Millennials, a Generation Defined by Contradiction
The millennial gaze, perhaps more than that of any other generation, is characterized by a kind of double vision
Welcome to The Ringer’s Millennial Canon, a weeklong celebration of the people, places, and things that defined a generation. See the winner of the Millennial Canon Bracket here.
Let me state up front that I am absolutely, 100 percent qualified to write this article.
Vote Now in the Final Round of the Millennial Canon Bracket
I’m here to introduce The Ringer’s Millennial Canon, which means I'm here to launch a celebration—and, more than that, a highly scientific accounting—of an entire American generation. Here at The Ringer, we’ve spent months sifting through the cultural artifacts most associated with millennials—the BuzzFeed listicles, the horny vampires, the artisanal brand logos, the American Apparel billboards, the back issues of Kinfolk, the Britney Rolling Stone covers, the Girls quotes, the AOL Instant Messenger door creaks, all the crumbs left over on the avocado toast plate of post-Y2K culture—to try to identify the objects and experiences that best characterize America’s most-talked-about age cohort. Whether you’re an early millennial, a late millennial, or someone who’s never even tasted a cronut, we hope you’ll enjoy revisiting the highs and lows of a generation that’s officially entered the age of full-on nostalgia. As Gen Z has become the driving force in youth culture, the millennial nostalgia meter has slowly ticked up to ’80s boomer levels, and, oh my God, the tsunami once ’90s boomer levels hit will lay waste to us all.
But you can’t understand a generation purely through stuff, even if that stuff includes “bacon” (a tough 3-seed in the bracket and definitely a meat that no prior generation has discovered). And therefore, some eagle-eyed editor at Ringer HQ decided we should include a think piece about millennials and authenticity, or millennials and sincerity, or the millennial mindset in general, and said, “Let’s get Brian to write that. He seems like someone who fully comprehends the millennial condition.”
Correct. I was born in 1976, and if the history of generational discourse has taught us anything, it’s that members of older generations always understand younger generations perfectly, and younger people always love it when older people describe their tendencies. They can’t get enough of it. It’s like bacon to them.
Anyway, here’s a thought about how millennials see the world. (Please don’t put in the newspaper that I am 12 billion years old.) My thought is pretty simple. It’s that millennials, more than any generation in living memory, experience the world primarily through contradiction.
That is, I think most people, historically, have found it hard to hold two contradictory ideas in their minds at the same time. If it’s dark outside, it’s not light outside. If you’re rich, you’re not also poor. Millennials, by contrast, seem to find it natural to hold on to contradictory ideas simultaneously. The millennial gaze, to me, is characterized by a kind of double vision. The best way to grasp the truth of any situation is to see the opposites from which it’s made.
America? It’s a failed state; it’s a supreme empire. Technology? A joyful necessity that’s destroying your mental health. Capitalism? Ruining the planet, but I love tracking sneaker drops. Finances? No one’s ever been more broke; no one’s ever been more prepared to drop $400 on brunch. The human self? You have an offline one and an online one; they are equally you, and they are not the same.
More Artifacts From the Millennial Canon
And again, I'm not talking about shifting perspectives or interpretations that alternate over time. The point is that they coexist in a single moment. When I imagine, say, a generic boomer walking through Manhattan, I imagine that much of the mental apparatus of this hypothetical person is devoted to making interpretive choices. This is the greatest city in the world! Or else: This is a hellscape unfit for human habitation! When I imagine a generic millennial making the same walk, I imagine them seeing the city both ways simultaneously, beauty and horror, like two transparencies overlaid on a slide projector.
I first started noticing this around 2010 or 2011, which I remember as the moment when everyone in America under 40, quite suddenly, started saying, “I feel like” instead of “I think.” (I think suggests an act of conscious selection—I see things this way, not that way—while I feel like suggests a more tentative movement among open possibilities.) Around that time, I remember being intrigued by a new tone of irony in the work of younger writers. Gen X, of course, was famously the generation poisoned by irony, but Gen X irony tended to be black-and-white. If, say, a movie was dumb and bad, you might say you loved it, but you didn’t mean you loved it; you meant something like, “I understand that this is corporate trash, and I am trapped in a world in which I’m expected to accept corporate trash, and corporate trash will destroy my mind if I let it, and therefore, as an act of protest, I’m going to pretend this steaming hunk of shit is the brilliant work I actually crave.” Irony was a sort of secret handshake among like-minded people. You made jokes the way the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 made jokes: because you were the prisoner of a hostile system, and jokes kept your mind alive.
