Burnt-Out Cases

Back in January, there was a Buzzfeed article about millennials being the "burn-out generation" that everyone read. It discussed, among other now-famous things, the difficulty most millennials seem to face in learning how to "adult." You know, things like paying taxes, cleaning up after oneself, returning emails, and the other mundane tasks that are inescapable in life.

Like every other member of the vast totality of internet users that one means by "everyone," I found the article independently - through browsing. And then I became convinced that it had been written just for me. Yes! This is so my life! I thought. I too am burnt out - burnt to ash! Later that day someone else in the office shared the article around. "This is so my life," she said. Within a week or so, I was hearing it dissected on a podcast. So it goes.

There is no great mystery here. Any generation, any nationality, any epoch, any human collective of any kind, will readily assent if you say to them that they suffer from a distinctive malady, a hidden ailment, some strange, ineffable dissatisfaction for which we have not yet found a word. The human animal is a creature of discontent, and most of us are convinced at any given moment -- I know I am -- that we contain secret reservoirs of passionate suffering for which we have so far been denied our just portion of sympathy.

When my 9th grade English teacher first introduced us to the concept of Angst, said with its fully rounded Germanic pronunciation, I felt that at last I had been understood. Likewise, even if most of the appeal of Hemingway is lost on me, I begin to comprehend why he has exerted such a hypnotic, romantically despairing male fascination over so many of my compatriots, when I get to lines like the following, in his To Have and Have Not -- "whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there."

Yes! Yes!  The suffering without cause. The unmentionable something-or-other. The problem with no name. The Weltschmerz. The "wórld-sorrow" of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Have we not all felt it too?

Hemingway, though, was no millennial -- nor Hopkins nor Friedan, for that matter. Could it be then that we are in the realm of a human universal, rather than a generational trouble?

Okay, fair enough. But isn't perhaps the form of human suffering that millennials are experiencing something that is unique to our generation? Our grandparents didn't seem to have any trouble "adulting." Weren't they adults from the start?

Works of literature -- and sub-literature -- of the postwar age do not bear this out. It turns out that even those people who came of age during the Depression, even those people who then got drafted or enlisted in World War II -- those Nephilim, those "greatest generation" folk, those people who basically invented the whole concept of adult as we know it... when one examines the books they wrote in their own time, one is shocked to discover that actually, they were young. Back when they were young, that is.

Let us look into Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)-- the book that defined the whole archetype of the mid-'50s "company man" -- the figure that formed our parents' notion of what a real adult was long before they ever conceived of the possibility of one day being adults themselves.

What we find in Wilson's book is a diagnosis of his generational predicament quite different from what we have come to expect. As Wilson writes in an endearing author's afterword for the 1983 edition, his main character is being "driv[en] to become a workaholic" -- wholly against his will and natural inclinations.

Throughout the book, the protagonist and his wife struggle mightily to remember to have breakfast, to catch the commuter rail, to pay bills. One of their bold projects for self-improvement is to try to start getting up in time on Sundays to go to church (the plan doesn't take). As the main character exclaims to his wife in one scene, "I don't see how we can do everything we're supposed to do."

Isn't that just the rub? Isn't that exactly the problem of adulting?

And this person speaking is a former GI! He parachuted over the Pacific Islands! And even he is defeated by a dishwasher and an alarm clock. He is stumped by the troubles that beset millennials.

I say that Sloan Wilson's afterword to his novel is endearing in part because he frankly confesses the book's failure at the hands of critics. It did not land as great literature. But he notes that it has retained its appeal and popularity among subsequent generations of young people, and I can see why. The fundamental problems do not change.

I was having a particularly burnt-out millennial day yesterday afternoon, which is why I was thinking about any of this in the first place. I've been in a rough patch at work, and after having to put in several hours on a Sunday morning, I happened to cross paths with someone else, in a casual way, who turned out to be an opera singer with a PhD in Applied Mathematics who worked in a cancer treatment center.

I was overwhelmed and cast into despair in an instant. I was staring into the face of someone titanically gifted in precisely three of the areas I have never been remotely good at. Music. Math. Science. Banes! Banes, all! And here I am, a slob by comparison. Struggling just to get dressed on time in the morning. Struggling just to figure out the the basics of how to "adult." It all seemed hopeless.

I have learned over the years that it is always best to milk a mood of any kind, when it comes on -- even a bleak one. The cruelest flashes of despair can be mined for aesthetic experience -- and since they will arrive sometimes in any case, you might as well get something out of them.

With this in mind, I remembered that I happened to have recently acquired Saul Bellow's Seize the Day at a bookstore. I thought it might have something to tell me about my predicament.

I was not disappointed. Bellow's protagonist Tommy Wilhelm is another burnt-out case. He is a burnt-out case in spades. Even though, just like the character in Wilson's book, he is also a child of the Great Depression. He also did a stint in the military, after enlisting of his own free will. Yet here he is, roaming about in early middle age, in the world of 1956 (one year after Wilson's book), an age that seems to have practically been the middle age of the world, the middle age of humanity -- or at least, of America. Certainly not a place where one can imagine there were any young people to be found!

And yet he, too, cannot seem to "adult"! He loses money. He drives terribly. He disappoints his father by acting like a slob. He has loose bottles and trash rolling around on the floor of his car. He sits in his room in his pajamas during the daytime and watches a sports game, while his dad tells him he really ought to pull himself together. He leaves his job over an emotion-laden matter of principle and personal advancement, not because he has to.

In short, he is me. He is you. He is a millennial.

And so what? Maybe the burn-out is timeless. Maybe it is universal. The only thing to be gotten out of it, in Bellow's day as now, is still the aesthetic thrill of recognition. The fact that someone has named once again what one once thought was unnamable. The Buzzfeed article was not, then, a work of scientific psychology. But it succeeds as the literature of autobiography. It extracted the universal from the particular -- the perennial facts of human life from the unique historical experience of one generation of people.

So I stand by it. Even if everyone else has already seen it. I'd share it again. And I'd continue to believe, secretly, deep down, it has a special message -- just for me and mine.