Millennial Burnout Is Being Televised

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Millennial Burnout Is Being Televised

How ‘Fyre Fraud’ and ‘Tidying Up With Marie Kondo’ capture a precarious cultural moment.

The fifth episode of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, Netflix’s effervescent new reality series, deals with Frank and Matt, a couple living in West Hollywood, California. Both writers, they have a touching love story involving Tinder, a too-small apartment filled with detritus from past roommates, and a burning desire to prove their adulting bona fides.

They are, in short, the archetypal Millennial couple. The dramatic hook of the episode is that Frank’s parents are coming to visit for the first time, and Frank wants to impress them, to make them see “that the life we’ve created together is something to be admired.”

Frank and Matt, in other words, want their home to reflect their identities and sense of self (as opposed to the cutlery preferences of the people Matt lived with after college). They’ve internalized the idea that the signifiers of success are primarily visual. “I don’t know that I’ve given [my parents] any reason to respect me as an adult,” Frank agonizes at one point, which is absurd, given his apparently successful career and adorable relationship.

“I’m organized in some aspects of my life. Like, professionally, my email inbox is organized, I’m great. And I just get frustrated with myself that I haven’t translated that into my home life. It feels like I give it all at work and then I come home and am like, pmph.” He makes a gesture like a deflated balloon.

If the viral success of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is anything to go by, Frank and Matt—their exhaustion, and their understanding that an adult existence is an optimized one—aren’t anomalous in their anxieties.

Kondo, a Japanese organizational consultant, has sold more than 11 million books in 40 countries since the publication of her magnum opus, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Compared to the interest in her television series, though, Kondo’s previous achievements are a relative blip. Netflix didn’t respond to queries about how many people had viewed Tidying Up, but in the U.S. at least, the show’s release has sparked a feverish curiosity about Kondo and her practices.

More than 192,000 Instagram pictures of color-coded sock drawers and neatly labeled mesh containers now bear the #KonMari hashtag. Thrift stores around the U.S. have reported record donation hauls as inspired Americans streamline their possessions. In barely three weeks, Kondo has gone from a best-selling author to a cultural juggernaut. In part, this is due to Netflix’s prodigious reach, particularly among young Millennials, who are five times more likely to watch a show on the streaming service than access it via any other provider.

But the success of Tidying Up also speaks to how neatly some episodes of the show sync with its cultural moment, a time in which identity and achievements are visual metrics to be publicly displayed and curated, and a happy home is a perfected, optimized one.

For Millennials like me, people born roughly between 1981 and 1996, the desire to flaunt our tidying prowess isn’t just about showing off. A 2017 study by the British researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill found that Millennials display higher rates of perfectionism than previous generations, in part because we’ve been raised with the idea that our future success hinges on being exceptional. But, as Frank suggests, we’re also struggling with what it means to really grow up.

The aspirational markers of adulthood used to be relatively straightforward: graduation, marriage, children, homeownership, a 401(k). But now that Millennials are so overloaded with student debt that we struggle to buy places to live, adulthood is more complicated. It’s more performative. It’s #KonMari.

Four days after Netflix released Tidying Up, BuzzFeed News’s Anne Helen Petersen published what feels like a seminal analysis of a connected phenomenon. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” elegantly and systematically documents how the malaise Frank complains about—putting so much effort into his work that he has nothing left for himself—is symptomatic of a much larger generational disorder.

Millennials, Petersen argues, have been raised with the belief that they have to be exceptional, or they won’t succeed in an economy that since the early 2000s has seemed to dance perpetually on the edge of an abyss. “I never thought the system was equitable,” she writes. “I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them.”

This conviction is why Tidying Up With Marie Kondo has drawn so many fans in such a short time, and why your feeds might suddenly be bloated with soaring piles of clothes and arguments about whether to Kondo your books. Millennials have come to believe, Petersen writes, that “personal spaces should be optimized just as much as one’s self and career.” But the conspicuous nature of #KonMari also suggests a larger vacuum. Millennials don’t just gravitate to Marie Kondo because they don’t have apartments big enough to own things.

What Tidying Up offers is both a counterpoint to the way they’ve been raised (less is more, versus more is always better) and an endorsement: The promise, at least as Millennial culture seems to have interpreted it, is that if people work to organize their lives to look just right, the rest will follow. The performance of the self has become more important than the reality. Even TV has noticed.

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