Milton's Burnout Culture

By TMP 43rd Editorial Board

During spring at Milton, blooming flowers and volleyball on the money-green quad often come with a dreaded complement: burnout. Talk of burnout’s many forms—“senioritis,” “sophomore slump,” and even the newly coined “freshmanitis”—seems to have been particularly pervasive this spring, and with good reason: in a May TMP survey, 51.3% of the 86 respondents reported having not shown up to something they would usually enjoy this semester out of weariness. One student lamented having “a lot” of “I can’t do this anymore” moments, while another reported feeling like “the work never ends.” At Milton, we’ve recognized the inevitability of burnout for a long time, and accepted it as a fact of life.

But burnout is not a fact of life, nor should it be. By definition, burnout not only represents a long-term danger to our mental and physical health, but also demotivates us from learning about topics that would otherwise thrill us. Rather than simply wallowing in burnout, we need to take a step back and acknowledge that the cult of burnout is antithetical to the very purpose of being at school and interrogate how we can begin undoing its normalization.

To do so, we need to understand how burnout culture begins and how it reproduces itself. Individually, burnout arises at the intersection of Milton’s academic rigor and students’ high expectations for ourselves. It becomes culturally embedded and internalized, however, only when the mindset that suffering necessarily leads to success pushes us to glorify burnout, a phenomenon seen across the school. Take, for example, the infamous saying that you have to “choose two” between success, sleep, and a social life, which makes its rounds among anxious sophomores every year. Even worse, upperclassmen often model burnout with pride, priming younger peers to anticipate future misery and turning this exhaustion into a perverse rite of passage.

This culture, in which we imagine a model student as necessarily overburdened, causes a vicious cycle in which students pile unmanageable workloads on themselves by design. This cycle is why Milton students have a self-destructive habit of responding to academic rigor with reflexive, even performative, stress while simultaneously racking up schedules that stretch their time and resources thin. In a way, we exist in the contradiction of working too hard and not hard enough.

How do you denormalize something as ubiquitous as burnout culture? Principally, we must reject the fiction that only a reduction in Milton’s academic rigor can improve mental health, that hard work equals burnout. We can promote the need for institutional change in some cases, but striving for excellence, and by extension the risk of burnout, is built into Milton as a structure. Thus, the necessary—and achievable—change is one in culture and mindset among students.

Specifically, combating burnout culture requires proactive self-care. Milton students, at times, find solace in identifying as being stranded in the face of adversity, but various groups on campus maintain resources expressly to combat burnout. These resources are critically underutilized, but can be extremely helpful. We should capitalize on the counseling center, the health center, meditation club, SAA events, properly used personal days, and even spaces as simple as the quad and the library. The upside of burnout culture is that there will likely be someone at every turn who can relate to your experiences, so speaking vulnerably with advisors, teachers, class deans, and always upperclassmen or your friends can provide a path forward. Start these conversations with the intention of fighting burnout, not just acknowledging it.

Furthermore, we need to appropriately take advantage of our teachers’ leniency. Meeting with teachers ahead of time to understand topics that take up time can both reduce workload-based hostility in the classroom and ease general stress. Utilize the extra help block well too! For the first time this school year, extra help blocks are dedicated solely to providing support to students, rather than sharing time with a club block, and we should capitalize on the extra resources we have been given.

Most importantly of all, for upperclassmen, model a positive mindset for rising sophomores and juniors. Do not take advantage of the myriad difficulties of the second half of high school to create a dynamic of perpetual pity from your younger friends, who will someday replicate whatever you promise the experience will be. Signaling to your younger peers that, as hard as school may be, it can be handled with the right resources will induce them to build systems to protect themselves against burnout rather than simply assuming it and passing it down. The cycle of upperclassmen persuading younger students that success requires burnout needs to end. At the end of a successful yet stressful school year, we ask: Why not now?