Makes sense. My grandmother nagged me to eat and I still eat all the time.
High Urgence/Low Importance climate of a teaching schedule
I had a nice introduction to just this. Scurrying in from the parking lot one morning, I confessed to a senior colleague that I was not really prepared for class that day. Her advice: "take something from the [metaphorical] file drawer that's ready to go, explain [make up any excuse] to the students why this is so important that you need to discuss it today rather than the scheduled assignment." Done and dusted. She also advised me that, pace the P&M's indoctrination, "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well." I'm not certain about this as career advice, but it's been a godsend for lawn care.
I appreciate the linked article, and I think it's interesting precisely because (rather than "despite the fact") it's clear that she hasn't quite thought through everything that she's included in the article. It's clear that she sees a number of different issues as connected, and is struggling to define/describe exactly how they're connected. It reads as very much a work progress.
It's really fucking long. Better be worth it, CharleyC.
Does the author actually define "millennial" at any point? Otherwise I'm not going to bother.
This makes me feel better about recent uncharacteristic failures to complete basic tasks. It's not just me! Life sucks for everyone younger than me in similar ways! (I cannot imagine having kids. I guess there are just that many more rigid demands on time.) Next week, I am scheduled to work 8:45-7:15 M-W and 7:45-7:15 Th-F so today, I'm cooking a bunch of food so we have quick meals for dinners, trying to catch up on thank yous for Christmas, go to the gym, and maybe do a little actual work that is overdue.
5: yes, because I count as the upper end, though u don't remember anything else about it.
I read this this morning and was thinking about suggesting it to you! One thing that really struck me from the article is that I hadn't really put together the way that the professionalization of childhood extracurriculars results in unhealthy work/life balance problems later in life.
That was really absurdly long. My 2 cents:
Neither I nor my parents did any of the life-optimizing-tiger-chopper stuff. My sister, who likes to buy things, eventually optimized herself after HS, got a professional degree, and now has a lucrative career, house, dog, manageable debt, the whole thing*. Had I ever gotten my shit together, I would be in a similar position, probably even with an arts degree; cohorts who never went to college but did get apprenticeships are doing fine. This is the case because Mossheimat is short of skilled labor and subsidizes education heavily.
*And apparently is miserable anyway, but that's because she's a venomous lizard.
Anything that's used as a metric eventually becomes useless because people just game it, but I think extracurriculars as metric for colleges has been particularly pernicious. Probably the change had already happened in more competitive suburban settings, but when I was a kid mostly people still treated their extracurriculars as an end in themselves and not as a means to get into college. I think that changed pretty dramatically over the next 10-15 years. A big part is probably just the internet making it easier for people to find out how college admissions worked. When MIT put on their website that they were more likely to admit people who did summer programs with competitive admissions the number of applications to said summer programs soared. This arms race is even continuing into college. When I was in college many of us didn't do an REU and doing one could make your application stand out, nowadays in many circles it seems like people basically think it's mandatory and many people do one two different summers!
I'm not sure I've mentioned this before, but I didn't vote in the 2000 election because of what would now be called failure to adult. I was moving from Ohio to North Carolina and I wanted to vote in Ohio because I knew the election would be closer there. So, I got an absentee ballot. But when I read the ballot, I realized it would be illegal for me to send it in (because I really had already moved) and it was too late to register in North Carolina.
Anyway, if one of those states was Florida, President Bush II would be all my fault.
Also, on the whole precarity thing, I think most of that reduces to "underemployment is boring and stressful". I think underemployment has been the norm for most humans since the Neolithic, if not earlier. Has anyone tried comparing "millennials" with peasants or hunter-gatherers? Also, everyone I've ever known, of all cohorts, has procrastinated on petty shit.
I've not yet registered for my exile vote because my nation-state is procrastinating on setting the date for the election.
I think underemployment has been the norm for most humans since the Neolithic, if not earlier.
True dat. The idea of a regular working week was developed in the 17th century by Sabbath observing Puritans, and the idea of a 10-12 hour day or whatever was a product of the industrial revolution.
And certainly earlier. You don't hunt and gather full time or watch the clock while you do it.
As a millennial, I wish millennials would stop writing about being millennials.
Has anyone tried comparing "millennials" with peasants or hunter-gatherers?
