Transcript | Ep. 128: Burnout with Anne Helen Petersen

Anne: I was just exhausted. And then after the midterms, I took a little bit of time off and I was like, OK, we're good. Like I took like three days. I was like, I got a massage. I got a facial. We're good. I was not good.

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Caroline: Hey y’all, and welcome to Unladylike. I’m Caroline.

Cristen: I’m Cristen. Before we get into today's episode, we have a favor to ask you unladies. If you haven't already, would y'all do us the honor of rating and reviewing Unladylike on Apple Podcasts? It's quick and easy to do, and it makes a HUGE difference. Thank you thank you for the support, and with that outta the way, Caroline, tell the dear people who we're talking to today

Caroline: We're talking to one of our all-time favorite writers and thinkers

Anne: My name is Anne Helen Peterson. And people always ask if I go by Anne Helen like I'm Southern, I'm it's Anne, Annie, whatever. I just was told when I was an academic that I should use all three names to distinguish myself.

Cristen: I was going to ask Anne if she prefers Anne Helen, which must've been my Southern instinct coming out.

Caroline: I was wondering TOO! You and I have been following Anne and her brilliant writing ever since she first made a name for herself as a PhD expert in celebrity and Hollywood gossip. She then left academia for Buzzfeed as a staff writer and now writes a weekly Substack newsletter called Culture Study.

Cristen: We wanted to talk to Anne about an experience that she's spent the past few years reporting on and that you and I — and many unladies — can relate to. And that is burnout.

Caroline: Yeah, back in 2017, Anne was working at Buzzfeed at a breakneck pace. She was filing multiple stories a week. Hustling to the point that the line between working and not working basically disappeared.

Cristen: Suddenly, small things like running errands and going to the post office felt impossible to cross off her to-do list. Tackling bigger projects also began taking an emotional toll.

Caroline: Long story short, Anne was burnt out. So, forever the researcher and academic, she decided to look more closely at what burnout is, what causes it and why it seemed to be happening to her.

Cristen: What Anne uncovered was a widespread problem that all the facials and massages in the world couldn't solve. Her reporting turned into a viral Buzzfeed article, which in turn inspired her book titled Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.

Anne: I think that the way that we think about burnout now is best described as this, like continuous fatigue that doesn't seem to stop and creates a new set of symptoms that are different than just like being really tired after a hard week at work. So to me, the best metaphor for it has always been like, you are running, running, running, you hit the wall. You're like, I can't go on any further. And then you scale the wall and you keep going. That sort of exhaustion.

Caroline: So today, Anne's breaking down millennial burnout and what’s led to our collective exhaustion.

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Caroline: So Anne, your research and reporting on millennial burnout was initially inspired by something your Buzzfeed editor observed in late 2017. They were like, 'hey Anne, I think you might be burned out.' So what was going on in your life at the time?

Anne: I was traveling constantly for work. This is when I was reporting just a ton. And I remember I had to actually like this is not in the article, but I had the experienced a sort of like the three week punch of I had been in Austin for ostensibly a vacation and had been called on a Saturday afternoon to respond to a mass shooting that had happened outside of San Antonio since the Sutherland Springs shooting. And even though it was my vacation, you know, I was the person that was closest to it. I got in a car and drove there and spent the next two days talking with the family members of victims. And then I got on a plane and I flew to southern Utah, where I spent a week in this tiny little border town, which is home to a bunch of women who escaped a fundamentalist Mormon sect and had returned to try to remake their lives after escaping from a life of polygamy and abuse. And then I also, while it was while I was there, I wrote an article about Armie Hammer and that sparked a ton of a ton of online abuse. And then also I was covering the midterms. Right. I was writing about the midterms and profiling different candidates and tracking different candidates. And I was just exhausted. And I the things that I was writing weren't coming out the way that I wanted them to come out. And my editors’ normal suggestions about how to make them better elicited very strong reactions from me. I was crying with my editors, which is not a typical reaction on my part, like not a way that I am in my work persona. And I think that that signaled to them something larger was happening. And my impulse when I don't understand something and, you know, this goes back to academia and also I think to journalism is I try to try to research it.

