When a millennial ages

Why millennials can’t grow up, and why this matters

It’s a self-evident truth that young people do things incorrectly. As the young form their identity in adolescence their elders place them in a kangaroo court. Why does the millennial eat so many avocados? Why are they so preoccupied with representation in media? It’s a rite of passage every generation must go through before they are permitted to quietly graduate into adulthood, only for the spotlight to shift to the next generation nervously waiting in line. But as the green shoots of millennial middle age begin to flower, they continue to take up an unhealthy amount of space in the discourse. If anything, they appear to be aging incorrectly as well.  

How should one age? To answer that we need to look back to the 1960s when the first generation of teenagers lovingly referred to as boomers invented liking things. On paper the route to maturity seems simple enough. Cut the air, buy a house, vote for Ronald Reagan, have kids, put the records in storage, acquire a fishing rod, convert every last atom of one’s adolescent identity into its opposite. But as the boomer set about cancelling the world promised by the 60s, they retained an unshakable loyalty to the aesthetics of counterculture, an article of faith the substance of which they have long forgotten.

By the end of the Cold War when Gen X swaggered onto the stage they initially looked ready to reject the course plotted by their boomer forebears. But it didn’t take long for warehouse rave optimism to decay into the Sorrows of Young Werther-esque defeatism of grunge. Detached sarcasm became a defence mechanism to save one the embarrassment that accompanies liking something. The utter pointlessness of everything finally accepted, Gen X quickly fell into line and grew old. Another round of haircuts, another electoral mandate for neoliberalism (this time packaged in Clinton and Blair’s winning smiles), another volte-face into conservativism caveated by the relentless deification of late 20^th Century counterculture. A deification limited to an aesthetic preference, Gen X would go on to spend their forties savagely attacking millennial’s insurgent 2010s optimism. For Gen X, things were indeed better back in their day, including optimism itself.

And so we come to the millennials themselves, who by now should be balls deep into the aging process first charted by their boomer parents. But the proverbial haircuts, the pivot to conservativism, the retreat into sedentary outdoor hobbies, all appear missing. The millennial remains stubbornly Peter Panist when it comes to aging, retaining the vernacular, mannerisms, and attitudes of youth well into their thirties. They are equally tentative in condemning contemporary youth culture, somehow labouring under the delusion that they are still part of the conversation, displaying a naked sincerity their elders find bafflingly immature and their younger Gen Z cousins no doubt regard as “cringe”.

Selecting your weapon of choice to explain why the millennial refuses to age will depend on your intellectual priorities. Maybe it’s the breakdown of economic and political consensus following 2008, which forced the millennial to cleave to the radical politics of youth well into middle age. Maybe it’s the fact that wage stagnation coupled with savagely rising house prices have all but removed the usual mechanisms for bribing the young out their idealism. Millennial interests aren’t aligned to an economic orthodoxy premised on owning assets that will exponentially increase in value. The way to maturity via kids, a mortgage, and set of golf clubs is now shut. Or maybe it’s the long shadow boomers and Gen X continue to cast over 21^st Century culture, which all but obliterated the possibility of things happening from the 00s onwards. There is no millennial mythos on a par with their historical equivalents, no third summer of love to rival 67 or 92. Even nostalgia is unbecoming on the millennial. Attempts to reappraise indie sleaze, emo, grime, and late nu metal appear contrived and feeble next to the immortal swagger of their 20^th Century counterparts. The ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the Star Wars prequels as secret tracts of avant-garde genius perhaps the starkest demonstration of the utter absurdity eating away at the heart of millennial aging.

So choose your fighter I guess. But whatever the truth behind one or all of these explanations, they all suffer from the same shortcoming, namely they let the millennial off the hook. It may be hard to age when the entire economic and political consensus appears to be conspiring to prevent that very thing from happening. But something deep within the soul of the millennial was already primed to welcome eternal youth with open arms. Something in their DNA prevents them from severing from youth with the same clinical brutality of their forbears. Let’s not forgot that a lot of millennials actually do have a mortgage and are parents, yet still collect Star Wars Lego and relish the prospect of marching their children through the detritus of a decaying pop cultural order, not for their children’s enjoyment but in the hopes of experiencing their own childhood afresh.