I'd guess that millennials don't have to deal with nearly as many marauding hordes of bandits/looters/slave raiders as peasants traditionally did.
Then again, I suppose these days the looters just take their cut in monthly installments designated as student loan repayments.
Some assholes broke a water main in my neighborhood, and we've been without water since ~11:30am. Fortunately, I bought tons of bottled water in preparation for superstorm Sandy (remember that?) and never used it since Sandy was a big nothing in my area. It's been a life saver. If you've got nothing better to do today, go out and buy a truckload of bottled water and put it somewhere where you'll forget about it. It might come in handy some day.
I was hoping for advice on how to optimize my burnout.
5. She uses the term to refer to people born from 1980 to 1996, recognizing waves within that range. I an't imagine anyone thinking that this sort of thing generalizes to other cultures. You can think of all the ways that the experience WWII impacts life in the US -- in the immediate aftermath, and even today -- and see immediately that the impact, in the aftermath and today, in each of the other belligerent countries would be completely different.
I think 3 is right, and I think AHP would say as much.
Of course Heebie's grandmother was right. Apple, tree, DNA. Not sure where that leaves the sibling of a venomous lizard, though.
21: Miserable.
The point of my 11 isn't to say that the OP doesn't generalize, but to show by the contrast that I think the OP is right in blaming structural conditions.
It is odd, though, that some many of the people who grew up in the immediate aftermath of WWII, in various places, are so intent on restoring their understanding of their place in the world, despite destroying the world in the process.
AHP on the process of writing the article: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/how-millennials-grew-up-and-burned
23: It is interesting. Economic good fortune, even in the Second world*; generations not realizing how lucky they were; maybe pervasive meritocratic indoctrination (of various kinds), not too spectacularly out of step with reality; and the aftereffects popping up in synchrony due to global convergence. The closest comparison I can think of offhand is the Belle Époque.
*Even Xi apparently is nostalgic for the 1950s. How he squares away the GLF and CR I don't even want to know.
I haven't read the article, but Charley touched on something small that irritates the crap out of me -- the implicit idea that literally everything is amazing for every other generation except millenials. My (GenX) brother has lost his job in every recession of his working life. I (also GenX) lost a job in 2000 and 2008, and in 2009 had to move to fucking Europe to get a job. We have just as much paperwork as millenials (probably more in the pre-Internet days), and we also get paralyzed by it.
27 In the late 90s it was a running joke among the associates of my law firm that there would be an economic downturn when I came up for partner in 2000 -- as there had been when I graduated from high school, from college, and from law school. Oh, there was a downturn when I was born as well. What's going to happen in 2025 when I retire? All hell will break loose, you can be sure.
I do think it's fair to say, though, that the damage wrought by neoliberalism -- from Jerry Ford's WIN buttons to the present -- has been cumulative, and that the younger folks are looking at a system that is getting worse and worse in terms of ROI on personal efforts.
How he squares away the GLF and CR I don't even want to know.
Nostalgia isn't bound by rational considerations.
*Even Xi apparently is nostalgic for the 1950s. How he squares away the GLF and CR I don't even want to know.
Easy. 1949 to 1957 is the heroic age. The CCP has triumphed over Japanese invaders, petty warlords, and western colonialists alike, and it has given China peace. Peace! And now it's time to build all kinds of good stuff. The Mass Anti-Rightist Campaign, the GLF, the CR - that's all in the future. Mao still has his shit together and in any case the leaders of the New 4th and the 8th Route are firmly in the saddle.
AHP on the process of writing the article: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/how-millennials-grew-up-and-burned
This paragraph resonated with my experience of feeling burned out.
Still, I did take a few days off, and you know what I did with them? Tried to write a book proposal. But I didn't feel better, because I didn't really feel anything. Sleeping didn't really help. Exercise didn't help. Reading sort-of helped, but the reading that interested me most was politics reading, which just circled me back to the issues that had exhausted me. I got a massage and a facial and they were nice but meh. In hindsight, I was totally burnt out! I was so burnt out I was smoldering! Not by the specifics of the reporting I'd just done, but by the baseline of my entire life. I thought burn out was like a cold you could recover from -- which is why I missed the diagnosis altogether.