Cristen: When that editor initially suggested, like, hey, you might be burned out, what was your first instinct?

Anne: Well, my first instinct was like, no way. Right? Like burnout was something that happened to foreign correspondents and emergency room doctors. Like that was how I understood burnout. And that was the sort of person who deserved the designation of burnout, And so I denied that I resisted it. And I wanted to actually figure out what was going on with me, which I thought was errand paralysis. But I think as I as I dug into trying to think about errand paralysis, it became clear that this was about working all the time and why I felt like I had to work all the time and what was going on there and how that expanded and extended to, I think, other millennial's of my life who had experienced something similar and different attitudes that were ingrained in us about work and about precarity.

Caroline: So after you have the reaction of like, oh, hell no, no way, I'm not burned out, that's something for other people. You said that you went down this research rabbit hole. What were you trying to figure out and what did that research illuminate for you?

Anne: I think I was really just trying to figure out some sort of sociological and psychological understanding for why I couldn't take my boots to the cobbler, which was just like a five minute errand. You know, this wasn't even like it was in New York where errands are always a pain. This was like a like an actual five minute drive that required very easy parking. And I think what I discovered a lot of it was to do with task avoidance and how mental overload makes it difficult to make what otherwise seem like straightforward decisions. So even something like taking my dogs on the walk, I wanted to optimize that time by listening to a podcast that would inform how I did my work. And so I had to really do a lot of work in thinking through, like, what if not everything was available to work, and what if actually having time away from work made me a better worker? I don't want to I really want to resist the idea that, like all of the anti-burnout work that we're doing is ultimately in service to making us better workers, which is kind of like how tech companies tell people to get into meditation so that they can concentrate better and be better workers. But at the same time, I think that what I want to do is like be intentional about when I'm working. I want to be a good worker and when I'm not working, I want to be good at not working.

Caroline Pulling back a bit, can you give us the kind of burnout 101 definition?

Anne: Oh big question. I think that the way that we think about it right now is it's not just a workplace affliction or occupational affliction. I think that particularly in the American context, it's much more of this exhaustion with all corners of your life. And I argue that a lot of that is fueled not just by the dynamics within someone's workplace or even within their family, but by this feeling of overarching precarity that, like the shoe is always about to drop, like your family isn't stable, even if you consider yourself middle class, like there's just one catastrophe away from total ruin.

Cristen: So to tease it apart a little bit more too, how how do you distinguish burnout from sheer exhaustion and or depression or anxiety?

Anne: I think that it's often really intertwined with anxiety and depression. And I think that people have to talk with mental health professionals in order to get a better handle on how that's working in their own lives. For me, a lot of it manifests in thinking about things in my life as part of this long to do list, right, everything flattens into another thing that you have to get done and that to do list endlessly recycles. At the peak of different periods of burnout for me. I really recognize it in not being able to find any sort of joy in things that I normally really like to do. And I mean that like like reading a book. When I'm really burnt out I'll have a stack of fiction books that I'm incredibly excited to read right at my bed stand, but I feel too tired to even open the book and start it and instead find myself just endlessly scrolling Instagram. To me, that's that's a burnout behavior. And I also think that it manifests in just like just like a weariness. Right. That like feels like there's no catharsis that you can recover from that changes the dynamic. Like, I remember in college or in high school, you would study so hard for the test you would just like really, really grind yourself into the ground studying. And then you would take a midterm or final hand in that paper and then collapse. Right? Like your body would get sick because you had been holding off on the immune system for so long and you would rest you would have a week, two weeks, like you were actually experiencing recovery. And I think the contemporary adult experience has very, very little space for actual catharsis and rest.

Cristen: Are there any groups that experience that precarity the most like who is, I guess, the most burned out?

Anne: Well, I think that it's really difficult to talk about this in a comparative way because there's a desire to not make this into the burn out Olympics, right? But yeah, like the burn out that a middle class person experiences, like, it's still sucks, right? But it's a very different burn out than not knowing what your housing situation is going to be. Right? Like, if you don't if you actually don't know where you and your kids are going to stay next week, that creates a different sort of anxiety and burnout and continual fear and an inability to deal with larger decisions than being like, I feel this ennui, that my life is like a Ferris wheel of sameness. And I don't know if I should get this other midsize SUV instead of this mid-sized SUV, do you know what I mean?

