Millennials Were The Last Generation to Have it All

Gen Z hate us because they can't be us.

If you were in your twenties in the 2000s or early 2010s, congratulations—you won. While Gen Z, currently holding dominion over the internet, might inform you that you are cringe, I have spent enough time watching their content to know that this might be a coping mechanism. A form of self-soothing. The truth is, they don’t hate us. They just wish they were us.

Let’s be real: millennials had it all. Not in the way that Boomers think we did (homeownership, job security, a functioning planet), but in the way that actually matters. We had the best cultural artifacts: the television that turned girlhood into high art (Broad City, Girls, Gossip Girl, New Girl, 30 Rock, High Fidelity). Shows that were messy and indulgent, that understood us as contradictory, unserious, and still worth watching. The best celebrity drama, because celebrity culture was still something that happened to famous people, not to everyone with a ring light and an audience.

We got to live through Solange and Jay-Z in the elevator as a mystery, not a micro-trend dissected into a thousand TikToks by teenagers convinced they have sources. Lemonade told us what happened, not a series of breathless exposés written by 19-year-olds who think watching a grainy paparazzi clip and having parasocial relationships qualifies them to unpack what really happened. I wholeheartedly believed that 2013-2015 might have been the best two-year stretch in human history. Vine existed and no one was trying to monetize it. Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj were fighting on Twitter before the app was disintegrated by an evil billionaire. The world felt like a place of infinite possibility instead of an over-policed performance space. We owned our cringe because we had hope.

And the faces, my god, the faces. The women of that era had faces. Distinct ones. Faces with character and quirks, noses that weren’t mathematically whittled into aerodynamic ski slopes, lips that weren’t pre-measured to a 1:1.6 Golden Ratio. Rihanna had her face, Keira Knightley had her jawline, Zooey Deschanel had her big, awkward, round eyes. Women weren’t expected to morph into an optimized version of beauty. There was no single template being mass-produced in Beverly Hills and exported around the country. There was no singular, terrifying Instagram face. There was no algorithm to tell us what kind of beauty “performed best.” Beauty was still aspirational, but it was varied.

@kreyolrebelThe 90s was the last era of originality #90sbaby #welovethe90s #90smusic #britneyspears #willsmith #madonna #leonardodicaprio #dennisrodman #mariahcarey #jenniferaniston #keanureeves #jenniferlopez #adamsandler #jamieleecurtis #drewbarrymore #whitneyhouston #jimcarey #jackiechan #fyp #explore

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Millennials were also the last generation to experience social media when it was fun, before it turned into a full-time job. When Instagram was just pics of or feet and brunch in sepia tone, and not a place to manufacture your personality into something aesthetically digestible to others. Social media was essentially one big group chat, just a place for your friends and family to keep up with you. The virtual world wasn’t more important than the real one. We went out, drank vodka sodas, made mistakes, and those mistakes stayed in the bar bathroom. You could have a bad night without it showing up in someone’s group chat five seconds later. We existed before everything was content. We existed before the algorithm decided that life should be packaged into a digestible, monetizable personal brand.

And we we had fun. God, we had fun. We went to work in pencil skirts and ballet flats because nobody worked from home unless they were sick. We went to happy hours where a beer was five bucks, and then the club because that was still a thing. No one stayed at home doom-scrolling because it hadn’t even been invented yet. Before the infinite scroll was introduced in 2006, being on your phone was like eating a bag of chips, at some point, it was just over. You reached the bottom and moved on. If you wanted to see your friends, you actually saw them, not just their carefully curated highlights. We took blurry digital camera photos that lived in Facebook albums with names like Summer Daze 2k9 because the only audience was the people we knew. Life wasn’t a personal brand, and being young wasn’t a content strategy. It was excessive, earnest, ridiculous, and free. And Gen Z hates us for it because they know they missed out.

The rise of tossed salad chains in the 2010s is my Roman Empire, and yes, I’m still thinking about it.

To be in your twenties in the 2010s felt like being on the last plane leaving Guam. If you were a girl, you were the first generation of women who truly had choices, not just in theory, but in practice. Unlike our mothers, we weren’t expected to marry straight out of college. We could be messy, ambitious, chaotic, and unapologetic in ways they never could. We weren’t just given the option of independence; we were expected to take it. So we did. In 2009, so many Millennial Black women signed up for college that they beat out any other demographic. More women of all walks of life were delaying marriage, delaying motherhood, pursuing careers, moving to cities, building lives on their own terms. And for the first time, it wasn’t tragic to be a woman in her twenties without a husband, it was aspirational.

We had it all: beyoncé’s feminism era, eyeliner on the bottom lid, and no one had ever read a notes app apology.

Feminism, in its mainstream form, was still new—an incomplete, flawed, corporate-friendly product in many ways, but also a revelation. For the first time, the language of empowerment was being broadcast to a mass audience. Lean In told women to demand a seat at the table, even if the table was built on structural inequity. Emma Watson stood at the UN, trying to convince men that feminism was for them too. The Future Is Female was printed on American Apparel t-shirts made by underpaid garment workers. Beyoncé sampled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Flawless, only for bell hooks to call her a terrorist. We were witnessing, in real time, these feminist debates conversations unfold and the decoupling of womanhood from the nuclear family model that had defined every generation before us. Economic security and social legitimacy were no longer tied to men but to work and education. Millennial women were delaying marriage, delaying children, outpacing men in degree attainment, making our own money, even if we weren’t making as much of it. We had role models who were bosses, not wives. We had options. And for the first time in history, a generation of women could be young before they were expected to be anything else.