The word I use in my head is "ahedonia" -- not being able to feel pleasure in things which I would normally enjoy. That doesn't last for too long, but I'm also not sure that I've figured out a good way to deal with burnout.
I got a "burnout is here, it's just not evenly distributed" feeling from the article. I'm just a bit older than AHP, in the "not really Gen X but millennial didn't seem to exist as a term for much of my youth" generation, and much of what she writes about her personal experience from high school to college to grad school is a lot like what I saw growing up. The whole thing in college applications/college prep about extracurriculars for the sake of looking well-rounded, not because you care, was already very well developed among a subset of people in my high school, for instance. But I guess maybe it was still a thing people did for advantage, not just because everyone else was doing it, so had not reached the point where people felt like to not do it would be to hurt your or your kids' chances. I certainly didn't do it, but I also probably wouldn't have done well going for private schools that cared about that part of applications.
Her description of grad school funding was kind of odd to me because it seems like a mix of old and new. I think of unions for grad students/TAs as a relatively new thing coming out of activism in the 90s and early 2000s, so her masters program having a union seems like a new thing to me. I don't think there were unions at any of the places I applied for grad school, though maybe a couple schools I never investigated closely (beyond academics) actually had them. But on the other hand, despite pretty widespread advice to not go into debt for a PhD, I think a lot of people, especially in public schools, were still doing that when I was in a PhD program. Many programs could offer decent funding packages for the first few years (and some programs were moving towards admitting fewer students but offering all of them some funding), but the likelihood that you'd have to finish while teaching for support because your funding ran out was pretty high, especially at public schools. I dropped out before going into debt because I decided that an academic career wasn't for me, so I just dodged that one.
Anyway, these are minor points and I definitely think younger people than me have grown up in a different situation than I did, and I don't want to go all "Gen X had it bad too!" I probably could have gotten on a "career" track after undergrad and just squeaked by into stable adulthood by now without feeling the constant stress of precariousness.
And now I have to fill out a job application that I've been procrastinating on for a job I'm not sure I'll really want to do, but need to apply for things because I'm burned out at my current job and also it's too expensive to live where I do without jumping to a higher paid career, so it's either move and change jobs (and maybe change career focus), or stay and definitely change career focus.
32: I am Gen X, and we definitely did the extra curriculars to look well rounded, but I went to prep school. I distinctly remember a chapel talk from the head of another school on why extra curriculars and being well rounded were worthwhile for reasons other than getting into college. People in high school did not have internships or do research projects in academic labs. They do now at the girls school I went to.
32.last: Uh-oh. This job application process has thrown in some short-form questions beyond the usual resume and cover letter. Time to keep reading about burnout.
34: Are they asking about your extracurriculars? Might not be the right job for you.
If you're past college and somebody asks about your 'extracurricular activities', they're accusing you of something.
if one of those states was Florida, President Bush II would be all my fault.
I regret to inform you that it's also illegal to vote 538 times.
Anyway, the closest election I ever voted in was also the first. In the 1990 primary for Nebraska governor, I voted for Not-Ben-Nelson and Nelson won by less than 50 votes.
Honestly, I don't remember why I voted for the other guy.
I voted in am intense local school board election where the good candidate lost by 5 votes and I was so mad at myself for not working harder to turn out my neighbors.
35: The questions do suggest it might not be a good fit, if I'm looking for a job that isn't spread thin across many responsibilities that don't all have quite enough support to be done well. But that's true of the job posting as well. At least it would be a somewhat different way of being spread thin than my current one.
36: The extracurricular is the political.
Anyway, I think many readers of this website will appreciate AHP's explanation in the supplemental link in 31, and on twitter, that her decision to not talk about "neoliberalism" in the piece was a deliberate one because she doesn't think it's helpful or meaningful for most readers.
We just had a state legislative election decided by one vote.
Jumping in here randomly: I'm doing the accounting I've put off for approximately two months and, thinking back on private life in 2018, two things stand out: it's probably the year everything in our lives finally seemed fundamentally stable and sustainable, and it's also the most purely anhedonic year I can remember. It's hard for me to separate those two things in my head.
