And Can You Really Blame Them?

"'...this younger generation wants to do everything…they want to hike. They want to live life. They want to enjoy their friends and not be worked to the bone'”:

https://www.parents.com/gen-z-is-entering-its-soft-life-era-11869008

"...today’s teens are realists—they know they don’t have that luxury. The job market—and the world—feels unstable, and it feels like there's no time to waste":

https://www.parents.com/teens-are-making-linkedin-cool-heres-why-its-catching-on-11854373

"Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure 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..."

"Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned 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 has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us..."

"Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, FAR more student debt..."

"They’d been guided closely all their lives, and they wanted me to guide them as well. They were, in a word, SCARED."

"Every graduating senior is scared, to some degree, of the future, but this was on a different level..."

"Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig..."

“'To adult' is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends...“

"...dumb, illogical decisions are a symptom of burnout. We engage in self-destructive behaviors or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list. Which helps explain one of the complaints about millennials’ work habits: They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that they’re bad at work because of just how much work they do — especially when it’s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness":

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work