The new burnout generation

In high school, Jayden Dial worked on a podcast, planned school events, and made a film. That was on top of doing her homework and applying to college. But sometimes, she still felt like she wasn’t doing enough.

Jayden, now 18, would see kids her age on YouTube talking about their packed routines — “I worked out, I meditated, I read my Bible” — and she’d think, “Oh my God, I need to be so, so productive.”

This kind of productivity anxiety is probably familiar to many adults. I, for example, have been known to stress myself out watching reels of parents somehow cleaning their houses while kids play happily in the background.

But according to a new report by the nonprofit Common Sense Media and researchers at Harvard and Indiana University, the pressure to live a scheduled, optimized, perfected life has trickled down to teenagers, leading to symptoms of stress and burnout more closely associated with people decades older.

Of the 1,545 teens the researchers surveyed, 56 percent felt pressure to have a “game plan” for their future lives, while 53 percent felt pressure to “be exceptional and impressive through their achievements.”

The findings challenge the stereotype of young people today as lazy and entitled iPad kids who just want to watch videos all day. In fact, researchers found that many teenagers have internalized a drive to succeed at the expense of their mental and physical health: Some reported that they didn’t prioritize self-care practices like getting enough sleep or talking with friends because they weren’t “productive.”

And more than a quarter of teens say they’re burned out, a feeling one likened to being “an overused machine in a factory […] You’re just doing the same thing over and over, and you don’t feel like you really have a purpose.”

Such statements are disturbing to hear from kids still in high school. The report’s authors believe that their findings could help explain high levels of depression, anxiety, and sadness in young people. Rising rates of such mental health problems have often been blamed on smartphones and social media, but the Common Sense report paints a more complicated picture: Teens exist within a culture obsessed with achievement and success, while the traditional markers of having “made it” (a home, a steady job, a savings account) feel more out of reach every day.

Social media may intensify these obsessions, allowing kids to compare themselves to more “successful” teens (a depressing concept in its own right). But it’s just one part of a larger problem, one with no easy solutions.

What’s needed is “a shift in what’s important,” Jayden said. “There needs to be a bigger emphasis on time to explore.”

The report’s authors started out by studying the effects of technology on teen mental health, said lead author Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, which studies the role of tech in people’s lives.

But teenagers told them they needed to widen their lens, to look at everything going on in young people’s lives. The researchers ended up asking a nationally representative sample of kids aged 13–17 about six potential sources of pressure in their lives: the idea of a “game plan,” grades and achievement, appearance, social life, friendship, and activism.

The kids came from all over the country and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and the researchers also specifically reached out to Black and LGBTQ+ teens to make sure their experiences were represented. Kids with higher family income tended to feel more pressure around achievement, but there were no consistent differences by race.

Teens, the researchers found, are more likely to be stressed out about their grades and their career plans than about having friends or looking good. And “this looming sense that you should have a plan for your future, and you should already be working toward it” has been a theme in the team’s research for some time, Weinstein said. She remembers a former teen adviser to the group who worried that she had “joined LinkedIn too late.” She was still in college.

Social media can feed into this pressure. “Before, you just saw things on talk shows about these really amazing, talented, gifted kids. Now, you go on TikTok, you could find 10 of them,” Dial said.

But teens told the researchers that the top source of pressure around achievement and future planning was adults in their lives, said Sara Konrath, one of the report’s authors and a professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. Parents, teachers, and coaches may be “doing their best to try to help teens, but not really understanding that we’re kind of pushing the teens to internalize some very unhealthy attitudes and behaviors.”

Those behaviors include skipping sleep, exercise, or hobbies because they don’t fit into the larger plan. One 11th-grader told the researchers she loves books, but sometimes second-guesses herself because “I just feel unproductive sometimes when I’m reading.” In interviews, teens repeatedly expressed guilt over taking breaks, Weinstein said, feeling that “if you’re not performing, if you’re not striving, if you’re not doing something productive in some area, that somehow that is almost morally wrong.”