I sometimes wonder which criticism one can use more often: 1) "you think your problems are so unique and special because of [whatever], but basically everyone else goes through this;" 2) "you claim to be the voice of a huge swath of the population but this is really just your own weirdness, weirdo." In general do people more often overgeneralize, undergeneralize, or do both simultaneously? (I do not actually expect an answer to this question, to be clear.) And, for discussion: which fault is worse?
They overgeneralize. I undergeneralize.
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"Please describe one innovative idea you put in practice in [an area you haven't had the opportunity to work in, and which is not a part of the experience asked for in the job posting] and how it succeeded."
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In general do people more often overgeneralize, undergeneralize, or do both simultaneously?
Lumpers and splitters. I think people do both opportunistically, constantly.
I'm in the cohort right in between Gen X and Millennial. My thinking on it is that the dividing line is mostly whether it seemed like optimization paid off. If you're old enough, you were young but already established in your career in 2000 and maybe the tech bubble popping didn't really derail you. If you were a little bit younger, you were affected by the rule changes on student loans in 2006, and then slammed by the Great Recession. The optimization hadn't changed, but the economy had. And then your boomer parents decided to stop hating your ironic slacker sibling and turn to hating you.
and how it succeeded."
See, that's the bullshit part of the question. "Tell me about an initiative you tried that flamed out spectacularly" would yield much more interesting answers.
I'm sympathtic to AHP. On the other hand, in the 1950s-early 1960s this was called the rat race.
interrogating why I was putting off a half-dozen quite serious 'errands', like, preventing myself from getting kicked out of grad school, getting paid for my day job, was: I put them off because they're *about me.*
This kind of indifference to self is something I have and am somewhat surprised to find shared more broadly. I speculate that it correlates well with indifference to extrinsic motivation (and to readership of this blog); and that lack of extrinsic motivation in turn correlates well with things like dropping out and fluffing your corporate networking.
Yeah, I'm either indifferent to extrinsic motivation or lazy as shit. Not sure which one.
"Please describe one innovative idea you put in practice in [an area you haven't had the opportunity to work in, and which is not a part of the experience asked for in the job posting] and how it succeeded."
"I bet no one you've interviewed has told you to go fuck themself before! Is it succeeding?"
I was ambitious, but then I noticed the extremely poor correlation between the effort I put forth and the results I got back.
You had miscalibrated your priors?
Young people have a really weird way of relating to the press.
58: And my ability to finish graduate school.
Update 59: I guess he's not a Millennial, but he is younger than me by a few days.
"140 things you can't hate about me"
"I got 99 warrants, but BO ain't one."
"8 rules for not defaming my Gen X age leaker"
Speaking of being lazy and poor hygiene, remember the thread about how using soap wasn't necessary for being clean? I discovered I get scalp zits if I don't use shampoo about once every week or so.
I gave up soap no problem, but I also haven't been able to give up shampoo. I don't know if that's because of a lifetime of shampoo use, or because some people just need shampoo.
I never even tried giving up soap. That sounds like a horrible idea.
It's great, but doesn't really admit of conversion by argument. You have to try it, give it a few weeks, and see how it goes. Or not.
I gave it up, but disliked the shorter showers, and resumed after a few months.
You people are fucking insane.
I'm with Mossy, I couldn't imagine giving up showering with soap with the summers we have here.
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I don't remember whether the man's death was noted last week. I did forget to post this in the technology thread. I do not miss making long distance calls from a pay phone.
OK, the one with Ray singing lead.
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"I bet no one you've interviewed has told you to go fuck themself before! Is it succeeding?"
I did manage to get the application in but I'm actually pretty fucking pissed off now. Not just at that question but also some other administrative bullshit that came up in the application process towards the end. Is it so hard to give people full instructions outside of the context of a web form that will lose your data if you don't fill it out quickly enough?
"We want your sincere, polished answer to these questions, plus an entire document with no instructions on what it is or how to produce it, and you need to do each step in 30 minutes or less. If you are not prepared to meet these requirements, which you have just learned about after preparing the other documents you knew you had to prepare, then we suggest that you exit and come back later. kthxbye."
Go fuck yourselves indeed. I kind of want to ask if potential co-workers are behind that application design.
I'm so fed up I might have to start taking LinkedIn seriously and following up leads or whatever it takes to jump careers again. But maybe avoid student debt this time around, if I can.