And masculinity, too, was shifting in ways we didn’t fully understand at the time. The dominant image of masculinity was still mainstream and white, but it wasn’t yet reactionary. The biggest guys in pop culture were men who made earnest music about their heartbreak (John Mayer, Justin Timberlake, Drake), or guys who leaned into humor (Jon Stewart, Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari before the thinkpieces). The rise of the alpha male, of podcast bro culture, of men rediscovering their "natural dominance" hadn’t happened yet. The manosphere was contained to the dark corners of Reddit, not sitting in the White House. Feminism was gaining traction in pop culture, but the backlash hadn’t hit yet. And for a brief, fleeting moment, it felt like we were all moving toward something better together, something less rigid, less punishing.

And politically, we all still believed. We lived through the hope-and-change era, through 2008, when believing in politicians wasn’t naive but normal. For young people, Obama’s election wasn’t just the first time we voted, it was the first time we saw proof that electoral politics could actually work. The promise of progress didn’t feel like an abstraction; it felt inevitable. And for a while, it was. We watched history unfold in real time, not as a crisis but as progress. Gay marriage was legalized before our eyes. A Black man became president, and even if that victory was imperfect, it felt profound. It felt like the world was, at the very least, moving forward. We didn’t know how fragile it all was. We still believed.

Before gen z called us cringe, boomers called us doomed. Millenials stayed thriving despite both.

And as someone who worked in media during the golden age of digital media—the BuzzFeed/Vox/Mic era, where so many of us got our start—it felt like we had won the career lottery. The internet was still a playground, journalism wasn’t yet a graveyard, and entire media companies were built on the radical idea that young people cared and wanted to make things that mattered. We worked at startups that had cold brew on tap and bean bags in the conference room, writing articles with headlines like 25 Reasons Millennials Will Save the World and actually believing it. We covered politics in an intersectional way that felt urgent and exciting, learning to package big ideas into explainers and tweets, making culture-defining videos in open-plan offices where our co-workers were also our closest friends. It was pre #METOO so you could do anything, and yes for me that included making my coworkers draw vaginas and HR did not care. It was a break from our parents, who went to work to go to work. We believed in what we were doing. Our jobs weren’t just jobs, they were part of a larger mission. It was the beginning of the startup era, when it still felt like a company could have a soul, when work could be both meaningful and fun. And for a while, it was.

the nyt capturing my essence in an otherwise unhinged hit piece on millennials simply existing.

Back when we celebrated our coworkers’ birthdays with cake in the break room instead of a slack thread with emojis.

And yet, despite being the focus of so much hate, unlike Gen Z, millennials haven’t become more conservative with age. Decades of political science research showing that people naturally drifted rightward as they got older, that financial stability and homeownership and family-building would inevitably transform the youth vote into the Republican base. But millennials never got the financial stability, we never got the homeownership, and we watched institutions fail us so thoroughly that we have remained, on the whole, progressive. In fact, data shows that millennials in the US and UK “are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history." This makes us the first generation in modern American history that has not shifted rightward with age, the first generation to experience adulthood as an exercise in watching neoliberalism fail in real-time. And maybe that’s why, despite everything we’ve lost, we refuse to lose our belief that things can change for the better. If anything, we’ve radicalized. We were raised on hope and change. And unlike the generations before us, we never stopped believing that progress isn’t just possible, it’s necessary.

Our generation was so unbothered that even at the height of our cultural dominance, the biggest criticism about millennials was that we loved ourselves too much. If you were alive when the infamous TIME magazine cover came out, you know exactly what I’m talking about. We were called lazy, entitled, and narcissistic by the same Boomers who tanked the housing market, stole the possibility of homeownership from us, and then mocked us for buying avocado toast instead of saving for a house we might be able to afford by the time we’re 60. We were told we had too much self-esteem, that our participation trophies had ruined us, that we expected too much from the world. Meanwhile, we were graduating into the worst economy since the Great Depression, and being told that the reason we couldn’t get ahead was because we spent too much money on iced coffee.

the boomer millennial hate was relentless.

Despite all of this, despite every op-ed about how we were too soft, too coddled, too idealistic, millennials were relentless in our optimism. We kept pushing for the future we believed we deserved. And what’s funny—what’s actually hilarious—is that so much of what we fought for ended up benefiting Gen Z. We fought for marriage equality. We fought for better conversations around mental health. We fought for the internet to be a place where people could build careers outside of the corporate machine. And in return, they turned around and laughed at us for wearing skinny jeans while we did it!!

The original 0.5 pic was actually a selfie stick held at an alarming angle.

The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes: millennial hate is just envy in disguise. People love to make fun of us. They roll their eyes at our Hogwarts houses, our pumpkin spice, our absolute earnestness. They make fun of us for believing in self-care before it was swallowed whole by corporate wellness, for treating the internet like a playground before it turned into an all-seeing panopticon, for experiencing our youth as something to be lived rather than optimized. But here’s what they won’t admit: being a millennial is elite. And deep down, they know it.

Maybe that’s why every Gen Z trend is just a heavily filtered, slightly ironic version of something we already did first. The claw clips, the wired headphones, the digital cameras, half of their aesthetic are straight up lifted straight from our Facebook albums. They aren’t mocking our past so much as repackaging it, fetishizing a time they never got to live. They’ll clown us for our side parts, then quietly buy our old butterfly hair clips. They’ll call us cringe, then post blurry flash photos of themselves at a dive bar with the same wide-eyed, cranberry-vodka-fueled chaos that defined our 2013. The truth is, they don’t hate millennials. They just wish they got to be us first.

I love being a millennial woman. I love that I got to experience my twenties before the algorithm decided what kind of person I should be. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s this: they don’t hate us. They just miss something they never got to have.