, parents, from their teachers, that that was the only way that they had to turn themselves into a walking resume, even if their parents didn't care. Yeah, I definitely feel that this is like reinforced both explicitly and implicitly, Like we're just told that this is how you're meant to live life, like you're meant to your meant your job is meant to be your every thing. Your identity should be this job, and you should be working seven when you're not working. You should be feeling guilty about networking or you know, turn whatever. You know, if you if you're a bake if you like enjoy cooking on the weekends, that should be a business or an Instagram page or something that you can never just not be you should never be not optimized for working or something that looks like working. Yeah, and well, and think about that though, Like what was it you know, my uh, like my mom would make bread on the weekends, but she wasn't like, oh, I need to try to like hustle on the side to like make a couple of extra dollars. And what it was is that like they were able to, you know, pay off my dad's student loans, Like they were able to buy a house in North Idaho. Like they weren't struggling constantly to cover the costs of raising a family, Whereas because of incredible increases in the cost of living, the cost of childcare, the cost of healthcare, so many families that have like dual income streams are still struggling and are like, Okay, I gotta make an extra fifty dollars every weekend by making bread. Yeah, that's something that I think you do a nice job. Of illustrating is how in our generation, millennials and older millennials, like a lot of us graduated into the Great Recession, you know, the dot com burst, now the instability of COVID. I feel, like so many of us, we have never had the luxury of making choices about our life based on security. Like every choice, every professional choice I've made, has been based on scarcities and based on my back is against the wall. Some calamity is happening that's completely out of my control, and I have to make my professional choices based on this scarcity. And we have no idea sort of what it looks like to be making a life at a time of stability. I don't even really I can't even like grasp that. It's so true. And I think, like, especially people who work in more creative fields, like there's this expectation to that, like the company you work for is going to fold, Like you know, you're not going to have any sort of stable job, Like you can't expect a job to endure in the way that a lot of our parents like started one job and stayed at that job for many decades, or like my grandfather worked at one company his entire life, right, um, And I think that that over our chain procarity so much of it, you know, it comes from entering into the economy as adults during the first Great Recession and then also just like expecting the other shoe to drop. Like most millennials I know are not surprised by the pandemic. They're like, we're just waiting for everything to collapse. And to me, that shows a psychology that is conditioned towards procarity, right, It's conditioned towards never feeling like you have a stability. And what that does I think over the course of you know, many millions of people over the course of a generation. And I think it's going to affect gen z as well. Is it it makes it hard to to be confident, to experiment, to take risks, you know, like when people talk about what having a universal basic income does, or even having health insurance that's not tied to employment. Is what it does is it allows you to make decisions that make life easier for you, right, that make it so that you can find a job that doesn't feel shitty and exploited of um. And it allows you to go back to school if you want to. You know, there are all sorts of things that having even just that modicum of stability permits for people, and we are so deeply unfamiliar with that. So how do we get to a place where instability is not the internalized norm for an entire generation? I mean, create a lot more social safety nets. So the big thing that's changed between our parents and grandparents generation and now is that so many of those social safety nets have been eroded. And I'm talking about like, uh, you know, pretty basic things like the fact that we have legislators have just largely defunded so much funding for public education and so like because you have so much student debt that makes it harder to you know, if you lose a job, you're like, well gonna default on these loans, right, But then also just thinking about things like um funding for some funding that has never existed, but funding for things like universal pre k or even before pre k uh mandatory paternity leave, universal health care, like things that are not alien to most developed countries across the world. Like these are things that actually make life feel like you're not conditioned to precarity. But I think that we are so obsessed with this myth of the individual and somehow if the individual can work harder, then you'll get out of precarity. But this is why millennials are having these sort of existential crisis. So myself included, is you get to this point if you're late thirties, right, like the oldest millennials are thirty nine and forty, and you're like, wait, I thought by this point I would have found some stability, And you're like, wait a second, like I have kids, or I have been you know, been in the workforce for almost twenty years, Like where's that stability? Why isn't it here yet, and becoming deeply disillusioned and saying like, well, this is just broken. We need to fix this entirely. Oh my gosh. It's like I I go back and watch these movies that I loved in the nineties when I when I watched Someone I was young, and all of the main characters need to be like twenty five and having some like fantastic job or like having a lot of existential dread that fact by the fact that they're not, you know, but they're turning twenty eight and they don't have their life together. And here I am in my mid thirties thinking like like, oh, we thought we were gonna have stable jobs, stable partner's own houses by the town. We we're like twenty five. That like, that was the framework we were working with. What is the one? Isn't it like my best friend's wedding? There? So funny? So funny? Oh more, after a quick right, let's get right back to it. The millennial generation is one of the first generations where it's not a given that we'll