I still shower with soap and use shampoo regularly if not as frequently as before, so I have that going for me on the jumping through adulthood optimization hoops. Unless not soaping is optimal now?????????!
While I'm serial commenting...
We just had a state legislative election decided by one vote.
Was that after a recount? It seems like many states wouldn't let a result that close stand without some kind of further review.
Was that after a recount? It seems like many states wouldn't let a result that close stand without some kind of further review.
Yes, the initial result was an exact tie. The recount changed it to a one-vote margin in favor of the Republican. The Democrat sued and the case went to the state supreme court, which ruled last week in favor of the post-recount result.
I find myself doing a job maybe twice as responsible as I was ten years ago for less than half the money. Curiously, this no longer worries me too much.
79: wait, by "showering without soap" do you mean even the, uh, "naughty bits"? B/c shit, some of them, well, there are sanitary reasons, no? And beside, sweat from there is different than sweat from the rest of the body.
Wikileaks said an email sent to media organizations and marked "Confidential legal communication. Not for publication."
Bwahahahahaha.
That was an enlightening piece. And so was AHP's blog about writing it. And now Cohen's piece about burnout. Thank you, CharleyCarp, heebie, and all the other commenters. I'd seen reference to this piece, but it was only after reading all your comments here, that I decided to read it. Time well-spent.
72. I've been informed that "millennials have killed bar soap." Is this true? I'm curious because millennials (at least by reputation) are big on saving the planet, and foaming body soap comes in big plastic bottles, at least in my limited experience. Bar soap usually comes in paper wrappers. On topic, my children are millennials and they and most of their friends are doing fine, thank you, having passed the hump of getting that first decent job. Yes, they did extracurriculars. (Those are another thing I've been told is dead*, colleges having figured out they are meaningless.)
* There is definitely a trope out there of "millennials killed X."
79: Did you mention that you shower with soap regularly on the job application? Maybe that would give you an advantage.
foaming body soap comes in big plastic bottles, at least in my limited experience. Bar soap usually comes in paper wrappers.
Not always. Bar soap tends to come in plastic wrappings, at least in my experience. Either heat-sealed clear plastic or loose wrapped plastic.
Mine comes in both paper (per bar) and heat-sealed plastic (per pack). I am totally killing the planet.
I make my own at home using grease from the kitchen and herbs from the garden.
You're doing it wrong.
I WANT TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF ANYONE WHO SPELLS MY NAME WRONG.
You're just a voice in my head. You don't even have a spelling.
I'm high Gen-X in terms of my birth cohort, but because I went to university late, and then took various periods out to work and earn money, I didn't actually leave graduate school until 2009, which means in a lot of ways, my experience overlaps with "millennials" in a lot of ways.
Procrastination is interesting. After decades of being guilty of it, I've basically just stopped. The last three or four years, or more, I've more or less kept on top of everything, all the time, and I'm very organised/prompt. I don't know what the trigger was, but some combination of having a child, and having a job that involves a lot of long hours, and a lot of context shifting, and a need to be organised means I've somehow managed to fix that particular issue. I do have a really good memory, and I often get frustrated at work when people can't remember stuff, and I can remember both my own stuff, and the stuff for half of my colleagues.
"You did X, and then you stopped because you were blocked by Y, and then you were waiting for A to finish B, but he didn't, because C, and then you were going to ask F to do it, and then you forgot."
"Oh yeah, now I remember ..."
One thing that really came to the fore, mentally speaking, was realising that while I had a self-image of myself as lazy, when I looked at what I actually did: in terms of how I performed at work, how much work I did, the various commitments on my time, etc, I realised that I'm not lazy at all. I just used to set stupidly high standards for myself, fail to meet them, and then blame myself for not working hard enough. Once I actually quantified it,* I realised that I was profoundly not lazy, and that seemed to really help, both in terms of being more ambitious at work, and in terms of being realistic about what can be done.
* e.g. in graduate school, I wrote 250,000 words in less than 2 years, while holding down 3 different part time jobs, and studying full time, and doing music exams, and putting multiple hours a week into learning two new sports.
Writing words in graduate school was always my problem.
I'm generally very sympathetic to people a lot younger than me. Their lives are shitty in many ways, and there are some advantages people my age (mid 40s) had, from the sort of background myself and most of my friends* are from, that someone in their mid 20s now does not.
