Interesting premise, but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. He says burnout is the default condition of a millennial. Various definitions I've seen seem to

Interesting premise, but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. He says burnout is the default condition of a millennial. Various definitions I've seen seem to disagree on whether that includes me (birth year 1980), but I was in the Army before getting into software and am definitely part of the generation that joined up post 9-11 and served in a pretty horribly-paced environment of long, repeat deployments that continued forever because of how long those wars lasted. Echoing other comments, I've definitely worked under psychopaths, including a guy who bragged about how hard his dick got blowing up hospitals in Mosul. I've seen a lot of what this guy is writing about in terms of people who become totally trapped in the present, believing they have no escape from their current predicament, and also become so accustomed to stress that they lose the ability to live without it and can never adjust back to regular civilian life. This is certainly a form of PTSD, but I have a lot of trouble accepting that anyone working a regular office job in media experiences anything like this. On the other hand, I'll also echo other comments about the difference between this and what I would personally call burnout. Traumatic jobs can be quite thrilling and produce intense bonds and feelings of mission importance. On the other hand, a modern office job can often result in monotony and a feeling that what you're doing is unimportant bullshit that would leave the world exactly the same if no one ever did it. That tedium is like Bart Simpson being forced to write the same sentence on a chalkboard over and over again for hours on end. That feeling that you're being pushed for no real reason is what leads to burnout. Contrast the same intense bonds and feeling of mission that comes from being at a fast-growing startup in the early days, where every decision has a magnified importance because the difference between life and death for your organization is so razor thin, to something like the purely manufactured urgency happening at Twitter right now. Pushing yourself to the absolute limit for a real mission tends to be the kind of thing people eventually become tired of, but nonetheless look back fondly on and miss a bit when they're honest with themselves, even if you can't do it for a lifetime. But deadlines for the sake of deadlines and induced scarcity intended to extract startup-level productivity when your situation doesn't actually call for it is what sours people entirely on the very idea of work and capitalism. As for the pandemic, I think it exposed an uncomfortable reality that most people stuck in the rat race don't exactly appreciate, which is that a whole lot of what we spend our lives doing for work is not "needed" in the sense that consumers will be materially worse off because they have less to consume if we stop producing it, but because our entire economic system is predicated on a level of consumption and growth that can only be achieved through induced demand, fake scarcity, marketing tricks, and busy work. That is, entire industries like salons and barber shops just disappeared for a while and it mattered because those people lost incomes and maybe it also mattered because customers are using interaction with service workers to fill the hole left by the fact they have no real friends, but it didn't matter that anyone's nails and hair looked a little worse.