I am extremely vain in almost every way – but, so far, I don’t mind ageing at all. I think this is because I was such a miserable and panicked person during my 20s that the idea of resembling her in any way today is frightful. I love being in my 30s, and because of this I also love hearing how much Gen Z hate me.
Complacency seems to be the real crime millennials are accused of, in a variety of ways. We had it all and didn’t appreciate it, pre-Trump, pre-Brexit, pre-pandemic. And not only were we ignorant dopes when it came to pertinent real world events, our idiocy further translated to a happy-clappy-clap-stomp culture, too. We had nothing better to worry about than the gender politics of sailor tattoos, we swooned before Manic Pixie Dream Girls, our commitment to eye endangering fringes meant everything. This is “millennial optimism”, as witheringly dismissed and possibly recently embraced by my beloved salty Zoomers.
The historic Democratic landslide in the US earlier this month was certainly in part to do with weary Trump supporters sick of chaos and unmet promises, but it was also to do with a stronger Democrat counter message of economic populism which didn’t sacrifice the marginalised. The surprise of a positive outcome and the sight of so many socially-minded candidates succeeding has reminded everyone of the Obama after-glow, and summoned the current nostalgia for that millennial golden age.
I understand the impulse, though I can’t help but think of how I jealously regarded my parents in the same way, coming into their prime in the 1990s in Ireland. I saw them as gorgeous, glittering, oblivious fools. The country was becoming increasingly progressive and also, what seemed for a time, limitlessly wealthy. It looked like great fun. But there were limits, it turned out, and then came the 2008 recession. This is one of the points many millennials will raise to object to the concept of our generation being especially optimistic: we graduated into a recession.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have known the difference, as I had made such a mess of my life by 19 that I would never have made more than a pittance for the next decade anyway. This is why I can’t take generational divides or even broad descriptors all that seriously. Those most prone to object to “identity politics”, or using aspects of age, race and gender to consider a situation, are often also most prone to glib and sweeping generational statements. I admit I am a myopic person – I can’t conceptualise things that become too abstract for me, and I have to narrow it down. But on this subject I think myopic is better. I think there really are too many idiosyncrasies to summarise generations usefully.
There are significant things I pity zoomers for experiencing that I didn’t. I’ll never stop thanking God that I lived 16 years without private internet use, and 25 before I had a smart phone. There were, also, political moments in my life which felt thrillingly indicative of a better world we were sure to get. Latterly, there was the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion in Ireland in 2015 and 2018 respectively. And even as a disinvested teenager in 2008 who had no relationship to America, it’s true that seeing a Black man elected as President felt like entering a distinct new, better era.
What’s also true to say of that election is that I was a teenager and stayed up all night watching it with a much older boyfriend – a circumstance which wouldn’t in 2026 be acceptable to my parents, friends, or even myself, I suspect. Things are always good and bad, worse and better, in these enshrined nostalgic pasts.
Millennials spent our young adulthoods in a pre-pandemic world, which is not nothing. We had some time to be hopeful before certain fundamental conditions changed. But I have to say, my experience of those times, living in London by then, was that even before Trump and Brexit, people were angry. People were aware of and bristling against the authoritarianism and punitive atmosphere. If some of us were optimistic, it was because we could see the road ahead, but if some of us were then – or are now – weary and cynical, it’s only because we want the same things and they have felt impossible. Optimism or fatalism can be just different ways of protecting one’s self. Optimism can, I agree with millennial detractors, poison the well of progress, if we are too eager to be misled by platitudes. There is that Brecht quote: “We who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness, could not ourselves be friendly.” Perhaps we millennials could have done with being a bit less friendly and more pragmatic about the threats around us.
Not long ago at a party in New York, I got chatting to a woman 12 years younger than me. Very generous of me, I know. I didn’t even make her tell me what esoteric fragrance she was wearing. She was visiting from Italy on an internship, and we spoke about different cities we had lived in. I told her I had lived in London for nine years before I came to New York, that I had arrived there in 2015. She nodded, trying to make associations. Then she lit on one: “Oh my God, right, London, 2015. It was like, Shoreditch, hipsters, the Cereal Cafe? I had a friend who went to the Cereal Cafe.”
I hadn’t thought of the Cereal Cafe, an arbitrary flashpoint in London gentrification wars, a gimmick which got swept up into more substantive concerns, in a good decade, but how wonderful to be reminded of it, how wonderful that it had somehow lingered in the cultural residue enough that it captured all of 2015 London for this 24-year-old woman. They were twin brothers with the woodcutter aesthetic and mustaches de jour, who sold cereal and milk for a slightly silly amount of money, and came to briefly represent the toxic whimsy of millennials.
But even as they profited from that whimsy, they were also having paint thrown over their cafe, “Scum” spray-painted on it and furious anti-capitalist diatribes posted against them on every platform. That, for me, is a good summary of the flimsiness of millennial optimism as a concept. Whether back then, or within our cultural imagination.