have things better than our parents had it. And yet there was this attitude where millennials were all lazy or entitled little brats, were all whiners. How do we combat those attitudes? Well? I do think that the messaging is kind of shifted, and part of that is, of course that millennials are now like at the helmet a lot of different publications, but just the idea that like millennials have kind of been screwed is becoming more are uh popular, I think. But then at the same time, I think a lot of it has to do or the way that we can change minds about this is actually having conversations with people who are you know, our relatives who are are here, like people who are older than us, that we can actually feel like we can have a real conversation with about like, here's tell me about what it was like when you had worked your way through college, which is always the common refrain, right, which is like, I don't know why you took out all the student debt. I managed to work my way through college. And you're like, okay, so how much did you make a semester? How many hours did you work? And then you're like, and here's how many hours someone would have to work in order to work their way through a state college today, right, And those things don't add up. But sometimes you need to sit someone down and be like, here's how things have substantively changed, and like you can do it without turning it into like a math lecture, but you can be like, here's how the cost of living hasn't changed, right, like, or like the ore raises haven't um been accompanied by changes in for cost of living or even inflation that sort of thing. But you know, one of the things that I tried to do a little bit was create a little bit of empathy by being like, you know, boomers were burnt out in some capacity too, because they had grown up in this time of unprecedented economic stability, and then as they entered the job market in the nineties seventies, they experienced those first waves supercarity, and we're responding to them and so like if anything, you know, part of the reason boomers and millennials have such a difficult relationship is because I think we are pretty similar in a lot of foundational ways. I think that's a good point. I think coming come having it come down to empathy and having real conversations about what things looked like because I don't know. I think about folks who are you know, the generation you know after me, and I want them to know we had a hard time. I don't want them to feel as if I want them to know that if they are struggling to figure it out, that we also struggled to figure it out. I don't want them to feel like they're alone, or that they're a whiner, or that they're you know, they make their they have some sort of individual failing if they can't figure it out, because I do think every generation has has their issues with that totally well. And I'm seeing, you know, two different kind of discourses come out of gen Z and one of them is like, you guys were sold a false bill of goods we're going to reject that bill of goods. Right, It's like we actually think you can like have a different sort of life, that college maybe isn't the most important thing in the world, that we can do something about climate change, that you know, everything isn't interractable. So and I'm always hurted by it, by that posture. But then I also see some some like stuff that's like, oh my gosh, why are millennials such whiner? Right, Like they just need a work harder? And I'm like, don't you dare? So I think hopefully by creating not just empathy but actual solidarity, right, being like, it doesn't have to be this way for us, It doesn't have to be this way for you either. How can we work together to change it? You make this point a lot on your work that I love that sometimes when we feel like we don't have a lot of power, leaning into the collective, whether it's joining a union, which I know more and more young people are supportive of, or just sharing honest experiences with each other can really be the antidote to some of the problems that you lay out, you know, the collective, you know, feeling like you're part of the United collective can really make you feel a lot more powerful and less alone totally. And it doesn't fix everything, but it does make you feel like, I mean, this is the word, right, it makes you feel a little less alone, like it makes you feel like you're not just fighting this problem on your own. So much of the writing and content that I see around burnout, particularly geared toward women, will always have some sort of individual little thing that like, oh, this is going to be the silver bullet or the magic bullet that that helps you figure it out. So whether it's using your meditation app or you know, doing your self care manicure, or you know, quit your nine to five and be your own girl boss. And I am my own boss, and I can tell you that my boss sucks. Working for her is not great all the time, you know. And I can't think, you know, it's it's not these individual choices or actions that are going to save us from something that is systemic, that is that is bigger than us. And you know, I think the real issue is capitalism, you know. And I guess my question is how a how do we get to a place where we unlearn that it's an like we are doing something wrong individually. If we are feeling burnt out and be how can we go forward knowing that the real issue is so much bigger than us, you know, it's funny. So there was a critique of the book that was, like, this book doesn't talk enough about therapy, right, And I get it because I do think that a lot of the neuroses that millennials have developed, a lot of them are things that like we need to work through on the personal level, um, through therapy if possible, even though therapy is not accessible to so many people. Um. But I also think that, like we've been taught oftentimes that like, oh, if you have a problem with this work play scenario, that's a personal problem, instead of thinking about like, oh, well everyone I work with has this problem with this workplace, so maybe it's a workplace problem, right, like, or all of these people feel the same way in society right now. Instead of that being a personal problem, it's societal problem. It's not something that you can just work through on your own. And also, almost every millennial I know who burnt out, who is burnt out, is either going to therapy or has been going to therapy. Right, It's not like therapy, it's