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The Darwinian Science Behind the Burnout Generation
A runaway competition for social status that can’t be won puts us all in a killer race to the bottom
In his book, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, economist Robert H. Frank makes the bold assertion that in 100 years, economists will cite Charles Darwin — not Adam Smith — as the father of the discipline.
Frank writes:
Darwin was one of the first to perceive the underlying problem with markets clearly. One of his central insights was that natural selection favors traits and behaviors primarily according to their effect on individual organisms, not larger groups.
Darwin observed this problem in nature, noting that natural selection often favored mutations that benefited individuals relative to the rest of their species, but harmed the species as a whole. These cases reflect the burnout that characterizes our current moment.
In “We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death,” I illustrated how the prisoner’s dilemma — a well-known economic thought experiment — explained the millennial generation’s obsession with self-optimization. In this essay, I take it a step further, using Darwin’s observations and insights to illustrate the roots of burnout culture and what comes next.
To begin, it’s first necessary to understand how Darwin’s observation about the fallibility of free markets applies to an extreme example: elk. Male elk, otherwise known as bulls, carry some of the largest antlers in the animal kingdom, measuring up to four feet across.
During mating season, bulls with the largest antlers battle over mates. These battles often last for hours, leaving both the winner and loser battered and exhausted. Winning, though, is worth it. The victor earns status that grants him outsized access to dozens of fertile females. It follows that a mutation coding for larger antlers would be useful to an individual bull, allowing him to dominate others in battle and pass his genetic material along to the larger population.
The caveat is that eventually, most bulls’ antlers would be approximately the same size as those of the bull with the original mutation. At that point, the advantage its…
