Millennial Cringe

What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation by Charlie Wells. Abrams Press, 288 pages. 2025

Is literally every single Zoomer an illiterate Nazi addicted to slurs, ultraviolent pornography, and unlicensed brain health supplements shilled on nine-hour-long video podcasts? Probably not, but it certainly felt that way on election night, as the exit polls rolled in, with young men turning decisively toward Trump. As a card-carrying woke millennial, I felt antique as a hippie washed ashore in Reagan’s eighties. There I was, archaically respecting pronouns while everyone else bought Bitcoin and rediscovered the joys of calling things retarded. (Granted I’d never been sterling on the not-calling-things-retarded front, but I’d never been proud of this tendency, and I’d never thought calling things retarded was an ideology.) Worse yet, the Zoomers were mocking us. Maybe you saw the “millennial cringe” videos that were circulating on social media around this time—little skits in which Zoomers parodied the content creators they’d grown up watching on YouTube, mistaking them for everyday millennials. It was hard to take these clips personally: no one I’ve ever loved, for instance, has called a dog a doggo. But in light of the election, they seemed to speak to something real: a dawning sense that millennials were—to use what may be a Zoomerism, or just a millennial’s lame idea of one—washed.

Let’s say that a central premise of millennial life was that in exchange for accepting less—less money, less stability—one could stay young forever. Let’s also say that the inevitable collapse of this bargain has ushered in, among millennials, a period of frantic and doomed non-monogamy, dead-end psychedelic experimentation, and back-to-the-land reactionary psychosis. None of this stuff is strictly true—the majority of millennials do indeed now have homes, kids, and dependable incomes—but vibe-based assertions are fun to make. It feels like just yesterday that one couldn’t open social media without being bombarded by poorly sourced clickbait about millennial spending habits, sex lives, attitudes toward work, etc. If a millennial had an unconventional thought about breakfast food or leisure travel, a Business Insider reporter would scramble for the scoop. One could enjoy this as a kind of highly ritualized discursive game, whereby the random attitudes of recent college grads were effortlessly converted into outrage, counter-outrage, and eventually the limp jokes of fading late-night comedians (whose livelihoods, per these very articles, the millennials imperiled with their cord-cutting). But as a method of uncovering anything meaningful or true about millennials, it was an obvious sham. One writer, though, apparently didn’t get the memo: Bloomberg editor and reporter Charlie Wells, whose What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation aims to wrest the narrative back from bad-faith journalists and to say something true, something from the inside, about who millennials were and what they’ve become.

Wells is alert to the challenges posed by his project. He concedes in his introduction that generational analysis is mainly astrology; that its primary purpose is to generate income for brand consultants and that it is difficult to say anything meaningful about a group of about seventy-two million people born over a span of sixteen years (“between the founding of CNN in 1980 and Fox News in 1996,” as Wells puts it, tipping us off to the range of his cultural framework). Having conceded these things, Wells might have paused to rethink his project. After all, “trying to tell the story of a generation [is] . . . the sort of thing that an overly confident White man might try to do.” But Wells—apparently an insecure or appropriately confident white man—persists. His solution is simple: instead of giving us airy generalities, he will get out there and pound the pavement, reporting the stories of five more or less representative millennials in an effort to scrape away the received wisdom that so often clogs generational discourse. The result, noble as its intentions may be, is millennial cringe in its purest form.

Wells assembles an appropriately diverse cast of nineties kids. We have Olivia Vilardi-Perez, a Long Island school teacher whose dad died on 9/11. We have Tereza Lee, a South Korean-Brazilian-American piano prodigy who in her teen years became the public face of the long-languishing DREAM Act. Corralling two separate if overlapping millennial themes—alternative modes of sex and love on the one hand, the rise of extractive social media platforms on the other—we have Miju Han, a half-Jewish half-Korean bisexual tech worker who was once the subject of a CNN interview entitled “I have a fiancé, a girlfriend, and two boyfriends” and who today, according to her LinkedIn, serves as vice president of product management at Capital One. Han contrasts starkly with Justin, the straight white male of the bunch, who was very slowly climbing the ranks at a strip mall dojo before he dropped out of the workforce to be a stay-at-home dad. Rounding out the group is Aaron, by far the book’s most appealing character, a black Rust Belt drug counselor and military vet whose twenties were, like mine, warped by the opioid crisis. (Wells—apparently too busy ascending the corporate media ladder to bother picking up even a modest pill habit—seems not to realize that Aaron was grievously ripping off his friends by selling them 30 milligram oxycodone pills for $40 ca. 2011.)

Credit where credit is due: Wells has avoided the trap of mistaking one demographic sliver—typically white, middle-to-upper middle class college graduates—for the entire generational picture, even if he winds up demonstrating the uselessness of “the generation” as a site of analysis in the first place. A prime millennial artifact like Lena Dunham’s Girls might have had certain blind spots given its exclusive focus on arts-oriented Oberlin graduates, but at least it offered specific observations about specific people. Wells wrangles his unwieldy material to vague pronouncements like “media matters because it influences who we think we are” and “the story of a generation is always a dynamic thing.” (Most bafflingly Wells contends that millennials “struggle with failure,” as if boomers relish it.) That material, incidentally, consists of thin portraits of his subjects yoked at every available opportunity to insights from one of the dozen or so books that pundits are permitted to read. (At a certain point in my first pass of the book I grew concerned—by my calculations Democracy in America should have been mentioned by page fifty at the latest—but I needn’t have worried: section three opens with an account of “the year Alexis de Tocqueville landed on our shores.”)

