The Burnout

Robert Doisneau. Les Tabliers de la Rue de Rivoli. 1978. 

Being part of the so-called burnout generation, the dreaded millennials, even in its earliest instances, is not an easy thing to come to terms with. Aging is hard for everyone, that is a truism, obviously, but it seems to be harder to us, accepting the adulthood and turning to be an adult into a verb.

What does it even mean? Getting married, having kids, taking the place of our parents in decision-making? Oh well, then I only check one out of three. There is a joke about being scared when people ask for the adult in the room, and you panic and look around for a ”more adult.”

Doing the clean-up for Christmas, I noticed a photo from my parent's wedding, with them and my aunt and uncle. Respectable adults. And it hit me: they were in their late 20s, early 30s at that time, 8 years younger than me now. I showed up when mom was 25 and dad was 32. My grandmother had her first stroke when my mother was 31. By the time mom was my age, I was going to high-school. And that brought perspective. There are people in my generation that have kids ready to got to high-school. Do they feel old? Did my parents feel old in their late 30s? Never asked, maybe I should.

Do I feel my age now? Hell, no. Sometimes I still feel like answering I am 28 when asked. It is doubtful to me too. And yet, after all these years, with two burnouts under my belt and another one creeping in, I get it. We are the burnout generation, burning bright, putting all our efforts into actions with impact. High energy, low impact activities are skipped, moved further down the line in the to-do list and innovations come for them: the dishwasher, the Roomba…

In the brief introspection about the lives of my parents as compared to my own, I still wonder how they could do things which seem unattainable for me. Mom was washing clothes weekly, outside, in a tiny washing machine, that required taking them out and rinsing them in three or four different tubs of cleaner and cleaner water. Oh well, I still need to take the clothes out of my washing machine, that rinsed and dried them. Too hard. My parents came home from work, had a meal with me and then left for the theatre or a restaurant with friends. How many times did you manage to get back home before an evening event? In my case, twice in a year, in special circumstances. I just link meetings, work, salon and doctor appointments in a stream, input in my Google Calendar, optimized to fit as much as possible. Is the world running faster? Are we busier? Why? Will I be as happy as my parents are in their 60s? Probably not, although I travel more in a year than they did in a lifetime.

It is all a matter of approaching time. We alternate periods of high activity with stretches of laying on the couch and binge-watching Game of Thrones, or playing whichever video game is cool at the moment. We are very much sinusoidal in our approach to time, and their generation was more linear.

And I did find my ”spirit animal” writer in Clarice Lispector, a millennial before her time when she wrote in The Stream of Life: 

“Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting.” 

Reading her, a part of my parents generation, felt like all this dichotomy of us versus them, my generation versus theirs is fake. They did not write blogs, but journals, they are fearing getting old and frail and missing out on things as much as we do. But we have a stranger kind of resilience, and we should take to heart more their resilience. There are millennials of all ages...

How do all these things fit into the story of a burnout? Maybe they don't. I guess I am just rambling because birthdays are hard when one still has imposter syndrome when called an adult. But there is a burnout creeping in, and perhaps that is a sign of a much-needed change in my approach to time and the activities which fill it. And I am not alone in this... I have an entire generation with me.