What Was A Millennial?

Experience

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a reflection on millenialinarianism (?). At the partner site

Inner Life

,

<Mary L. Tabor>

writes on Passover.

Best,

Sam

WHAT WAS A MILLENNIAL?

Zadie Smith has a nice line in which she says that each generation seems to have about three great and ten terrible ideas. Millennials, amidst the whole welter of bad ideas (tamagotchis, MGMT, the coddled workplace, etc) came up with one interesting idea that the jury is still out on, which is that it’s possible to be a fulfilled person without undergoing the usual initiations to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman.’

I’m showing some millennial privilege or whatever in thinking that we were the ones to come up with that idea. It’s certainly there in the rebelliousness and androgyny of Flower Power, etc. And there are hints of it going all the way back to late 19th century Decadents. But millennials seemed to make that idea mainstream and to codify it in that briefly ascendant cultural entity, the Metrosexual.

The briefly ascendant metrosexual

The basic idea — and this was there, although hardly ever fully articulated — was that all of the old processes of initiation were a bit silly or outdated, they related to violent patriarchy or, at the least, to societies of scarcity. Since things were, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, really good, and had been for a very long time, it stood to reason that there need be no deference to the logic of scarcity. Boys did not need to prove themselves to be ‘men,’ whether through military service or same sort of Book of Genesis-ish test against other men. Women did not need to be mothers to find fulfillment  and could dispense with much of the coquetry of dating. The heroes were people like Michael Cera, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Jason Segel, etc — people who seemed to have no very clear place on the gender spectrum, who didn’t necessarily pass through the usual accepted steps of adulthood but had a distinct self-possession to them, an ability to self-inhabit wherever they found themselves in the world.

The problems started to emerge with time. The whole generation was a bit tough to deal with in the workforce — more interested in self-care and motivation than in proving themselves to superiors. And rates of child-bearing were very low — the search for fulfillment was endless, running through creativity, spirituality, relationships, but not, particularly, family.

For millennials (at least the circles I was in) androgyny wasn’t particularly a choice. The sense was more that it just didn’t really matter — without childbearing, without initiatory masculine tests, men and women had more or less the same lives, subject to the same career pressures, etc. For Generation Z, that idea seemed to be pushed much further — trans became a generational totem in somewhat the way gayness had been for an earlier generation. The generational heroes very much seemed to be defying their ‘assigned’ genders, treating everything as a choice. Whatever the future was, it would be far less gender-demarcated than the past.

All of this was much to the consternation of older people, who noted the falling birth rate, who noted the preponderance of grown-up children, who bemoaned a lack of polarity in romantic dynamics, who felt that the endless ‘self-expression’ masked a running-away, an evasion of basic adult responsibilities.

To some extent, this was just the usual inter-generational misunderstanding — most millennials and Gen Zers probably would go on to have perfectly conventional lives, slot themselves in to existing power structures, etc. But there was a real idea at the heart of it: whether anything really was lost by just skipping the initiation rituals, whether society didn’t end up being kinder and gentler for doing without them.

As far as I can tell, all of this is still very much undecided. I’ve been going through a round of regrets for my millennial upbringing, and share in the general bewilderment at Gen Z’s apparent lack of contact to reality. But I look at other cultures around the world and understand why we went in the direction we did. The masculine rituals do have a way of enforcing conformity, of eliminating individual identity. Feminine ‘maturity’ tends to emphasize romance and motherhood to the exclusion of all else. The traditional systems can be brutal to anyone who is different.

A GenZer untethered to reality

I understand the critiques. I understand why millennials seem soft and Gen Zers fantasists. I’m aware of the feeling of having been misled — that biological realities and some ironclad truths about sexual dynamics made a mockery of millennials and Gen Z’s more utopian ideas of how to change the world. But who we were at the moment of history we were in, when everything did seem really, really good, there was no alternative except to try.