If one can identify any buried contention in Wells’s book, it is this: people born at roughly the same time are likely to experience many of the same historical phenomena. Eureka. To illustrate this notion Wells treats us to ChatGPT-level capsule summaries of the most significant and widely known happenings of the last twenty-five years, starting with 9/11 and proceeding through the war on terror, the rise of partisan media, the recession, the 2016 election, #MeToo, and so on. Among this litany there is only one event I’d genuinely forgotten: the raucous celebrations that erupted on college campuses the night President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden. I witnessed one of these as a junior at a middling state university and what I mostly remember was a fellow student chanting—with great conviction, until her boyfriend took her aside—“Obama is dead!” To Wells’s mind “a shot of adulthood bolted through our veins” that night as we were forced to reckon with “a contradiction: feeling the joy of an enemy defeated combined with the uncomfortable truth that those around us (and maybe even we) were celebrating another human being’s death.”

Wells seems to misunderstand why a right-thinking young person would flinch at that night’s spectacle—not out of any concern for the bodily welfare of Osama bin Laden but because, nearly a decade into the war on terror, his carcass represented a hollow trophy. In general, the leftist perspective is absent from Wells’s book, an expected omission from a business reporter but nonetheless glaring. It is one thing to fail to mention Occupy Wall Street in your supposed generational history, another to neglect Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns, upsurges of socialist sentiment the likes of which hadn’t been seen in generations. There is a kind of conceptual logic to these omissions given that—at least until Zohran Mamdani’s victory in this year’s New York City mayoral primary—these upsurges appeared to have achieved absolutely nothing beyond making the continued entrenchment of the right that much harder to bear for those briefly convinced a better future was possible. Still, you’d think this stuff would warrant a mention, given that Wells’s book makes ample room for Britney Spears’s public breakdowns (did you know she was actually a victim?) and Jon Stewart’s endlessly retreaded appearance on Crossfire. But that’s the peril of writing history by way of the Yahoo! News homepage: a lot gets left out.

Wells’s book is distinctly millennial in at least two respects: First, there’s the sense of it having been written not for Wells’s own peers but rather toward the nameless authority figure whose stamp of approval/legitimation every millennial—according to Wells’s stated generational schema—not-so-secretly craves. Second is its obsession with dating. Pages upon pages of What Happened to Millennials are taken up with minute recountings of its subjects’ love lives, relayed in prose not far removed from the kind of young adult fiction that millennials have oddly enshrined as acceptable adult reading material. (Here is Olivia, the Long Island schoolteacher, learning the hard way that she is not exclusive with her new beau: “[Olivia] turned around. And there was Giles. But Giles was making out with someone else. That someone else was Kennedy.”) These interleaved narratives build to a summation of such stunning banality that it needs to be quoted at length to be believed:

What happened to us? . . . The truth is, there are millions of answers to that question, because there are millions of versions of us. There are seventy-two million American Millennials, and even more iterations of the people we have become. If you freeze the frame at any single moment over any one of those lives, the ultimate takeaway will be different than the one that came before. I’ve spent this book talking about what it means to be a Millennial, but when you get down to it, one of the only ongoing truths of the human experience is that we change.

When the man’s right he’s right: we do change! For instance, I started Wells’s book confident that I understood my own generation and ended it convinced that making any kind of definitive statement about anyone was an act of insane epistemic hubris, distinguished only by degree from the rankest race science. Thinking alongside Wells, whose thoughts leap away from certitude into term-paper abstraction, I have had to admit the flimsiness of my generational convictions. It used to seem to me that millennials’ chief claim to cultural distinction was their relationship to technology—old enough to have known a world of corded phones and sitcoms in syndication, young enough to be warped by social media at a tender-ish age. Wells touches on this narrative, claiming that “millennials are something of a bridge, raised analog but increasingly digitized.”

But this would suggest the average millennial was more susceptible to the effects of the internet, when in fact something like the opposite has proven true. Millennials may have been the first teenagers to flirt with their crushes on AOL Instant Messenger, but by the same token boomers were the first senior citizens to lose their minds parsing Q drops. There is a notion embedded in generation-based analysis that history happens primarily to the young, but in a gerontocratic age this notion loses some utility. After all, the most powerful millennial in America—J. D. Vance—spends his days attempting to impress a seventy-nine-year-old man whose Truth Social posts contain more present-tense vitality than any dozen internet-fried alt lit chapbooks.

Sweeping generational pronouncements aren’t de facto absurd. The writer Malcolm Harris makes plenty in his Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, and eight years later they mostly hold up. This is because Harris takes an almost purely materialist approach to his subject, deploying graphs and social science data to meticulously chart a vast conspiracy to immiserate millennials while working them to the bone. A cultural history of the kind Wells has set out to write is a trickier proposition.

I’ve personally met thousands of millennials: one narrowly avoided prison time for a check-kiting scheme, one arguably pioneered getting famous on Instagram for having a huge ass, still another lost his mind after taking molly for thirty straight days and then published a demented five-thousand-word Facebook post in the form of an Entourage screenplay detailing various wrongs done to him by his fraternity brothers. I suppose someone could devise a unified theory of culture that links these people, along with their seventy-two million coevals (1.8 billion coevals, if we take in the global population, which we might as well do). But one would first have to ask oneself a question that Wells sadly failed to consider: Why bother?