However much the prospect makes me want to shower immediately, an alternative explanation to those offered above requires us to look at this dialectically (I’m so sorry). Let’s go back to the very dawn of the millennial’s emergence as a viable demographic. They came of age with the rise of the hipster in the 2000s, in other words a moment that represented the end of cultural progress itself, a kind of postmodern (again, I’m sorry) amalgamation of various cultural streams filtered into an aesthetic regime of consumption. Implicitly or explicitly, all youth cultures are premised on some kind of “hot and not” stratification. The hipster’s innovation was to extend this hierarchy into a totalising lifestyle programme. Owning the right records and deploying the correct vocabulary was no longer enough, suddenly, in order to belong to a subculture, one must also select the correct single origin coffee beans. Homeware and cuisine were brought under the same consumption regime as music and fashion. The object of consumption becomes less important the version of the object consumed. From bread to beer, bags for life to physical media formats, that the object was a prestige version of itself, the result of a localised, artisanal process mattered more to the hipster than the object itself. This is why the hipster didn’t cleave to one specific genre of music or coherent set of fashion signifiers. Everyone agreed that the hipster was everywhere, but no one seemed willing to accept the label if it could be defined at all. The hipster became a kind of “you know it when you see it” spectre. But what united them all was the utter conviction that if taste was expressed through carefully selected speech patterns, mannerisms, or philosophical scaffolding it was somehow more legitimate.

The dialectical pushback to this took two forms. The first was poptimism, the insistence that pop music should be treated with the same degree of seriousness afforded to “alternative” music. The second was the ascension of geek culture into the mainstream throughout the 2010s. More than any particular cultural output, the lasting impact of both trends is the mark they left on millennial psychology. Having dispensed with the hipster’s rigid yet oddly arbitrary aesthetic system for sorting objects into the elect or the damned, the millennial then opted to flatten the playing field entirely, adopting a ruthlessly egalitarian attitude toward cultural consumption. Its mantra, “why can’t we just enjoy things?”, an obstructionist platitude disguised as a question, reveals the poison at the heart of millennial aging. At the crucial moment, the very threshold of adulthood, when the records are supposed to be sold off and a subscription to Prospect Magazine acquired, the millennial just kept going. Comic book universes were reappraised as Shakespearean, video games treated as an artform, shelves creaking under the weight not of Waterstones bestsellers but toys marketed to adults.

We can blame the internet for the nostalgia boom of the 2010s, but the real reason is the millennial’s inability to age. Unlike boomer or Gen X nostalgia however, the millennial didn’t pine for their youth, those dark years after 9/11 and that Greenday album, they pined for their childhood. They pined for make-believe, escapism, fancy dress, and play. Film studios, toy manufacturers, and indeed a whole nexus within the music industry quickly realised the returns that could be made by appealing to millennial denialism. A lucrative demographic who would not only go on purchasing the ephemera of their formative years but fanatically defend their right to do so in the face of any criticism.

There is no clearer illustration of this pathology than the Funko Pop. A small, humanoid toy with a large, exaggerated square head, a simple, cartoonish figurine onto which any character fictional or real can be grafted. The entire spectrum of pop culture filtered through a single, whimsical template, built for no other purpose than display. Displaying what exactly? The act of liking something. The thing liked becomes almost incidental to the act of liking itself, now conveniently homogenised into this one all purpose format.

We see this too in the breakdown of our ability to assess music with any degree of rigour. Again, we can blame the internet for this idle eclecticism. But the millennial, via the hipster, also pioneered this dispassionate cosmopolitan fingering, where the entirety of music is available to pick through and sort in broad but shallow salvos. Again, what matters here is not the thing liked, but the amount and variety of things liked, and how easily they can be converted into social media shaped content. The collapse of the legacy music press – the latest episode of which has been well documented – has finally removed these guardrails. With music criticism reduced to influencers posting videos of themselves nodding along to five new albums that you “might’ve missed this month”. Substantive criticism is mistaken for gatekeeping, a hostile act, a barrier placed between you and enjoying the thing. Even the boomers stubborn condemnation of all culture after 1980 looks sophisticated by comparison. It is, at least, a standard. One they will fight and die for, calling on the overwhelming power of their era’s cultural legacy to lend their point a not unwarranted legitimacy.

By the 2020s the nostalgia money train has shown signs of slowing, if not coming to a halt entirely. Popular franchises have faltered at the box office, the “normies” are growing tired of convoluted expanded universes, the well of popular IPs to reboot is finally drying up. But millennial psychology may be irrecoverably damaged by this episode. Their ability to weigh and measure culture utterly degraded. Like a rabid dog loyally guarding their master’s corpse, the millennial continues to defend their right to “just enjoy things”. Adoration without understanding. Passion without humility. Like the Funko Pop, what matters is the act of liking, the reason for liking, the value (or lack thereof) of the thing liked, all is lost in a haze of anti-intellectual fetishism. This is why the millennial’s failure to age correctly out of their adolescence will have deep and lasting consequences for us all. The stakes are nothing short of our ability to understand the cultural moment. The skill of assessing cultural production not tied to some preexisting IP or established aesthetic mode is eroding away. If everything has value then nothing has value, if everything is a Funko Pop then nothing is a Funko Pop.