Such attitudes can lead to burnout, experienced by 27 percent of teens in the study — a state characterized by “emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a lack of confidence that your effort will make a difference,” the report’s authors write.

Public conversations about burnout typically focus on adults — Anne Helen Petersen’s viral 2019 BuzzFeed essay “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” was about people in their 20s and 30s. But according to the Common Sense report, a lot of teens feel like they’re part of the burnout generation, and they’re experiencing the same ill effects many adults do, including fatigue, lack of interest in formerly fun activities, and potentially an elevated risk of developing depression.

In addition to providing a clue about what might be driving some of the troubling trends in youth mental health, the research also offers a counter-narrative about why teens and young adults today aren’t reaching certain milestones — like starting to date or getting a driver’s license — at the same rate as their elders. “They’re kind of adulting in many other ways,” Konrath said. “Maybe the reason they’re not getting their license is because they’re in school all day and they come home and do five hours of homework.”

Though many adults wish kids would put their phones down and go play outside, we are the ones who created hustle culture and the obsession with productivity, as well as the economic conditions behind them.

Today’s young people are less optimistic about their economic futures than previous generations, Konrath said — they see what their parents are going through and worry about whether they’re going to be able to afford a house one day.

They’re also constantly reminded of how much more unattainable the traditional markers of middle-class life are becoming, starting with annual headlines about record numbers of students applying to college (which could soon cost $100,000 a year).

It’s no wonder teenagers feel like they should already be on LinkedIn. “Certain aspects of childhood or teenagehood have been taken away from people my age,” Jayden said.

Restoring what’s been taken from them won’t be easy. Self-care behaviors like exercise and spending time with friends do help — kids who engaged in them were less likely to be burned out, the report’s authors found. But “just giving kids another to-do list” is not going to fix the problem, Weinstein said.

Instead, kids need grownups to look at potential root causes of pressure and burnout, including a culture of “constant quantification” enabled by apps that allow schools to share every test score and assignment grade immediately with parents, Weinstein said. They also need to consider the world kids are growing up in, from climate change to school shootings. “When you’re a young person, a lot of times it can feel like the people in power do not have sympathy,” Jayden said.

Jayden, now a first-year student at Stanford, does have some advice for teens her age and younger who feel like they have to have their lives all figured out. “It’s much better to experience newness and try new things rather than trying to figure out everything,” she said. “You have the rest of your life to be an adult.”

USA Today columnist Marla Bautista wrote about evacuating her family ahead of Hurricane Milton, and the toll disasters like this can take on kids. “While the physical destruction receives significant attention,” she wrote, “there is much more damage that you don’t see, including the mental and academic destruction wreaking havoc in the lives of children.”

UC Berkeley researchers studied how kids react to misinformation. Their study is very fun and involves aliens with dark glasses and lies about zebras. They also have advice for exercising kids’ “skepticism muscles.”

In lieu of reader emails, today I’m going to share a few perspectives from students that I didn’t get to include in my recent newsletter on kids and politics.

“I first got interested in politics in 7th grade through my National History Day year-long research projects, an enthusiasm that strengthened when I was in 8th grade during the 2020 election,” Hannah Cho, a high school senior and the national chair of the High School Democrats of America (HSDA), told me in an email. “I still remember watching the inauguration unfold on T.V. during breakfast and being eager to discuss President Biden’s inaugural address and Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem among other events that occurred during the historical day with my history teacher, Mrs. Linck.”

Rishita Nossam, 16, the HSDA communications director, told me she started to get more interested in politics after seeing posts about Black Lives Matter on social media. Today, the biggest issues for her include gun violence, media safety, civics education, and reproductive rights: “Government should not have a right to interfere in the decisions that women make about their own bodies.”

Finally, I’d love to hear what you’re hearing from kids and teens in your life about the pressure to achieve or plan for the future. Are the teens you know experiencing these pressures? And what’s the role of parents and caregivers in helping them navigate all this? Let me know at [email protected].