Millennial Gray
It’s finally here—the existential horror that “millennial” is no longer a synonym for “young person.” But has that changed the identity of the generation born between 1980 and 2000?
A sweeping, somewhat inconsequential headline recently made the rounds: “More millennials drinking it up at home because going out is ‘too much effort.’” According to a study by the consumer reports firm Mintel, 28 percent of people age 24–31 said they prefer to drink at home “because they believe it takes too much effort to go out.” (Or, you know, when you’re trying to eke out an existence in the eroding corpse of late capitalism, it’s a little cheaper to mix your own gin and tonic than it is to pay $16 for a mixologist’s artisanal cocktail, but I digress.) Said the writer Brian Phillips, in a tweet that has now been retweeted and favorited several thousand times, “Isn’t this also a natural consequence of the fact that millennials are now 35[?]”
He was kind of joking, but it’s a good point: A lot of millennials are in their mid-to-late 30s now, which means that the media’s default image of us is about as age appropriate as a too-small crop top. Although the cutoff points for generations are always in dispute, most research defines a millennial as someone who was born after 1980 and before 2000. Earlier this year, though, Pew Research Center officially decided, “for a number of reasons, including key political, economic, and social factors,” to draw a line at the birth year of 1996. That means that according to Pew, the oldest millennials will turn 37 this year; the very youngest will turn 22, the age many undergraduates are when they graduate from college and (you know, God willing) enter the workforce. And so the old stereotype of un-PC-professor-protesting, avocado-bingeing, Applebee’s-agnostic kids is in need of an update. As painful as it is for me, a 31-year-old Old Millennial, to admit, we’re not that young anymore.
“Soon ‘millennial’ won’t refer to those rascally kids with their phones,” writes Malcolm Harris in his 2017 book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. “It will be a dominant character of a new America.” He’s right, and that shift is happening before our eyes—especially in the wake of the sudden visibility of Generation Z (or whatever they decide to call themselves) and their widespread activism after the Parkland shooting. The poise and purpose that so many teens have shown in the past year has been inspiring, but it’s also a reminder of a new millennial identity crisis. When we’re no longer able to be stereotyped as lazy, entitled, iPhone-lobotomized kids, how, exactly, will we be seen? What will we be known for? What happens when a generation infamous for its anxiety about “adulting” starts approaching (gulp) middle age?
Earlier this year, I was astonished—maybe more than I should have been—to hear a 17-year-old I know use the word “millennial” to mean someone significantly older than she is. Because this particular 17-year-old is incredibly wise, I asked her to describe what she thinks of when she thinks of the word “millennial.” After the requisite jokes about avocados and chain restaurants, she considered the question more deeply. “Maybe this is stupid,” she said, “but the first thing that comes to mind is, like … Glossier. That whole clean, minimalist advertising aesthetic. People wanting to make life less messy, and make life ‘easier’ … but only really for their generation and people like them.” (The teens! They are wise and will save us all.)
Her characterization didn’t shock me, but it did bum me out. I want to believe that there is a spirit of radicalism and revolution to my cohort, but how radical can we be when the name we’re called just conjures another advertising aesthetic—a modern, streamlined way of selling us stuff? Hoping she’d be equally cynical toward her own cohort, I asked her—a member of what she called with a crinkled-up nose “Generation Z, I guess”—how she saw her own peer group. She painted it in contrast to the image she’d just described: messy, hodgepodge, “putting all kinds of styles together that don’t really match.” She shrugged, reluctant to box herself in too much. I might have done the same thing when I was 17. I wondered how much any of this has to do with generations, and how much of it is simply the way you see yourself and the people older than you when you’re young.
In their influential tome Generations, the sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe liken each particular generational cohort to a train. “Picture one long lifecycle track,” they write, “with birth the place of origin and death the destination.” It’s bleak, yes, but it’s a clear way to envision the differences between generational identities and life-cycle markers. Phases of maturity, like childhood, midlife, and elderhood, are different stations. “Now picture a series of generational trains,” they write, “all heading down the track at the same speed. … If we picture ourselves sitting at any given station watching one train go and another arrive, we notice how different each train looks from the next.”