Cristen: Mhm, mhm yeah sort of crossing the line from from burnout to survival.

Anne: Yes. And they're related right they’re they're related through this through line of precarity, but they are fundamentally different characteristics. And I also think that something like if you for people of color, for people who are any sort of targeted or marginalized group, they are dealing with the continual labor of just surviving in their bodies from day to day. And that is an additional layer of burnout that I think, you know, if someone is white and middle class and cis gendered, like they're they're not worried about that on a daily basis.

Cristen: At what point in this whole process did you also start reflecting on sort of your earlier path, maybe into burnout in childhood as a very studious teen?

Anne: Yeah, I mean what I was looking at specifically with my history was not only like my type A personality and perfectionist impulses as a young child. Yeah, I mean, but I think I was even more shaped by where I and where a lot of millennials were placed in relationship to the Great Recession in terms of graduating from high school or college or grad school into the Great Recession, and having the dynamics that shaped our financial lives and our parents financial lives really trickle down. Like there's all these lessons about what sort of work you should do for free, what sort of work you should do in order to not be the person who's laid off or to to find some sort of stability. I And a lot of the rhetoric and the conversations and the advice that was given to millennials, particularly in the 2000s and especially during the Great Recession, was grad school will give you that stability, right? Go to grad school. It'll look good on your resume, and go to grad school, it'll help get you a job, go to grad school because you're smart and that's what you should do. And I think that there was little conversation about the massive amounts of debts that would accrue around people and also about the fact that there is no guarantee that these degrees will do anything for your job prospects. But I think when you are desperate for some sort of sure thing that will put you on that route to stability, we cling to something that seems to promise it. And so as it's sinking into the water, I think we're having more and more conversations about the reality of that debt and what these degrees can and cannot do. But it doesn't seem like it's become a mainstream conversation. I still get hundreds of emails every year asking for advice about whether or not someone should go to grad school. I still get hundreds of emails every year asking for advice about whether or not someone should go to grad school.

Caroline: What do you say?

Anne: No! Well, here's what I say, if you come from family money and you will not be have to take out any sort of money, any at all or if you are in a program that is fully funded and not just fully funded in terms of like we will give you a tuition remission, but fully funded, as in, you will not have to take out loans in order to participate in this program. Also you were thinking clearly about taking three to eight years of your life and starting a life after that and being very honest with the fact that, like getting a Ph.D. in English, the chances of you getting a job as an English professor are vanishingly small. And even though as a millennial or a gen Z person, you have been taught your entire life that if you just work hard enough, you will prove to be the exception and the person who wins in those vanishingly small odds, it's just not the case, right.

Cristen: Yeah, this is just like reawakening my my early to mid 20s rage at the realization that meritocracy in the workplace is not a thing.

Anne: I really, really thought that like, yes, the chances are so small that I'll get a job from this, but if I just work harder then I will buck the trend. I will be the exception, and I think when people come to the realization that that's not the case, whatever point that that realization arrives, I think for some people it arrives when they're 7 and some people it takes until they're 57. And watching what's happening with their kids or their grandkids, it's foundation shaking. And it's just astounding to me that this myth of meritocracy still remains so foundational to our understanding of the way things work, even when so many examples suggest otherwise.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break.

Cristen: When we come back, Anne connects the dots between girl bossing and burning out.

Caroline: Don’t go away!

[stinger]

Cristen: We’re back with Anne Helen Petersen.

Caroline: So obviously Anne, the idea of burnout is not new. And we were doing a little reading and found that the term burnout was originally coined in the 70s to describe a personal drain associated with “helping professions” — things like medicine and social work. And of course, now we know that it can affect all sorts of workers. So why do you describe millennial burnout in particular as a “slow motion crisis”?

