Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.
This is very out of left field but based on the omnipresent US world view, this similar to post Vietnam and the disenfranchisement and alienation of veterans. Millennial burnout is a societal problem that has impacted every generation see Lost Generation.
Slapping a new face on the fact that we fundamentally donât handle things well, like change, stagnation, upheaval, loss, regrets, etc⌠As mental health care improves and we live longer more problems become apparent. We donât burn out necessarily I think we get world weary of the little cog in the big machine.
At first I thought videogame fatigue has something to do with the fact that physically youâre always just looking at a screen and twiddling your thumbs. Your brain is having one hell of a ride, but your body is just bored and wants you to stop. After thinking about it some more, I donât think the mind/body dichotomy really explains it. I donât have the same problem with reading, for example, or browsing the web. I do get fatigued doing those things, but itâs more short-term fatigue than long-term. I could spend too much time reading or browsing the web in a given day, but a couple of days later at the most Iâm ready to go again, and it feels just as good. Whenever I approach a new videogame however, thereâs always a sense of apprehension, depression, and even despair. Maybe I would call it empty achievement fatigue. Iâve spent decades playing videogames, Iâve managed things within the context of playing them that surprised me, made me smarter, that I didnât think I would be able to do. Trying to translate these achievements to real life made them feel more like anti-achievements. They havenât made me better at handling day to day situations, theyâve made me worse. They havenât made me more ready to tackle real life challenges, theyâve made me less ready. Challenges in videogames are designed, graduated and tested for enjoyable consumption. You know there is always a solution, so each problem becomes manageable. In real life there are no guarantees. Real life problems arenât always fair, there isnât always a solution, and you donât always feel a sense of achievement in the end. Itâs become so much easier to retreat from real life problems in favor of ones that are on the screen over the years. Maybe this fatigue isnât fatigue at all. Maybe itâs just you knowing on some level that youâre harming yourself, and trying to stop yourself from doing it.
Burnout is central part of life, for autistic people. So Itâs a little strange? to see many neuro typical people, write about their kind of burnout. Which seems from an autistic perspective, to be somewhat mild, and not something that can make you stop function.
But then again itâs not competition. itâs more that I find it interesting, that words can have very different meanings, for different groups.
Good youtube video about (autistic) burnout
Damn, youâve articulated exactly how I feel. I think youâre really on to something here. I keep wondering whatâs wrong with me while browsing gaming news sites and subreddits and not feeling âproperly engaged.â
That does suggest what is the proper level of engagement with material. If fatigue is possible from any source, then at what point does use become harm?
This is interesting. I think, by and large, the concept of âmillennial burnoutâ is just a new name on a very old phenomenon. The one contributing factor now that I think is different from the past is specialization. You could commit yourself to a smaller, singular space, but I hope you pick the right one, because within a few years everything else will have passed you by so far that there is virtually no going back.
I read or learn about people hundreds of years ago making groundbreaking discoveries in physics or biology who were self-taught. People who learned calculus in their spare time. Hobbyists. Scamming for every book they can get hands on, if you will.
It boggles my mind. Today, you canât even get your foot in the door without a decade of specialized education. Want to study anthropology? Cool, hereâs a dozen books on anthropology. And history. Go ahead and learn a couple languages - spoken and programming. Data science. Statistical modelling. CAD. Good? Now pick a single aspect of a single time in a single place and study nothing but that for the rest of your life.
This isnât to imply that things were more egalitarian or meritocratic back then - obviously there were many systems in place deciding who got these opportunities and who didnât. But today, the realm of the autodidact is the realm of crackpots and conspiracy theorists. But hey, by my experience, those people never burnout, so maybe theyâre on to something.
I donât think burnout in the modern sense is unusual. Sounds like itâs time for you to slide sideways into a more meaningful (for you) aspect of your career. I donât think specializing will work. Youâre older and more mature and your focus/ needs have changed. Maybe you would like to help or manage younger people or work in a team or help develop games for people with special needs or study education gamification. Who knows but take a risk, the change will feel good and even if the next thing is not the right thing it will help you narrow down what the problem is.
Thank you for writing this article and linking to that excellent BuzzFeed piece. My wife and I both read the Buzzfeed article and it dominated our discussion over the weekend. I am at work right now so I canât get all my thoughts out here but I will be back later today!
I came here to echo this sentiment as well as to offer an alternative take on the way video games might relate to burnout (especially the way it is characterized by Anne Helen Petersen in the BuzzFeed article). Specifically, I think the achievement structure of many video games fits into the paradox of needing to take a break but being unable to partcipate in one due to overwhelming anxiety about all that needs to be done on oneâs âto doâ list. Petersen references psychiatrist (or psychoanalyst?) Josh Cohenâs write-up about clients who seem suddenly to stop performing daily occupations. One key feature to these tasks is their perceived importance for daily life (one must maintain a living space through countless chores; one must maintain oneâs own life by eating, sleeping, and working).
By contrast, the various tasks that the player completes in a video game are almost always intrinsically meaningless with regard to these sorts of goals (with one possible exception, depending upon the playerâs relationship to the game, being leisure activity for recuperating oneâs will to work). While I think that games are extremely meaningful in different ways for different people, they are meaningless from the perspective of nonstop productivity that undergirds the contemporary formulation of burnout. Thus, I wonder whether the task-like design and framing of so many in-game activities (go here, fetch this, kill that, solve this, get that, level up, etc.) simultaneously fulfills the drive to check things off a âto doâ list and also short-circuits the anxiety associated with the apparent necessity of accomplishing all those things. To what end, though?
