Millennial Burnout: Why Are Women So Tired?

I know what you’re thinking: not another article on millennials. But, hear me out.

At least once a week, a pop culture think piece makes its way to my algorithm, reminding me yet again that we — millennials, i.e., those born between 1981 and 1996 — are the generation of many idiosyncrasies. We grew up making it to work the next day after a late night’s partying. We have unquestionably specific music tastes, look younger than our actual age (thanks to growing up on Michelle Phan and Korean skincare) and are soft parenting both our parents and children into tedium. Occasionally, we get upset when younger generations appropriate our culture, such as low-rise jeans.

However, a near-constant barrage of millennial burnout pieces got me wondering: is our generation really that exhausted? Or are we just victims of mass digital fatigue and sensory overload? Why do we reminisce about a ‘simpler’ era? Are things truly worse?

As it stands, 2026 is a major milestone for millennials — it’s officially the year the youngest millennials turn 30 years old and the oldest touch 45. Back in our Tamagochi-wielding, unsupervised youth, 40 seemed a sheer impossibility. An age that would take an improbable amount of years to reach, and even then, seemed a land far, far away. It meant the veritable end of youth and brought to mind images of wrinkled faces, arthritis, supplements and leisure time involving only boring hardcover classics.

While some of this is true, it’s also a fact that on the whole, millennials haven’t aged that badly. I mean, we look good on the outside, even though we still make decisions like we’re 28 years old (and have the financial instability of that age too). We’re still serious about coffee orders and have unhealthy obsessions with book-adaptated television series, home improvement shows and solo travel. Despite that, we don’t particularly quantify ourselves as old — that’s still our parent’s generation, right?

“It’s the stage of life we’re all in,” says Maliha (39) a working mother of two who moved to Auckland a decade ago, visiting her hometown Lahore over the recent December holidays. “My mom has knee surgery, Dad recently had heart surgery and I have a new niece in the family — it’s all a lot on top of my own kids. We’re raising our kids in this precarious, digital world where you’re constantly monitoring them, and then we have both have ageing parents who need supervision of a different kind. Our children and parents both need us: emotionally, physically, financially. Everyone needs you and you become your own last priority.”

Fair enough. Millennials are all pretty worn out: from demanding careers where bosses can reach you after-hours with the click of an email, to relocating and adjusting to cities in the sort of geographic mobility we could only dream about a generation ago, or the fatigue that comes from raising children whose childhood spans have shortened from the spillovers of Instagram, TikTok and Roblox.

This got me further wondering about the specific sort of burnout that millennial mothers face.

Mothers have always had the toughest end of the bargain, but has motherhood always been this exhausting? Not really. Research says that working mothers are more depressed and more burnt out than ever before, some polls indicating the number is as high as 30% of all working mothers. A deadly combination of being promised that women could have it all, not providing adequate support for them to achieve that ‘all’ and then tying success to metrics that read like corporate KPIs all turned out to actually be this: having to raise a clan with no village, having to work like you’re not a parent and parent like you’re not an employee. And while research indicates millennial fathers are spending more time with their children than ever before, the trickle-down effect might take a while to reach this part of the world. Millennial fathers are shifting, glacially, but the burden of chores and children lie heavily on the shoulders of a mother.

So how are the mothers coping?

“The demands from schools are overwhelming now,” says Mahrukh Beyg. She’s the force behind Haryali, Lahore’s premier artisanal market, now running in its 14th year of operations. She’s helped launch over 7,000 businesses, most of which are female-run. Mahrukh — a millennial mom — did it all while running a house and raising three sons, two of whom are now married.

“My youngest is eight years old and it’s just different now. There’s a constant stream of events that has parents scrambling,” Mahrukh continues. “I’ve done it before with the two older ones, but this is a whole new level. Recently, my youngest was assigned a class project, and it was so detailed and specific that he couldn’t do it. I had to end up finishing it for him and even had the house staff pitch in! It took two whole days, and we were all sitting around, fiddling with clay and paint, making entire charts on the science behind volcanic eruptions. The expectations from kids can get unrealistic.”

This isn’t unusual. School calendars are now packed with events, special days, inquiry walks and research activities. Just check the social media accounts of any of the top schools in the country and you’ll see how school events are a momentous, event management level affair now, with drone videography and slick graphics to boot. Just recently, I had to forage through eight different shops in Islamabad to secure a white skirt for my seven-year-old’s Sports Day. I was met with different versions of: “Baji, yeh toh summers ke stock mein hota hai, abhi toh winters hain.” I ended up fashioning an old dress into a tutu, but the damage was done. I had fallen prey, once again, to the exceedingly Herculean requirements of being a millennial mother.