going to solve those larger issues as well. And so what we have to think about is what are these systems that are that are making everything so sucky? Right? Like? What are what are the systems that make the scenario that leads us to burn out? And I'm hardened actually by even just like the willingness for us to say things like capitalism allowed, Like even ten years ago, it was kind of like a like third rail, like oh are you a socialist? Like, oh, are you part of the occupying movement to like talk about capitalism as this problem? Whereas now, like I mean, in part of it, I think is the success of memes and even just like all over TikTok and Twitter, like you see a very clear indictment of capitalism as the source of a lot of our ills. And I think that, like you know, regardless of my personal politics, which are like much more radical than anything that I can see us implementing in the United States in our lifetime, I do think that there are ways to make capitalism work for the worker, and that that is possible, and that there are plans or policy suggestions that can make that possible and we can do it. The big first step is regime change. So even though it's hokey to say, like we have to vote, like we have to resume change, and then we have to make some big changes and be willing to make ourselves amenable to those changes, not just incremental ones, but things that might feel scary, um, because they're going to reorganize our lives, and I think for the better. So I might have to ask, you know, in your in the excerpts that I read, you talked about feeling so burnt out and how writing that BuzzFeed piece was in a in a way trying to kind of come to terms with that. How has that how has that looked like for your personal journey? Are you still feeling that way where you give me give me a check in, Well, I'm pretty burnt out in the moment, I think because I'm trying to wrestle starting like this newsletter that I'm doing is basically like be made my own shitty boss, like you said, but then also letting getting this book out into the world, which requires a lot of talking about the book, which I find incredibly gratifying, but it also is time right um. And and then trying to think to the future about other big projects like whether that's books or whatever. And it was all really amplified for me a couple of weeks ago when the smoke got so bad out here in the West and I realized that, like the one release valve that I had cultivated over the course of just general work stress but also like COVID and quarantine stress, was being able to go outside. And when that was taken away from me for a week, I was just like, I I have nothing, Like I'm collapsing under the weight of this this house of cards that I've built for myself. And I think that drove home to me, like just how fragile things were, Like I've the balance was in my life of trying to keep working and some sort of release uh at the same time. But I mean the thing for myself like, no, of course I'm not cure to burnout. But what I can do is I can recognize burnout behaviors more easily. They can try to like see them for what they are and just kind of not judge them, but be like, Okay, how can I maybe shift a couple of things just quietly in my life to to try to change that um And you know, talking about it definitely makes it feel better. I agree. I have to tell you you're You're writing and burnout made me feel you know. We talked about the collective and feeling less alone. Just knowing that I'm not the only person who feels such incredible shame around my atrocious inbox or my inability to just get simple ship done, or the package that's been in the back of my car for six months. Just knowing that it's not just me really gave me the power to just start thinking about it and talking about it honestly, like like, I really you feel like you opened up that space for so many people, myself included to do that. So I'm so grateful for your work. Yeah, I think it was something that a lot of us were ashamed of for a long time. It's like we there was this idea that you had to somehow be like doing all the ship right, like that you had to like keeping it all be keeping it all together at all times. And uh, you know, even the people who are like, oh, I'm so authentic on Instagram or whatever like that is such a performance of like messiness, Like it's not actual messiness or vulnerability. And so I just hope that we can continue to have this conversation in all of the different directions it takes us, and also continue to be really piste off about it because I want to use that anger, uh and use it to push us towards change. Nothing we're dealing with right now is normal. So if you're feeling burnt out or like you can't get anything done or you can't find any motivation, that's okay. One of us are operating under normal circumstances, and you shouldn't expect yourself to perform like we are. How have you been dealing with burnout? Hit us up at Hello at tangodi dot com and let us know if you're interested in issues like culture and tech and media, and you probably are. If you're listening to this podcast, don't miss Unfinished Live. You can hear Anne Helen Peterson in conversation with Charlie Worzel on the future of work, Sophia Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression, on equity and tech, Casey Newton on the Creator Academy, and Neil Dash with a rallying cry for a free digital future. All Out Unfinished Live September happening live at the Shed in New York and for those of you who can't attend in person, don't worryry, We got you. The talks on live podcasts, including our very first ever live Tangoti taping, will be available to stream virtually as well. It's a great opportunity to learn about how we can all use ethical tech to build a fairer economy and a stronger democracy, alongside the leading mind shaping that future. The in person experience includes two days of talk by leading thinkers, live podcast recordings like my Own, an interactive audio experiment, clubhouse conversations on I'm mers of art, installation, networking opportunities, and more. Just go to a live dot unfinished dot com and use promo code tangodi. That's t A N G O T I and I cannot wait to see all there got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello at tangodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangodi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me bridget tod It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts, And then I have to w