Digital Crumble

Jan 14

“Ethnicity is a risk factor in humans, and a very high prevalence of type 2 diabetes occurs in some indigenous populations such as American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, and Pacific Islanders. This genetic predisposition of some ethnic groups is most apparent when combined with a Western lifestyle (15). Underlying insulin resistance (low insulin sensitivity) is thought to be associated with a “thrifty gene”(16), which once enabled hunter-gatherers to utilize food efficiently, but is disadvantageous when combined with an affluent lifestyle. Cats have undergone similar lifestyle changes to the ethnic groups predisposed to diabetes, as they have evolved from hunters to suburban indoor cats and are no longer dependent on hunting to supply their nutritional needs.” Canine and Feline Diabetes Mellitus: Nature or Nurture? | The Journal of Nutrition | Oxford Academic

(Source: academic.oup.com)

“The thing about American labor, after all, is that we’re trained to erase it. Anxiety is medicated; burnout is treated with therapy that’s slowly become normalized and yet still softly stigmatized. (Time in therapy, after all, is time you could be working.) No one would’ve told my grandmother that churning butter and doing the wash by hand wasn’t work. But planning a week of healthy meals for a family of four, figuring out the grocery list, finding time to get to the grocery store, and then preparing and cleaning up after those meals, while holding down a full-time job? That’s just motherhood, not labor.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“People patching together a retail job with unpredictable scheduling while driving Uber and arranging child care have burnout. Startup workers with fancy catered lunches, free laundry service, and 70-minute commutes have burnout. Academics teaching four adjunct classes and surviving on food stamps while trying to publish research in one last attempt at snagging a tenure-track job have burnout. Freelance graphic artists operating on their own schedule without health care or paid time off have burnout.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“What’s worse, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task — passing the final! Finishing the massive work project! — never comes. “The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,” Harris, the Kids These Days author, writes. “Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

Jan 13

““Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations.”

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

Now I see clearer why I always hated “personal branding”.

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The “purest” example is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. But social media is also the means through which many “knowledge workers” — that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information — market and brand themselves. Journalists use Twitter to learn about other stories, but they also use it to develop a personal brand and following that can be leveraged; people use LinkedIn not just for résumés and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren’t the only ones who do this, but we’re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“One thing that makes that realization sting even more is watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it. I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children, the landscapes inhabited and the food consumed seems not just desirable, but balanced, satisfied, and unafflicted by burnout.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“The only people in my cohort who didn’t have to take out loans had partners in “real” jobs or family money; most of us were saddled with debt for the privilege of preparing ourselves for no job prospects.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset. I’d worked hard in college, but as an old millennial, the expectations for labor were tempered. We liked to say we worked hard, played hard — and there were clear boundaries around each of those activities. Grad school, then, is where I learned to work like a millennial, which is to say, all the time. My new watchword was “Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good”: Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

Jan 12

“That model began to shift in 1980s, particularly at public universities forced to compensate for state budget cuts. Teaching assistant labor was far cheaper than paying for a tenured professor, so the universities didn’t just keep PhD programs, but expanded them, even with dwindling funds to adequately pay those students. Still, thousands of PhD students clung to the idea of a tenure-track professorship. And the tighter the academic market became, the harder we worked. We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“We couldn’t find jobs, or could only find part-time jobs, jobs without benefits, or jobs that were actually multiple side hustles cobbled together into one job. As a result, we moved back home with our parents, we got roommates, we went back to school, we tried to make it work. We were problem solvers, after all — and taught that if we just worked harder, it would work out.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

“We are now a government of the Twitter, by the Twitter and for the Twitter.” | Kara Swisher, All Text and No Subtext (via stoweboyd)

(Source: stoweboyd, via stoweboyd)

“Those two years as a nanny were hard — I was stultifyingly bored and commuted an hour in each direction — but it was the last time I remember not feeling burned out. I had a cellphone, but couldn’t even send texts; I checked my email once a day on a desktop computer in my friend’s room. Because I’d been placed through a nanny agency, my contract included health care, sick days, and paid time off. I made $32,000 a year and paid $500 a month in rent. I had no student debt from undergrad, and my car was paid off. I didn’t save much, but had money for movies and dinners out. I was intellectually unstimulated, but I was good at my job — caring for two infants — and had clear demarcations between when I was on and off the clock.” How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

(Source: buzzfeednews.com)

Digital Crumble

Crumbly on the outside, sweet and squishy inside. An attempt to bake sense into my online wanderings.