The Burnout Generation

There's this here article HERE. Go ahead and read it. It's an article about the perpetual state of burnout Millennials find themselves in.

I can see a lot of myself in it for sure. There's the undo anxiety about small stuff: errands, paperwork, opening mail. There's the lack of feeling accomplishment even when finishing an important or large task. There's the guilt surrounding the already existing feelings of helplessness for feeling so helpless.

There's not much by way of solutions presented here, only commiseration. The author seems to conclude that there is no real solution, that awareness and commiseration are the closest things to a solution there are, which only highlights the depth of the trap. Burnout is an oubliette. One can't even make enough contact with the prison to understand it.

She touches on its beginnings in childhood, how this is an old feeling, not something that started in adulthood. And she sees this as being part of the culture of aggressive helicopter parenting that predominates, itself perversely enforced by shame and guilt. I've seen friend's raise children in much the same 'understanding' way as I was, where from an early age conscientiousness is heaped upon the child, burdening them with thought. Every decision they make must be a conscientious one. If they try to escape conscientiousness through drugs, which for awhile has taken the form of screen time for the young, then it abates the immediacy of the conscientiousness but ultimately only makes things worse, just like the drunkard who drinks to forget he's a drunkard. We are so overburdened with thinking that simply being and doing are almost impossible. Thoughts intrude at every turn.

More research about spanking has come out, always in the negative, showing that spanking leads kids to express themselves through violence more often. But is the alternative really to internalize all spanking as metaphor and become mind crippling self-flagellants? And not only self-crippling, but particularly susceptible to being victimized by others. How does one come safely out of that training in adulthood? How do we train our children to be both conscientious without becoming prisoner to it, to such extent they become paralyzed?

I'm inclined to (perhaps tritely) say that the cure for this as children is freedom. Freedom to roam more, to associate more as we choose, the freedom to solve problems and dangers and scary situations on our own. There are movements like this arising--free range children-- but they are slow and often resisted, both from without and from within. Because what if your kid is the one who's kidnapped? What if letting kids roam more does lead to more disappearing children, more child predators? Maybe to save the sanity of the young it is worth it, but is it worth it if your kid is the one taken? Not only will you have to deal with the loss, but the community will not let you forget your failure. They, afterall, kept their kids safe and sound in their panopticon.

The author also brings up academics, and more could be said there. The structure of our schooling has been awry for awhile, but with the increasing emphasis on constant testing it is becoming more and more its perverse self. Math is maybe the best example here. Give a child--a smart child--a problem with just a bit of novelty and they'll throw up their hands. Despite all the time devoted toward math, these kids have no idea how to manipulate it to solve novel problems nor the belief that this is something they can even do! There's the crux. All these kids grow up, grow up, try to "adult" and find that nobody told them the whole thing was improvised, and nobody ever taught them how to improvise! If anything they had it crammed into their head that improvising, that deciding for themselves their goals, discerning for themselves what is important, was always not so subtly suppressed by their culture. And we are so clueless about this ourselves that we do not realize that implicit indoctrination can be every bit as oppressive as the explicit kind.