Why all work and no play makes for millennial burnout | Dawn Foster
An anonymous Manhattan lawyer tells us in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener of a perplexing turning point in the short story, where Bartleby one day stops following orders and instead responds: “I would prefer not to.” The action is unconscionable, both disobeying orders but also having no clear prompt or reasoning for the sudden change of heart. The phrase has become famous and, in the modern way, sloganised. A friend of mine has it on a tote bag and T-shirt. It can be found in many saleable formats for millennials.
In many set out this week: those born between the early 1980s and 2000s are beset by “errand paralysis”, its author Anne Helen Petersen claims. The line between work and life is so blurred that for millennials, the idea of a work-life balance has never been an aspiration, let alone a reality.