Anne: Well, I think that a lot of it has to do with wealth accumulation, which sounds like a big and like a weird word to talk about, we're talking about burnout, but, you know, a lot of the stats on the ways in which millennials are screwed are things about the fact, like how behind millennials are as a generation in terms of savings, in terms of purchasing things like homes that turn into assets, in terms of mountains of student debt. So if something was like an immediate crisis, it would be everyone defaulting on their student loans at once. And instead, it's just people's lives and opportunities being slowly squeezed in painful ways, but in slow ways and often invisible ways by that debt, by that lack of, the wealth iceberg that accumulates underneath your life and makes life feel stable, both your current life and your future life. Most millennials I know just kind of assume that they're going to work until they die. Retirement feels like something that's unavailable.

Caroline: Yeah, I literally tell my financial adviser she's asks like what goals do you have, what fears do you have? And I my main goal is I just don't want to be homeless when I'm old. That's so depressing to say, but it's.

Anne: Yes, right. like that's something that again - So my granddad was like a classic boomer in terms of or classic greatest generation, in terms of got a job when he graduated from college after being in the military and bought a house using the GI Bill and then worked at his job. He was an accountant at 3M in Minnesota for the next 30 years of his life and then retired with a pension at age 55, and never had to worry about being homeless, right. He had to worry about a lot of other things in terms of like, am I going to die from smoking four packs of cigarettes a day? But he did not have to worry about being homeless or about am I going to have health care? What's going to happen to me if I get dementia, which he did. He got dementia, but he was cared for because he had all of these various safety nets that were the product of his time and his employment. And that is something that I think a lot of us are terrified of.

Cristen: Well one thing that we learn about in your book is how, right after World War II when your granddad is setting up his career, we see the rise of these low-cost office temp workers called “Kelly Girls”, like that was actually their brand name of these temp workers. And they became super popular, there were tens of thousands of them temping across the country by the 70s. So can you tell us about the Kelly Girl model and how it set the stage for our current gig economy hellscape?

Anne: Kelly girls are so fascinating. And the really interesting thing about these temp girls is that they were considered they were conceived of as a way for companies to not hire as many people as they needed to hire. But if a secretary, let's say, went on maternity leave, they could hire a temp and that temp wouldn't have to be paid and be brought into the pension plan and have the benefits that actual employees of the company would have. They were thought of, as, you know, essentially like plug and play replacements short term that you didn't have to treat as workers. Right. And the rhetoric and the advertising around these workers made that explicit. They were like, what if there was a worker who was never sick, who you never had to pay for time off, never took vacation, who you didn't have to pay for their health care? And who you didn't really have to pay that much because it's just a bunch of housewives who are doing this for pin money, pin money is a code, a phrase used at the time for kind of like spending money, like allowance money. And so it was encouraging these companies to not think of these women as traditional laborers and what happened was they were so popular, they were so effective that that ethos has gradually expanded over the course of the last 40, 50 years to apply to the way that we think of all sorts of subcontractors, like you look at it someplace like Amazon or Apple or Google, where there are significant percentages of the company, upwards of up to 50 percent that are actually subcontractors. They're not employees. And what that does is it gives the company itself a mode of reason, an ability to not treat them as workers, they are subcontracted, they they're of a different classification.

Cristen: Yeah, I like how it sounds like with the Kelly Girl advertisements, they were just not so subtly saying like, “Hey, do you need a housewife at the office? Because she'll do anything, not complain and you don't have to pay her.”

Anne: Yeah well, and that I mean, it's so crucial, right, that it was women because it was extending this preexisting understanding that women's labor is it's OK to uncompensate or to poorly compensate women for their labor. And so if you have a Kelly girl that's coming in like they're just you know, they're just filling in just for fun. The vast majority of people who are doing this temp work, they weren't bored housewives. They were people who actually needed the money. Right. Either to support their families as well as their husband's income or single mothers or people whose husbands had died for you know, there's all sorts of reasons why people actually needed this money. But this is a lie that people bought into in order to justify poor compensation and poor treatment.

Cristen: Talking about the gig economy and hustling, inevitably, it makes me think about the girl boss. And I'm wondering from your vantage point how or whether girl boss culture and burnout intersect.