And if it isn’t the parade of events on the school calendar, it’s the extra-curriculars we as parents have self-inflicted on our own progeny, just so that our kids are not left behind: swimming lessons in the summer, evening futsal, volunteer work. We worry about their future if they aren’t young artists moulding clay with their tiny fingers into exceptional pieces worthy of a Sèvres Porcelain line by the age of nine.

Delightfully, some of us even have to manage a career in the midst of the funhouse mirror room that has become a child’s social life. Careers that are fuelled by constant competition, the race to seek validation and praise, and if you happen to be part of a service delivery organisation or a business owner, the risk of being razed to the ground from a social media review that takes the user a mere eight seconds to push out into the world in the permanent, perverse ordeal that is the Internet Court of Justice.

“I quit two jobs because of burnout,” says Manam Hanfi (30), who runs the Islamabad Readers Book Club, which has amassed a community of 8,000 readers on social media in just a year. “We’re living in a flawed system: overtime is celebrated, a day off requires justification and being sick needs proof. What was confounding was that my salary was never based on my role — I was paid because of my relationship status. Male colleagues who did exactly what I was doing, were paid more, because: you don’t have a family to run. It was so deeply normalised; it took me years to understand the injustice. On top of that, the hustle culture is never-ending, nothing is ever enough.”

Manam and her best friend Hira, between day jobs at the time, started the book club which took off surprisingly well. They now hold separate sessions for the twin cities, rotating between classics, romance and modern fiction catering to niche readers.

For the Pakistan-based millennial, the ordeal is manifold. While you may be fortunate to have the ease of house staff to manage a well-oiled, cleaned, mopped, dusted home with hot food served on a table, dishes that are magically washed and stowed away into cupboards and clothes that are folded and tucked into wardrobes — the emotional labour of managing housestaff deserves a manual of its own. Once again, the burden is majorly taken up by the women. And even if you take this — this easier version of running the house — the cons are endless. The accessibility to libraries, museums, amusement parks, safe green spaces and the opportunity to meander in solitude, to wander in peace, to travel unhindered, all rely on your social status, and even then, are barely existent in Pakistan. It’s hard for a Pakistani woman to find herself alone and unbothered outside the confines of her own home.

Moreover, social excursions require further considerations and negotiations. There are the cars you might not own, but the InDrive that you have to rely on instead, hoping the driver prefers silence. There are traffic jams due to ‘protocol’ that may have you stuck on the roads for up to an hour on a regular weekday in Islamabad, and then the limited options you do have when you want to step out with friends — a rotation between coffee, dinner or a mall. Quaint drum circles, eclectic poetry jams and archery classes all sound fancy, but are usually hosted in far-flung farm houses, another operation in logistics, and limited to the crowd you are in the know with. I don’t know about other cities, but I don’t imagine that such places for self-expression and relaxation are that easily accessible to women, even if the barriers to access are endless traffic jams that further burn you out in their own way.

Bringing along children makes it more complex, which is why so many millennials have taken to hosting at home; it’s the lesser of two evils, but fraught with endless food prep, setting up tables and post-dinner clean ups no one will volunteer for. Especially the men. If anything, this generation excels in making it harder on themselves. Which is why most of us have sought refuge in a slew of side quests and hobbies.

Mariyam Ali (40), a former journalist, moved to Toronto around the time of the Covid-19 Pandemic. “I joined a softball league two years ago, which has literally given me a new lease on life,” Mariyam says. “What’s the opposite of comfort zone? I’ll tell you: moving to Toronto and raising a family after a life spent in Lahore. I missed my friends and family terribly and felt like I was constantly needing to figure basic things out. But I feel that entering your forties instills a sort of it’s-now-or-never attitude in you. I now take time out for myself, going on long trails almost everyday in the area. Last year, I picked up a paintbrush and started practicing Arabic calligraphy. It’s been 20 years since I last thought about art and now it’s seriously healed something inside of me.”

The work on inner healing sounds familiar. After fifteen years of a career in bureaucracy, I found myself teetering on the brink of a breakdown, exhausted from moving back to Pakistan, a newborn, and the complexities of work life. My mental and physical health were in shambles.

I ended up taking a year off to reset: doing nothing but reading, writing and gardening. It completely rewired my neurons, as I dug into the collective millennial comfort zones: indie rock bands from the early 2000s, clinging on to micro-obsessions (in my case romance books, strength training, calorie counting) and taking up new craft projects before the old ones had a chance to finish.

So you see, whether it's partially self-inflicted, or a crossover between circumstances and the ever-growing social demands of life, the women (and men) are burnt out. Which is in direct conflict with (and a direct consequence of) our need to please, placate and stuff our plates with what we can. Recognising this is the first step to breaking the cycle and extricating ourselves from this burnout. We need to take a step back and put ourselves first, to create a village around us and to indulge in those hobbies we always wanted to partake in.

Because despite it all, the world keeps moving and changing rapidly, and if there’s anything we millennials are good at, it’s adapting.