‘Burnt Out’ Millennial Worker Wishes She Could ‘Climb Back Down’ The Corporate Ladder — ‘The Stress Isn’t Worth It’
It's time to lean out, not in.
Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels We spend most of our lives aiming to reach whatever goals we’ve set for ourselves. In high school, we set our sights on college. In college, we look toward our professional future: going to graduate school and getting our first job, landing a promotion and becoming indispensable to the company.
Yet, as a woman named Breeana Riordan shared, that trajectory might not be worth it, after all.
The ‘burnt out’ millennial worker wishes she could ‘climb back down’ the corporate ladder.
In a brief yet resonant TikTok, Riordan captured herself in a familiar scene. She sat at a desk with her knees pulled up, a look of intense concentration on her face as she stared at a computer screen in a seemingly spacious and chicly decorated office.
In the text overlaid on her post, Riordan described herself as “Just a millennial who climbed the corporate ladder and landed a director of marketing title by age 30 and now all she wants to do is climb back down.”
“The stress isn’t worth it,” she declared, and the people who came to the comments agreed.
Buro Millennial / Pexels
“I’ve quite literally never felt more understood in my life,” one woman said. “Nobody understands the desire to climb back down.”
“Me, but a director of development, stepped down at 34 and finally getting a full night’s sleep again,” another woman said.
“I feel this!” Yet another woman exclaimed. “Just stepped down from [a] leadership role! It’s not worth my mental peace.”
Riordan responded, saying, “The mental load alone is literally insane.”
Corporate girlies are on the top rungs of the ladder, looking down, imagining a different life.
Millennials came of age in the era of the girl boss. It was a time when hustling wasn’t just expected; it was celebrated.
We were taught that our work ethic defined our worth. Being exhausted and stressed was a badge of honor, a way of proving how committed we were to getting it all done.
Yet keeping that pace proved to be untenable. Making our jobs the center of our world is a straight path to burnout, which isn’t easy to recover from.
The facade of being a corporate girlie began to crack, revealing several harsh truths.
Max Vakhtbovycn / Pexels
Companies don’t really care about work-life balance or their employees as people with responsibilities beyond their jobs. Companies care about profits and their bottom line, and everything else is interchangeable, including their staff.
Corporate workers are rethinking their choices, wondering if they took the right path after all.
Contrary to what the corporate world tells us, there’s nothing wrong with taking a step back. We can say no. We can quit our jobs. We can find work that doesn’t make us break out in hives because of all the anxiety we carry.
There are more fulfilling ways to spend our lives than working ourselves to the bone.
Having a job might be an inevitable part of existing within the crumbling confines of late-stage capitalism, but we don’t have to hate the work we do. We don’t have to love work, either. It’s more than okay for a job to just be a way to earn a paycheck and not the thing that fuels our fire.
We can commit ourselves to the things that nourish us. We can climb down the ladder, leaving the pressure behind. We can find our peace.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.