Anne: I think that girl boss culture is our contemporary iteration of second wave feminists who were the first in their field in terms of like the first to become a chemistry professor. The first to become a family physician in Idaho. Right. Like just people who were trailblazers in some regard and who had to put up with a bunch of crap and essentially stay quiet about it, or adopt the same practices of the dominant culture, which was a masculine and white culture in order to blend in. And so now you have women who are the first to really publicly and flamboyantly run companies. Right. To be on the cover of Forbes magazines, this sort of thing. Like, yes, there have been women CEOs for for decades, but now there are more and more women people who are trying to be like startup founders like do what men do and the way that they can succeed is oftentimes by doing it with the same sort of shitty behavior as the male CEOs before. And the other thing that they can do is distinguish themselves by working all the time. So I think a lot about the CEO of Yahoo!, who like, made a point of coming back after two weeks, if even that from her maternity leave, as evidence of the fact that, like, she doesn't need to take any more leave than a male CEO. So instead of trying to advocate for women to have more like to have better treatment in the workplace or to advocate for a different style of leadership, they mold themselves to the expectations that exist. And I think a lot of this idea, like I think in the next 10 years, 15 years, we're going to have more and more conversations connecting the dots between something like Lean In and girl boss culture. Because Lean In is essentially saying, like, insert yourself into the conversation instead of change the conversation. And what girl bosses do is they just put girl, which first of all is infantilizing and demeaning in front of boss. There's no changing of that idea of what a boss is. It's just trying to suggest in a playful and ultimately meaningless way that they are a different sort of boss.

Caroline: Yeah, I mean, it seems like that sort of the "lean in" of it all, the striving to just fit into the white male system instead of challenging it, is just a recipe for burnout because we're never going to be white men.

Anne: Yes, it's exhausting, right? Like trying to erase all parts of your personality, all needs, like all care components of your life. I think it's exhausting for white men, too, because I think there is only a sliver of white men who can perform as this idealized white male worker, which was really like this idealized white male worker of the 1950s and 60s. First of all, they still went home at the end of the day like they weren't working 100 hours a week. But they also many of these white men from that period, what were called oftentimes organization men, they had wives who were doing all of the other work for them. Like right I often think about how successful I could be if I just had a wife. And I don't mean that in like a stay at home wife, like and I don't want to reproduce that system, but that is the infrastructure that's in place that allows a lot of these white men to succeed in the way that they do.

Cristen: I'm laughing partly because Caroline and I literally had that exact conversation, maybe like a month ago.

Caroline: Yeah, yup.

Cristen: We’re gonna lean out for a quick break.

Caroline: When we come back, Anne shares why bath bombs will never solve burnout.

Cristen: Stick around!

[stinger]

Caroline: We’re back with writer Anne Helen Petersen.

Cristen: Well, as things do start to reopen and especially as workplaces start to bring employees back in or not. Is there an opportunity for some burnout prevention to be built in, can we avoid, as you put it, “a regressive, inequitable shit show” in terms of race and gender in the workplace?

Anne: Well, I think the companies that are that are really trying to do this are listening to their employees, right. They, like a lot of companies, have sent out these surveys and then have looked at the surveys and the like. Well, we're still going to do what we want to do or we're still going to do what the CEO wants to do. That is the most common is that the CEO or the exec team has this understanding in their heads of what work looks like. And because they are managers and they are leaders, to them, management looks like in-person interaction. It looks like presence. And I think it is often very difficult to disabuse them of that fact, and I understand it, I can I can absolutely understand why that's what work looks like to them. But I also think that they should get out of their heads and think about what work looks like for other people. The other thing, too, that I think is really difficult to understand is that less work is often times better work. And there was a fantastic, extensive, wide reaching over many different years in different industries study that just came out of Iceland looking at the effects of a four day workweek and not four days as in like four tens, but four days of work at the same pay that you were getting for five days of work. And with less time in the office, less time explicitly devoted to work, people do better work. They're not just more satisfied that they're happier, they're healthier and the work itself is better. The productivity levels don't go down. It just. It's a better balance, and so that idea that less work can be better work is so antithetical to American culture and American ideals of productivity and work ethic and all those sorts of things. But I do think that, like, that's the way that we can try to create more space in our lives to to advocate for our communities, to be the mother, not just that society says that we should be, but that we actually want to be to be the women that we want to be and the partners and just as individuals. And so if workplaces can imagine their workers as people and not just as laborers, I think that that's that's part of the process.