That said, I'm amazed at how -- from my point of view -- how stunningly fucking lazy** some of them seem to be compared to what I spent my mid 20s doing.***
* it's probably not a coincidence that basically all of my very close friends are from working class backgrounds on the Celtic fringes of the UK and Ireland who were the first generation in their family to go to university/college.
** this is probably not fair. They just aren't sticking in the Stakhanovite levels of work that they probably need to to overcome some of the shit placed in front of them.
** although I notice that my nephew, who is 24, has started to take steps to change this.
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I would like to be all condescending and superior about that unrealistic millennial idealist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but her ongoing awesomeness makes that impossible.
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Differentiating generations is dumb for reasons that author acknowledges in her blog post, but it's an understandable vice.
Certainly on any metric that I can think of, Young People Nowadays are less awful than my generation.
This doesn't bother me, but you know what screws me up? Anything to do with real estate. I see the housing market as this terrifying destructive, but also insidious and corrupting force and it depresses the hell out of me to see the way so many people I know talk the talk, and then can't pass an estate agent's window without going squee. They're mutually-supporting, too; once the topic comes up it's like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
102: Word. I think I've mentioned before how I was convinced to buy a place when I landed my tt faculty job because "that's what grown ups do". Huge mistake. A year and a half out from finally selling the thing I'm in better financial shape then I've been for a decade. Pretty much everything I was told about property being this great investment and saving vehicle was a lie.
"Never trust anyone" is the lesson I've drawn from the experience.
103.last the same lesson I've drawn from my second marriage and divorce.
105: In my experience that lesson doesn't help - you end up having to trust people anyway.
If you betray people first, you don't have to trust them.
It was so long ago that I had forgotten about it, but I should co-sign 98 too.
97.1 Early Gen X but very similar life trajectory, including leaving school for various jobs, a change of career, and a only coming to my current career very late. I'm so screwed.
Bar soap is more eco-friendly.
I had stopped using soap while showering long before the debate arose on Unfogged. Still use shampoo and facial scrubs because my hair and face are extra greasy. That said, the bar soap/liquid soap debate is still of interest because I need to buy soap for washing hands.
100: I'm impressed that she somehow managed to singlehandedly inject the idea of high marginal tax rates back into the national conversation, to be immediately backed up by a bunch of centrist pundit-types.
So far Trump hasn't gone after AOC on Twitter. Its probably a matter of time, but maybe he realizes he'll get his ass kicked?
I differ from the article in a lot of ways - no grad school, minimal social media presence, closer to a 9-to-5 and more securely middle-class than the article is talking about - and yet it feels like it's talking about me in some ways. I generally mock the idea of generations, but maybe this is good evidence for it!
When I think about stressors or causes of burnout in my life, Atossa is a big part of it. My job keeps me busy but it's not why I'm short on sleep. (No stress involved, she just has nightmares, or wakes up and wants something.) If it were just Cassandane and I, we'd probably eat out or get takeout more often, but I feel obliged to model a healthy diet and also it's hard to eat out with a 3-year-old, so I'm busier in the kitchen than I might like to be. One looming two-do list item is an upcoming vacation I have to book (I know, very, very first world problems), and like the hotel options or not, we have to do something that week because the school is on vacation then. I'm sure that in 5 years, these parenting problems will be replaced with different ones. Not sure if that's better or worse.
What do other cishet men here think of the "mental load" comic there? I think I'm doing, maybe not a full 50 percent of the mental load, but pretty close to it, I can point to specific examples in that comic that aren't problems for us... but the risk of a Dunning-Kruger effect seems high here for obvious reasons.
Also, as for cleaning and home organization, how much does it matter how much of the "stuff" is co-owned or not? I swear, I would tidy up the house a lot better, but a lot of the stuff isn't mine to get rid of.
It gets much easier after age three.
I (cishet husband, 34, 2 kids under 5) forwarded the article to my partner to talk about the mental load piece, it's something we've talked about before with less precise language. I think I'm on the high-initiative side in terms of routine chores like dishes and laundry, but it's just really hard to divide things like vacation planning in a way that doesn't just double the work.
I was super-embarrassed to introduce industrial-strength project management to my household, but honestly setting up an Asana board for the household middle of last year has been one of the better things I've done for my marriage.
