There's a high-pitched sound coming from America's co-working spaces, third-wave coffee shops, and mommy-and-me yoga classes.
Maybe you've heard it, as if 72.2 million complaints were ringing out in unison: complaints of joint pain from high-intensity interval training, from parties held in distant neighborhoods during the week; complaints about the resurgence of Y2K style, the emergence of hair loss, the strength of contemporary marijuana.
Millennials have grown up. We have reached middle age, beginning to show signs of aging, including leaving the Internet and entering something called “millenopause.” Now we have to work harder than ever to remain culturally relevant, while Generation Z and (gasp) Generation Alpha capture the attention of marketing departments and the media.
While it is true that the generation born between 1981 and 1996 is aging (as all life does), we are obviously not old, except by the effort of our own feverish imagination. Millennials are currently between the ages of 28 and 43, meaning a significant number of us are still too young to run for president. A 36-year-old person falls right in the middle of the generational cohort, fitting well within psychologist Erik Erikson's “early adulthood” stage of psychosocial development.
Even if we admit that there are real things that make millennials feel squeaky (the traditional milestones of adulthood met or not, the 20th anniversary of “Mean Girls,” and the confusing craze for Stanley water bottles), there's something a little strange to call that. pay close attention to our own generational obsolescence.
The chorus of lamentations is so loud that it feels like protesting too much. Could it be a trick? Remember, millennials are the first generation that learned to mine their lives for social media content, and “aging” may be too strong a category to leave on the shelf.
Once upon a time, if you got attention because of your age, it was to tell everyone how good you were at it. Baby boomers, for example, did not approach middle age as neurotically. As boomers began reaching middle age in the 1980s, Cheryl Russell, then editor of American Demographics magazine, stated, “The era of youth dominance is over.” Boomers would continue to wield cultural power; they would simply leave childish things behind.
And for many boomers, getting older wasn't even getting older. “Being 40 today is what 30 used to be, and 50 is the new 40,” boomer Diane von Furstenberg told the New York Times in 2005. Meanwhile, for millennials, like TV writer Jen Statsky once posted“When you are 34 you are actually 27, but the moment you turn 35 you are 50.”
According to Anne Helen Petersen, author of “Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” millennials were trained on an Internet where every detail of their lives went viral. Ms. Petersen was my coworker at Buzzfeed for several years in the 2010s, when articles like “Signs You Grew Up in a Small Town” were the norm.
“People will share things or click on them because then they feel seen,” Petersen said. She noted that older millennials have complained about being out of touch for some time, but that as more members of the generation approach 40, there has been more content about aging.
Generation Z faces similar incentives to create content based on their own lives, and believe it or not, they've already begun to worry about their own decrepitude. The contrast between two social media-native generations is, for the first time, social media material, a fact that is not lost on anyone who has used TikTok recently. Have you ever wanted to know how millennials answer the phone compared to Gen Z? How they dance? How do they do their makeup?
“TikTok has amplified these generational differences, where every little thing seems to be under a microscope,” said Casey Lewis, author of the popular After School newsletter, which analyzes youth consumption trends. “From the emojis we use to the way we say certain words.”
Ironically, almost two decades ago, millennials were branded as a generation that would change cultural mores and make everyone else feel old: “A new generation of American workers is about to attack everything they hold sacred: from giving orders even his starched white shirt. and tie,” a 2007 “60 Minutes” segment warned.
Having remade so many aspects of American life in their youthful image, millennials are acutely aware that their age defines them.
Maybe all this meowing is a defensive strategy: a tactic to claim our irrelevance before our younger counterparts can blame us for it. A new argument, made primarily by millennials on TikTok and X, is that Generation Z is aging faster and worse than millennials. In other words, we may be old, but soon you'll be here and you'll handle it even worse.
“I don't even try to stay awake, and that's very liberating,” said Lewis, who added that she had recently encountered a Gen Z neighbor in the hallway of her building, prompting an epiphany. “I saw her wearing basketball shorts and a big button-down shirt, a small camisole and cowboy boots,” Ms. Lewis said. “I looked at myself and thought, 'I don't have to get involved with that anymore.' She was wearing jeans and a sweater. “It’s liberating, in a good way.”
Of course, millennials' ability to drive a cycle of discourse around our times means we can still shape the conversation. For millennials who criticized their boomer parents for decades for not leaving the stage, the act of “look how old we are” may serve another purpose: to prolong our own time in the spotlight and our own sense of being the protagonists of the history.
A recent TikTok by comedian Iliza Shlesinger perfectly reflected this tension. In the video, Shlesinger, 40, rails against Generation Z with an outraged “millennial message,” chastising young people for forgetting that “we walked on Instagram so you could run on TikTok.” Naturally, the clip has gone viral on the latter platform, where it has been viewed more than nine million times.
“We were young once, too,” Shlesinger said.
Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