Cristen: Yeah, I mean, it it also just makes me wonder how far that can it would require that to trickle down to all of the would you describe it as like the precariat, those sub-contractors and even like the self-employed people like me who's like, yes, a four-day week, weekday fuck yes. But I don't know how I can keep myself to that.

Anne: Well, and that's the thing about this Icelandic study is that they looked at people who were working in retail. Right. Like they tried to do it in different corners of different industries because it usually is just something that happens for people who work in offices. And so I think that that is, again, promising. But it would demand such a different like a holistic shift in how we think about, oh, well, I want everything that I want when I want it. And that's hard.

Caroline: You've described self-care as a Band-Aid for a bullet wound. How so?

Anne: I think that self-care is something that is oftentimes prescribed to people who are dealing with legitimate burnout or legitimate grievance. Or systemic disenfranchisement, and they're like, why don't you just go have a bath with a bath bomb, like take some time for self-care or even on the corporate level, there's a lot of messaging about self-care that's like, why don't you take this health care wellness module instead of why don't we try to actually create staffing that would make it so that people don't have to work frantically if one person can't be in the office for a day. So I think that oftentimes it really is like, yeah, like I said, like a Band-Aid, it is it is very surface level superficial and it doesn't actually create any sort of long standing relief and might feel good for a second to have a bath bomb. I love like there's something about the bath bomb that just seems to like, like it's just so quintessentially useless, like it's something that the like costs money and has a special name and it's like a new thing that you can buy and be excited about. But it's just like bubble bath, right. It's like your bath tub is still gross and like you don't want to go in there because it's all this, like weird kids toys. Like you don't want to go in the bathtub. It's not like you're not going to use the bath bomb. And yet we tell people that that is the way that they should recover from long standing burnout that is the symptom of capitalistic exploitation. Like that's not going to fix your problem.

Cristen: Oh, my God. That the bath bomb might be the best metaphor for this I have heard because you're still soaking in filth like it's still there.

Anne: It's still, it's like all these weird chemicals and they create a scum and you have to clean off like it's just creating more work and more things to buy.

Caroline: OK, so if self-care if bath bombs won't save us, what will?

Anne: Well, dismantling or significantly regulating capitalism will help. You know, there's a lot of things right. It is solidarity and not just with people who work in similar jobs as you or look like you or have similar caregiving situations, like it is actually being like this person is a worker, too, and they deserve to be treated fairly. And I think that sometimes we can embrace that as an idea, but then not embrace it when its ramifications affect us. So one thing that I thought a lot about is that a lot of organizations, companies, retail organizations have had difficulty staffing in the pandemic or post-pandemic because their wages are so low. And for various reasons and people haven't wanted to take those jobs, this combination of things that have made those jobs into shitty jobs and for the first time in a long time, workers have had the ability to say no to them. And the result of that is slow service or no service or service in a way that's different than you experienced before. And so what can you as as a consumer do to have solidarity, you know, it's not complain about that and not treat the existing workers there in a crappy way, but also agree or not complain when that organization raises its prices in order to pay people better. Right. And then I think just really advocating for and voting for politicians and leaders who are advocating for this sort of systemic change. That's a big thing, and then the last thing, which I think is really hard to do, because we can see it in other people and then often not do it in ourselves, is think about how your actions are actually creating burnout in others.

Cristen: Mm.

Anne: And I think a very simple example of this is when you send emails, right, people who are like trying to cut down their burnout or their stress level by, like, rage cleaning their inbox at 11 p.m. on a Sunday. And your email, you don't think about the fact that, like, that email goes into someone else's inbox and creates anxiety and stress for them. And there are very simple things that you can do with delay send to to change that. I always say I'm sending this to you now and please don't look at it until you have time to look at it, right. Or I have like a signature, an email signature that might sound hokey, but it just says, like, I recognize that my working hours are not your working hours. Please respond when it's your working hours again. Those sorts of things that are trying to acknowledge that other people are different from you and also that not everyone needs to be alert and working all of the time. That's part of the process as well.