The worst is when people use industrial strength project management at work.
You can think of JIRA as a giant pile of rope, with a sign saying "please hang self."
The problem with vacation planning as a couple is that some people want to go to really expensive or boring places.
We spent last weekend trying out family to-do list/reminder apps which was itself a large task. Now I have an app that has a badge for (as of this moment) 104 notifications.
121: this particular problem is we're doing it in one specific week, using time-share points my parents have given us. Time-shares are a scam, or at least theirs seems pretty close to it.
Also, what do you do for February vacation, anyway? We aren't avid winter sports types. We like the beach but you have to go pretty far south to find the beach fun in February, and at that point, see above about points.
121: No kidding! I have trouble getting the family onboard for trips to nearby Civil War battlefields or 19th-century forts. For some reason, they want to go to Disney World or Europe.
112: I'm so old I remember when Krugthulu was a neoliberal sellout.
I read that article and saw a lot of myself in it. I'm pretty burnt out. I've hit a point where lack of progress at work plus a build-up of consecutive minor crises has probably lead to some stress-related health issues. I'm hoping the burnout will dissipate some once/if my health issues resolve and the season changes.
I've struggled a lot with whether I'm lazy--I do work hard sometimes, but I get discouraged easily, and hardly end up doing any sort of personally fulfilling creative work. If I have energy, I should be doing something that has to be done; if I don't, I should be doing something recreative to restore energy. This isn't a healthy perspective.
118/120: For organizing household chores, we've gotten a lot of mileage out of Remember the Milk. Admittedly, I do the vast majority of chores, so it's less for avoiding duplication than for keeping tabs on things that need to be done at a slower rate than daily. My wife is ace at organizing vacations, though.
124: Somehow I was able to convince my wife that we should take a trip to Fort Necessity, a reconstructed fort historically notable for how badly it sucked in every possible way. (And also being involved in the start of arguably the first global war, but I digress.)
Though it's more recent than the fort.
I read that article and saw a lot of myself in it. I'm pretty burnt out. I've hit a point where lack of progress at work plus a build-up of consecutive minor crises has probably lead to some stress-related health issues.
Yeah, as the author acknowledges in the blog post about the article, in many ways the piece is more universal than she makes it out to be. I am far from being a millennial, but I am burnt to a fucking crisp right now from a combination of work and personal responsibilities. (Pro tip: If someone asks you to be executor of their estate, DO NOT DO IT. Especially if the decedent is a day-trader who has skipped 11 years worth of tax returns and at least two of the beneficiaries of the estate hate your guts, don't care if they ever collect on their bequests and are willing to hire a lawyer to fuck with you purely out of spite.)
I've had my share of general stress in life, but for the first time ever, I really thought I was about to crack about six months ago. (Ah, I said to myself, so this is what being on the verge of a nervous breakdown feels like.) Also unprecedented: I responded by exercising and (this is important) dramatically cutting down my alcohol intake. It worked brilliantly. I'm still operating at full capacity, and still grit my teeth to greet every day, but it's not more than I can handle.
Drinking and not drinking both solve problems. Different problems, usually.
That said, the bar soap/liquid soap debate is still of interest because I need to buy soap for washing hands.
I don't know how I ended up with the foam soap dispensers, but it turns out they're refillable with a dash of Dr. Bronner's liquid soap in water, so that has served us well for a while as an outcome that makes me feel less wasteful while also making children happy. (I realize even for me this is a sad, dull comment.)
I've gone through various failures and burnout and now a minimum-wage job that's still better than how things were before. I'm getting to be a believer in avoiding misery whenever you can, because there's plenty of it that isn't optional. Maybe others weren't as inclined to seek it out as a moral good in the first place, but losing my job and then having a bunch of surgeries for a bunch of us in the family was probably the best thing that could have happened because it was awful but then things got better, whereas being in a miserable relationship meant just awful forever and a job that left me burned out didn't offer hope for much more than that. The money was much better, but it turns out the stuff about money and happiness is true-ish.
What do other cishet men here think of the "mental load" comic there? I think I'm doing, maybe not a full 50 percent of the mental load, but pretty close to it, I can point to specific examples in that comic that aren't problems for us... but the risk of a Dunning-Kruger effect seems high here for obvious reasons.
