The 'Burn-Out' Generation - Lizzie Sara
Edited April 2020
In order to help keep the blog exciting, it was decided that members of my friends and family could write guest posts and I would publish them. The first one is by my friend Lizzie. Lizzie is an amazing writer and I can’t wait to work with her again. The rest of the guest posts won’t have this awkward introduction, but I felt it important to introduce this series to my readers – enjoy!
I’ve put off writing a blog for quite some time. I remember talking to Cerys about writing a blog probably a year or two ago (drunk in the girls’ toilets because who goes to the toilet alone???) – it seemed like something that I would enjoy, and I love talking about my experience of what being a working-class student at a top University is like. I just couldn’t seem to write anything down. Today, is the day that I finally plucked the courage to write something and share something I felt a lot of people could resonate with.
Why have I been putting off writing a blog for so long? My to-do list feels infinite. Writing a blog is very low on my priority list and something I felt I didn’t have the time to do, or I hadn’t done enough ‘stuff’ to do. Basically, I hadn’t completed enough on my to-do list to award myself some time off to just write how I was feeling or what was going on in my life. I recently read an article on Buzzfeed (don’t judge me – we all know what it’s like we’ve all spent an hour or two asking ourselves ‘if I was a dog what dog would I look like?’ or ‘if I could have gotten into the Spice Girls which member would I have been?’- let’s take this quiz and find out). Anyway, back to my point – I read this article on Buzzfeed called ‘Millennials Burnout’ (here’s the link). Although, I’m probably a year or two out of being a ‘Millennial’ (I’ve recently turned 21) this article really resonated with how I was feeling about a lot of stuff and why I wasn’t allowing myself to write this blog.
In brief Millennial Burnout refers to how this generation are feeling stressed and as if they aren’t achieving enough or should be achieving more – we have ‘internalised’ the idea that we should be working every second. But why? Why is a whole generation of people feeling like this? Because nearly every institution from school to college to maybe your parents have told you that that’s what you should be doing – you should be working hard, and you should be achieving and if you’re not then what the hell are you doing? So yeah what the hell am I doing?
Right now, I’m not doing any work and I can already feel the guilt settling in and how I’m probably going to regret how much time I spent on writing a blog. I’m in my third year at the University of Bristol currently writing my dissertation and have never felt so stressed out. I have never felt so much pressure to get a First or a high 2:1. I didn’t do so well in my GCSE’s and looking back on it – the stress I felt at 14/15 made me lose interest in most subjects; even though most teachers were reiterating how important getting an A was and that if we didn’t do it, we were going to regret it. Clearly this narrative has been part of my life and most of my friends’. I remember the pressure all my peers were feeling in fear of not being clever enough and what would people think if they didn’t get an A. Most importantly the consequences of not getting an A and not achieving what was expected. When really all the teachers cared about was their scores in the league tables. There was nothing in place to make sure we were coping with the pressure – they just kept piling it on. This just caused me to be uninterested in education, I didn’t go to school for so many days, and I lowered the expectations on me substantially and felt so much better. My A-levels hit and there was the pressure again and no support, but I came out with some really good marks and I felt like an underdog but of course this has just caused the expectations to sky rocket… yet again.
I grew up in a community where everyone was working-class where there are no jobs due to the closure of the mines affecting the community greatly. My parents have worked hard for me to have a better life and the expectation was now to do even better than them. This is completely natural to expect your children to do better and want them to do better. In reality most people my age won’t be able to afford their own house, with the introduction of zero-hour contracts we won’t have job stability, we most likely won’t retire until we’re 70 as the age increases and we most likely won’t be better off than them. That’s hard to swallow and its depressing.
Somehow going to a good University, I thought I was giving myself an advantage other people wouldn’t have as great people have come from my University and have gone on to do amazing things but I’m burnt-out. I’m tired from all the pressure, the stress and the endless to-do list and so are others. So today I’m writing this blog to say let’s all say fuck it because life is too short to be burnt-out and to let your anxiety of not doing well ruin your life.
Fuck it. Life isn’t going to be easy and no-one said it was going to be so fuck the expectations and fuck my anxiety. My ‘to-do list’ is being scrapped and I’m focusing more on what I would like to do. I’m not defining myself anymore on my grades or what other people may think. We live in a society where everyone can see what you are doing constantly from posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat – we have FOMO (fear of missing out) and I say fuck that. We need to reach out more to each other regarding people’s mental health and to check in with each other. Not to boast about what we are going to be doing next week, next month or even next year. How are you feeling today? Has anyone even asked you? Or are they just showing you what they are doing in their life that’s so more interesting than yours. Well I’d bet any money that it’s probably not as good as you think it is or what they say it’s like.
I guess what I want to finish on is, care about others and reach out more. Feeling anxious, burnt-out and stressed is completely normal for our generation but don’t allow this to dominate you. Before reading that Buzzfeed article I’d found it really hard to explain to friends and my family why I was feeling anxious constantly and guilty. So I hope whoever reads this knows that it’s not only them. We are the ‘burn-out’ generation, let’s own it and say, “Fuck that!”.
What is your experience with this? Let me know in the comments down below.
Cerys x