What I noticed with millennials, though, was that they’d make similar jokes, but they actually loved the thing they were, simultaneously, making fun of. The tone of the irony was similar, but it was more three-dimensional than Gen X irony; it added a new, more deep-lying joke, which was that the irony was in fact sincere. “I understand that Real Housewives of Myrtle Beach is corporate trash, and I live in a world where I’m treated as a sheep who will lap up corporate trash uncritically, and therefore I’m going to pretend as a joke to think RHOMB is brilliant—but I also am a sheep who’ll lap up corporate trash uncritically, and therefore the actual joke is that I mean what I’m saying.”
This is why I think the usual clichés about millennials—that they grew up on the internet, learned to commoditize their inner lives for social media, and became disillusioned with America after the subprime mortgage crisis—aren’t quite accurate, or at least don’t go far enough. The clichés explain millennials according to the big, top-line historical events they lived through when they were young. This is the standard way to explain any generation, of course: find its Kennedy assassination, its Vietnam. But as with any generation, the millennial worldview is a much deeper and more complicated reflection of the cultural shifts they’ve lived through, including the slow waning of American power and the broad loss of confidence in the idea of the truth.
What’s a generation, after all? It’s a cultural radar gun and not much more. The idea of generations gives us a convenient way to track social change, but generations themselves don’t really exist. Take two people, one born on the last day of 1980 and the other born on the first day of 1981. According to the standard generational cutoff points, these two belong to different generations: Person A is an Xer, and Person B is a millennial. Do you really think they have more age-related stuff in common with their generational peers born 15 years earlier or later than with each other? Of course not. And by the same token, there are countless members of every generation who have almost nothing in common with the prevailing age-group stereotype. In the world at this moment, there are millennial managers of Kia dealerships who met their spouses at church, own four-bedroom suburban homes, have never had a social media account, and think Forever 21 is a liquor store. There’s no way to write about generations without using a ludicrously broad brush.
At the same time, humanity never stands still, and taking a basic reading of the speed and trajectory of a group of similarly aged people—even a group arbitrarily defined—can be a way of seeing where we’re all going, in the same way that Paris Fashion Week can give you a sense of what you’ll soon be buying at J.Crew. “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “human character changed.” She was joking, but—like a true millennial!—she also meant what she said. There are moments in history when “all human relations,” as she put it, change. Those changes can seem to appear quickly; you wake up one morning, as I did in 2010, and the sentence “I feel like people used to ride bicycles more” suddenly makes sense. But the processes that cause those changes are subterranean and gradual, and they affect all of us, and I think—sorry, I feel like—talking about generations can help us see them at work.
So when I think about millennials and the experience of contradiction, I’m also thinking about ways in which the millennial worldview manifests in everyone else. For instance: Millions of people who are not millennials, both younger and older, find it increasingly difficult to believe wholeheartedly in the kinds of clear, simple, culturally agreed-upon explanations of the world—civilization is on a path of progress, capitalism is good and communism is bad, the purpose of life is to get into heaven—that more or less sufficed for their great-grandparents. Yet most of us aren’t completely rejecting those explanations. We believe in them and don’t believe in them, find them comforting and threatening, want to go back to them and want to escape from them, all at the same time.
All of which is to say that I think the experience of contradiction has gotten easier for more people in the millennials’ wake. That may be their real generational legacy (well, that and destroying mayonnaise). Holding on to opposites feels more natural than it used to, which can be a good thing (in that the truth is often misrepresented by simple explanations) or a bad thing (in that viewing reality as an irreconcilable web of contradictions can give people leeway to, say, reject science based on their feelings). Regardless, it’s where we are.
Aging, confused, open to possibilities, and hungry for bacon—you know what? Maybe I’m a millennial after all.