I'm fairly sure my wife would have a different view, but I'd say I do quite a bit more than 50/50, but it really depends how you measure it. If it's day to day organising of things like childcare, play dates, etc. I'd say that she does slightly more than me. I book most of the childcare and activities -- the online booking systems for: school aftercare, swimming, football, drama, etc are all in my name, for example-- but my wife is the primary maintainer of the shared calendar that keeps us all informed about what is happening and when, and is more likely to organise non-routine activities for xelA. But, it's me that does all of the shopping, and all of the cooking, and budgeting, etc. And for all big things: holidays/vacations, Christmas,* major purchases,** family birthdays, and almost all organising, etc. It's 100% all me. If people come round for dinner, it'll be me that's playing the role of the woman in that mental load cartoon.
I think it's very hard for people to be genuinely honest about this, though. I had a serious girlfriend that I lived with in my mid 20s, who'd have made exactly all of the complaints in that cartoon, and she'd have been delusionally wrong. I was at home a lot more, because I was studying or working shifts, so it was just naturally me that did most of the organising and most of the chores, and she grew up with a stay at home mother, a part-time cleaner, and a grandmother who lived at home, so she was just someone who expected things to kind of happen for her by magic. She was, and I say this with hindsight, and I'm 100% not kidding myself here, epically full of shit on this particular topic.
Similarly, there were long periods early in our marriage, and especially when xelA was small, when I'd have probably confidently declared I did my fair share, and I'd have been wrong.
* so, for example, I bought all of the Christmas presents for everyone this year, including buying and arranging postage for the presents for my wife's family. It was me that wrote all of the Christmas cards, and got my son to write his. Me that did the Christmas food shopping, and did all of the cooking and all of the childcare over Christmas.***
** including purchases my wife is making. If she is spending any kind of real money, she'd expect me to do all of the research, and if I get it wrong, I'm to blame. It's always me that books vacations, organises things like visits by tradespeople or people working on the house, pays all of the bills, etc.
*** this isn't because my wife is a lazy asshole. It's because she works a lot at Christmas, and so this division of labour is what works for us. Just like I often have work trips away in the spring and early summer, and then the burden shifts.
I was thinking about another key part of burnout, which is not specific to Millenials* but is specific to the past 10-20 years, which is that most workplaces in the US are wildly wildly understaffed. Employers have been pushing for more "efficiency" by getting fewer people to do more and more work, and that can only work for so long until everyone is burnt out.
*With the caveat that if you've reached a certain level of seniority or power, which requires being old, then you're probably not in the same situation. Our Provost's office has more employees than it did 20 years ago even as every department has fewer employees.
It's really a shame that Obama's new overtime rules never went into effect, it'd be interesting to see what would have happened. That said, definitely the administration here was clearly intending to ignore the rules (i.e. tell everyone that they're not authorized to work overtime and then require them to do more work than will fit in the given time, and expect that people will just falsify their time sheets).
I think people might be getting burned out because they keep so many browser tabs open.
I'd say I do quite a bit more than 50/50
This is a highly personal question, but would you say you have any preference for taking on disproportionate amounts of work? You've described this in many different parts of your life, and I know there are people who prefer to run a sort of trade surplus in their interactions with the world -- whose aversion to the feeling of freeloading or not pulling their weight is much stronger than the aversion to overworking. It's not necessarily conscious, but it can be.
I can't really say how true that is of me. It is a matter of record that my sister and therapist tell me I'm too self-sacrificing, but I vacillate between thinking it's just not true (i.e. they're reflecting reverse-sexist bias, among other things, and they only hear my side!) and thinking to the extent that it is true, it's not terribly important. This probably varies month to month. I'd say I do at most 50% at home, and I'm not overly generous at work either. I do find it comforting when I feel that I'm giving more than I'm taking (up to a point, obviously). Maybe I also find it soothingly flattering when people tell me inaccurately that I'm doing too much! I'm a hot mess when it comes to motivation. This navel of mine is riveting
Book update that is also a Burnout update: I have started reading a book by Byung-Chul Han, theorist of why things are driving people crazy these days. Anyone else fallen under the spell of this non-charismatic but intriguing intellectual and his many very short books?