There’s always a basket full of laundry and odd socks at the top of my stairs. The odd socks have lived there for months and the clothes in the basket get replaced with new clothes that I have folded – it’s as if the basket has become the family’s communal closet and we don’t have wardrobes I can easily slip the folded laundry into.
It could take me five minutes to put away the clothes when I fold them and maybe 10 minutes to deal with the odd socks, but I never get around to it. It seems like too big a job, like cleaning the gutters or decluttering the garage.
The basket has come to symbolise, for me at least, my failure as a working mother. And every time I ascend the stairs it’s there – a subtle reminder of the things on my to-do list that are so mundane yet mentally draining and therefore, basically undoable.
The basket, it turns out, is symptomatic of my millennial burnout – the condition that American wrote about earlier this year when she realised that she, like many others of her generation, was struggling to keep up with day-to-day tasks because of the physical and mental exhaustion of being wired to work all the time. As she saw it, life had always been hard, but our constantly ‘on’ generation – the one that was educated to believe it could achieve anything – was not “equipped to deal with the particular ways it’s been hard for us”.
Ironically, I couldn’t finish Petersen’s article. I got about three quarters of the way when my brain stopped paying attention. I found it bizarre: I was interested in the subject matter and there were no other distractions in sight, and I was someone who had spent her teens and early 20s reading long-form features in magazines and devouring entire novels in one day. Where was my focus?
Petersen wrote about millennials in a way that resonated with the internet: within days, friends were using the term ‘millennial burnout’ in conversations and hashtags, and Buzzfeed followed up with a piece on what it looks like for different people; within weeks follow-up stories appeared on some of the world’s most popular mastheads, including , , and .
I suddenly felt seen. Petersen’s case studies highlighted how vastly different our lives were to our predecessors. We’re living and working at a time where property is becoming out of reach, where we seek (often costly) higher degrees to stay abreast of workplaces that are changing while other jobs become obsolete, where the holistic approach we have to life competes for the hours we have in the day, and where information on how to be, act, live and eat better is coming at us faster than ever before. But no matter how much we meditate or how much celery juice we drink, we’re still wired.
And it’s affecting a lot more than our to-do list, with research from the American Medical Association revealing that we have higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide thanks to our quest for perfectionism, driven in part by our use of social media, which compels us to curate a perfect life.
Reading about millennial burnout made me feel like less of a failure, but in some way, it further isolated me from asking for help. This wasn’t a condition my doctor was going to get. My father-in-law wasn’t going to understand it when I explained to him – yet again – that I didn’t have any new writing in the works. And it was another thing my migrant parents weren’t going to understand.
I had, in my early 20s, tried to articulate what depression was to my mother. But she had looked at me like I was strange, and I never opened my mouth about it again. There was no word for depression in our Arabic language, and how does one explain to a migrant parent – one born in a poor village, who didn’t get to finish school, who fled war for a strange land – that they had depression? What did I have to feel depressed about?
When my mother comes over, I feel the fear of God. Her home was always immaculate – my mother even mopped the cement floor in our backyard. At mine, there are toys, clothes and books scattered on the coffee table, piles of papers on my desk and children’s mouths smeared with chocolate.
Within half an hour of her arrival the house is spotless. Her voice commands the kind of attention and perfectionism I never get from my children, and she gets into the nooks and crannies – cleaning under the couches, polishing the door knobs and wiping down grout. But I never let her go upstairs, because the basket would be my ultimate undoing.
Last year, a study revealed that millennials would be the first generation to have lower health in middle age than their parents, with stagnating wages, emotional pressure and job concerns leading to a higher risk of cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Those are things I might be able to explain to her, but millennial burnout? Just like depression, there’s no word for that in Arabic, making it just one other thing that I have to deal with on my own.
Being consciously aware of it, however, has been the next best thing. While I can’t control the economic climate or the way my industry changes, I can control my response to it. I won’t be drinking celery juice, but I’ve found my way to slow living podcasts, understanding the concept ofand in summer and social media timeouts. These are things my parents’ generation didn’t necessarily have to think about, because it came naturally to their way of life.
I can only hope that my social media timeout will lead me to finally tackling that basket.
Sarah Ayoub is a freelance writer, follow her on Twitter at
