The Millennial redemption arc
Gen Z deserves their 'Girls' era, too.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Let’s not get carried away now, though… —Kate
Awards season is finally over, but the work of online fan accounts is timeless:
For some time now, a Millennial was one of the worst things you could be online. As soon as a younger generation came in to skewer our mannerisms—saying “doggo,” pausing, making coffee a personality trait—it was game over. “Millennial cringe” compilations racked up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok. TikToks with Millennial energy elicited comments like, “Post this on Reels.” Even I got rid of my bangs and started rolling my eyes at myself for things like “enjoying The Office.”
But there’s recently been a vibe shift, and I think it’s thanks to Girls. Yes, the show—which ran between 2012 and 2017—has been resurfacing in the zeitgeist for years now; Gen Z may not even remember a time in which it was considered anything less than pitch-perfect satire. But now, it seems, at the same time Lena Dunham is gearing up for her next project, Millennials themselves are being reassessed.
I cribbed this screenshot from one of
’s great recent Substack essays:
Once lobbed at us as insults, these generational markers have, perhaps inevitably, taken on a pleasant, nostalgic sheen. It doesn’t hurt that Millennials came of age during peak filter era, so all digital relics of the time come preloaded with the fuzzy glow of a “dead-wife-in-a-flashback” montage:
I gotta admit, things look pretty good for that girl (aka me, going through what I know was actually the most insecure and anxious time of my life). But that was also the time when Instagram was the Instagram that inspired the “Instagram vs. Reality” meme. In many ways, we’re falling for the same aesthetic deception now as we did then.
But there are other reasons I imagine we’re looking back fondly on this era. It’s not as though political fault lines weren’t already beginning to swallow up widely shared illusions about America: Birtherism had set the stage for Trump’s first presidency, and it was the 2014 murder of Michael Brown that kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement. But politics and government weren’t yet in chaos. The crises we suffered seemed to many of us like isolated incidents, not a non-stop barrage of world-altering events. Obama’s second term, which started a few months before the debut of Girls, was the neoliberal calm before a populist storm. I was a teenager for some of this, but I can see how a complacency in the culture allowed a certain kind of playfulness to flourish.
Millennials were the new adults, and having grown up at least partly online, we were rewriting everything from work to shopping to politics. There was an earnest enthusiasm that eventually gave way Millennial burnout. As Gen Z began to take our place and enshittification gripped the internet and politics alike (and the pandemic interrupted many kids’ coming of ages), the discourse naturally turned dry, sardonic, and deeply unearnest.
This is not a knock on Gen Z. And Millennials have, of course, contributed to the intra-generational tensions. When I published my Millennial pause piece, many of them said they had been through enough and didn’t deserve this kind of mockery. And yes, of course, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash were wildly disruptive events. But if Millennials are victims, what does that make Gen Zers passing through young adulthood during a Trump presidency, a pandemic, and the rise of an oligarchy in just five years?
Gen Z didn’t get a real college experience. Gen Z doesn’t do happy hours with their coworkers. Gen Z doesn’t meet people outside dating apps. Every headline Gen Z reads today would have been a Millennial’s 30 Rock joke 10 years ago. While Gen Z can claim innovations like TikTok, all of Gen Z culture has been created under the thumb of some kind of existential threat, be it climate change or a coup. Gen Z has never, in other words, had their Girls era.
So it doesn’t surprise me that, when presented with Millennial culture, Gen Z’s first instinct was to recoil. The playfulness and optimism of Millennial content must have felt even more out of touch than what generations typically inherit. But Millennial culture is slowly being remembered in its broader context, in which it is clear that Millennials weren’t stupid. They were free, if only for a few years. We should all be so lucky.