Millennials are aging. Long live millennials?
On Colette Shade’s Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was)
Increasingly, I’ve been seeing people online observe how millennials—a much maligned generation—now appear to be the most politically sober, sane, and cautious generation (partly because we are also apparently the most computer literate bunch). I am not yet prepared to accept this wholesale. Except maybe computer literacy; MS-DOS and the early internet taught us well.
Boomers will disagree and call us lazy, and Gen Zs will call us ‘boomer lite’ and laugh at the millennial pause. We never escaped the accusation that we wasted our money on avocado toasts and designer coffee. Perpetually infantilized, yet working several jobs to earn our keep. Another millennial-centric tweet goes something like, sorry I didn’t buy stocks for so and so tech company, I was busy finishing high school.
Remember high school? Remember side-swept emo bangs? Remember emotional music from early college? A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out turns 20 years old this year. Welcome to the Black Parade will soon follow next year. Blink 182 and Green Day are now approaching classic rock status. We are aging, but so is everyone else.
But I do agree with the book’s basic premise. Because we had a taste of economic prosperity after ‘the end of History’ (debunked) and the future was promised to us in Frutiger Aero’s techno futurist glory (we are now in a tech dystopia), the rug being pulled under our feet is an especially rough awakening. There are things to be said about the hacks that have risen from our generation’s ranks: JD Vance, chief among them, was able to skip past Gen Xers. Millennial ‘copes’ include nostalgia, says Shade, but I’d also add to the mix the strange political choices informed by anger and despair.
Shade writes from the vantage point of an educated white American, which does not capture an entire generation’s experience. But there is something about the American pop culture of the time—exported to the rest of us, along with the values of Western hyperindividualism and fear of the brown, radicalized other—that bore itself deep into our consciousness.
We came of age during a recession, faced bad job markets, and are now experiencing full-blown climate and AI-induced existential crises. Born too late to be counterculture hippies, born too early to, well, have our misery put to sleep by the end of the world. Large language models will take our jobs, and so we must be future-proof, whatever that means.
Shade writes at the end why boomer nostalgia and millennial nostalgia are fundamentally different:
Millennials are aging now, too, but in a far more violent, precarious, and uncertain world. And so we look to the past for our hope, because hope in the future feels so hard to come by. Nostalgia is, in many ways, the opposite of politics. Politics may look to the past for context, but it offers us a chance to shape the future. Nostalgia is a surrender to the world as it.
The book mainly reads as entertainment, not unlike our glued attention to freakish moments of mundane virality. Entertainment TV taught us millennials, more than anyone else, the generative and destructive power of the moment. We take respite in them from the burning world outside, the melting ice caps, the political chaos. In this economy? In front of my salad? Yes, in this economy. Yes, in front of your salad.
At the same time, the book frames the demands of politics as such: we need to anchor everything on the inequality and gross excess in our material conditions. We are millennials and have always trudged on. Only now, the world is unliveable. The book’s central thesis lends us to one of its many takeaways: our hypercapitalist sensibilities must come to pass. This world can no longer be.