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.

Read: ‘Tidying Up With Marie Kondo’ isn’t really a makeover show

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.”