Like many readers, I was very moved by Anne Helen Petersen’s widely-shared Buzzfeed essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Its precision in describing the common sensation of struggling to complete an all-too-surmountable task and its lucid and cogent diagnosis of both why that sensation exists at all and why it is so common were revelations to me, as they were—judging by the responses of my friends—to many other people. I don’t intend to recapitulate Petersen’s ideas here, but I thought it might be useful to think about how we might historicize her essay’s central term. She defines it as Read more