If you think of it this way, our generational experience is a little bit about the train and a little bit about the station. That conversation with my wise Gen Z-er made me consider what people might have said about “millennials” when I was 17, back in 2004. The truth is, most of the things we now consider quintessentially “millennial” did not even exist then. Mark Zuckerberg was, at that moment, a nerdy unknown kid at Harvard; Barack Obama was a little-known junior senator from Illinois whom most people would first hear of that July, when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention. I didn’t have a smartphone when I was 17; the iPhone wouldn’t exist for another three years. The housing market and the job market seemed … fine. Or at least it seemed as though they would exist in some reliable way when I was old enough to need them. In other words, I trusted the train would make its scheduled stops.
My resistance to thinking about what “millennial” means when it’s no longer a synonym for “young person” is of course related to my fear of aging and inevitable death (who can relate?!). But I think it’s also a method of avoidance. Because all the other things that define us—massive student loan debt, the juvenilization of poverty, uncertainty about the environment and retirement and capitalism and democracy and and and … feel pretty catastrophic.
Last December, 35-year-old Michael Hobbes published a long, thoroughly researched Huffington Post article titled “Millennials Are Screwed.” “What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor,” he wrote. “What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence—education, housing and health care—has inflated into the stratosphere. From job security to the social safety net, all the structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding. And the opportunities leading to a middle-class life—the ones that boomers lucked into—are being lifted out of reach.”
Malcolm Harris’s book paints a similarly bleak landscape. He describes us (and himself—his book cheekily notes on its cover that he was born in 1988) as a generation engineered from birth to be efficient workers, cogs in a labor market that would be more competitive and depleted than ever by the time we reached adulthood. Both authors note the strange, pervasive tendency of our elders to blame millennials for the broken system we were born into. “Participation trophies have become a symbol for generational weakness,” Harris writes in Kids These Days, “but no AYSO-playing Millennial fourth grader ever owned a trophy factory—we’re not giving trophies to ourselves.”
The 2008 recession (for which Hobbes suggests a new, millennial-friendly term I quite like: “the Great Fuckening”) was, in many ways, the defining event for most American millennials. At least if you found yourself on a particular end of it. Hobbes cites an eye-popping statistic: “In 2007, more than 50 percent of college graduates had a job offer lined up. For the class of 2009, fewer than 20 percent of them did.” (I am in the majority of that latter group: I was unemployed for six months after I graduated college in the cursed year of 2009. The full-time job I finally found was at a bakery, which kept promising they’d eventually give me health insurance, but never did.)
Perhaps the great irony of labeling millennials the “entitled” generation, Harris notes, is the fact that (according to a 2014 Pew study) only 6 percent of millennials believe they will receive full Social Security benefits, and 51 percent believe they will not see any Social Security benefits at all. “Think about that for a moment,” Harris writes. “The average dual-earner couple will pay over a million dollars in taxes into a system that more than half of Millennials think will leave them high and dry. … [T]he so-called entitled generation doesn’t even feel entitled to our own entitlements.”
Maybe we’ve been so distracted by our millennial-pink aesthetics and avocado punch lines because it’s too depressing to think of what defines us on a deeper level. Uncertainty. Collapse. The feeling that we’re cosmically screwed.
As difficult as it is to read statistic after statistic telling us how fucked we are—how we will be statistically worse off than our parents, that we’ll have to work well past a reasonable retirement age, how we’ll never afford to own a home—we need to diagnose these problems before we can know how to treat them. Which just might be something we can do as we approach this next stage of life. As that infernal southbound train rounds the track toward the Midlife station, the good news is that millennials will soon become the country’s dominant demographic. We’re already starting to elect the first wave of millennial politicians. We’ll soon be the largest voting bloc in the country. Ideally, that means we’ll be able to engineer and support the kinds of policies that can help us most. Finally—a productive use of our narcissism.
If just thinking about all of this triggers an impending midlife crisis, the sprouting of some gray hairs, or a sudden need for adult diapers—fear not. I’m sure there’ll be apps for all that soon.