Caroline: I love that. So on our team, we have gotten in the habit of prefacing certain slack messages with “not urgent”

Anne: Yes.

Caroline: Colon and then whatever the messages are, so that when the little preview thing pops up you know like this is not a fire drill, I can continue to concentrate on what I'm doing and get to this when I have a minute. And, you know, something that small actually does make a huge mental difference.

Anne: Yes, absolutely.

Caroline: On a personal level, how can we begin to reckon with our own feelings of burnout, like recognizing it? Addressing it and - and what helped you?

Anne: I think that describing the parameters and giving it a name was was honestly life changing. In no way did I cure my burn out. That's always the question that I got after I wrote the article was like, oh, so your burn outs cured now? I'm like, no way. And like, writing the book about burn out, totally burnt out again. I wrote and this other book co-wrote it with my partner actually while in like while during the pandemic burnt out then too. But I can recognize its parameters, like I can see it and I can also see burnout behaviors. So at the beginning of our conversation we talked about the the scrolling, the endless Instagram scrolling, instead of reading fiction, like I can tell, I'm like, oh, that's a burnout behavior. There are other smaller things, including the fact like not being able to deal with my errands that alert to me that I am kind of going into a bit of a trough in terms of burnout. And I think that being able to see it allows me to then program against it and to change some behaviors and to reschedule things and to adopt stances that are like I'm really I'm overloaded or I've said yes to too much, and now I have to say no to a lot. And that oftentimes requires just being very transparent. When someone asks me to do something like a podcast. I say no. And so, like, I just do not have the space for that right now, which is hard because I think a lot of us, whether we're producers or creatives or just conditioned to be compliant as women or as perfectionists, want to do all of the things all of the time, want to always be the person who says yes and practicing the discipline of no of declining is hard. And it's always I think it'll always be hard for me. But I also recognize it as crucial for self-preservation.

Cristen: Is there any advice you would give to the younger, pre-burned out Anne?

Anne: The biggest piece of advice I would give is that you are not your job. You are not your work, because if you are only your job, you are only your work, that's going to go away, your job is going to go away at some point in your life. And there has to be something else of yourself there once that goes away. So I think understanding ways to cultivate a self, a personality, a desire, you know, all these different things that make up a person that aren't simply yoked to one's employment are crucial. And I think that doesn't mean that you shouldn't love what you do or have it be a significant part of your life. You know, that's true for a lot of people, but there is so much more to life than what you do or what you are paid to do. And if we don't understand that, we are going to continue to marginalize people who are disabled, people who no longer in the workforce, people who choose to not be in the workforce or who are caregivers are paid less as long as we value people based on the work that they do, there's so many problems with that system. And so I hope that we can continue to embrace people's value being rooted in the type of person that they are in the world. And that has so little to do with the amount of money that you make.

Cristen: You can follow Anne Helen Petersen on twitter @annehelen and on Instagram @annehelenpetersen. Subscribe to her excellent newsletter, Culture Study, or check out her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.

Caroline: You can find us on instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can also support Cristen and me by joining our Patreon; you’ll get our undying love plus weekly ad-free bonus episodes at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Cristen: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Caroline: This podcast was created by your hosts, Caroline Ervin

Cristen: And Cristen Conger of Unladylike Media.

Caroline: Next week...

Bridget Todd: I think it's such a shame that so often the work of making platforms that we use safer, more inclusive, better, falls to black women, that labor is often unpaid. And we can have Band-Aid solutions. We can have bells and whistles that might help. But until we contend with that fundamental, you know, misogyny and racism at the heart, we're not really going to get anywhere.

Caroline: We’re talking to writer and podcaster Bridget Todd about the Internet -- and how things like disinformation and digital blackface are harming communities of color.

Cristen: You don’t want to miss this episode! Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Caroline: And remember, got a problem?

Cristen: Get Unladylike.