I Am Not a Millennial

by Jasper Gilley

I am not a millennial. I was born in 1998, and people born prior to 2000 are supposed to be millennials, but I’m decidedly not one. For all the good press they get for being “the most educated generation yet,” “held back by their elders,” etc.,¹ millennials do some incredibly irritating stuff.

Millennials Wear Bell-Bottom Jeans

Every millennial has seen that old photo of their parents arrayed in a jean jacket, bell-bottom jeans, and a headband, having caught Saturday Night Fever in the 70s. “Thank goodness we enlightened millennials refrain from wearing such silly vestments,” most millennials think. Yet millennials’ baby-boomer parents thought the same of their parents back in the day, and millennials’ yet-to-be-born kids will one day think the same of millennials’ skinny jeans, beards, iPhones, bicycles, and penchant for vinyl records and typewriters. The hipster in 2050 will be analogous to the hippie in 2017: an aging symbol of our silly ancestors who thought they were the coolest cats ever to be on fleek (note the intentional blending of baby boomers’ and millennials’ lingo. Millennials’ lingo will sound as antiquated as their clothing will look in 40 years.)

Millennials Think Themselves Very Cool Because They Have Their Own Telephone

Millennials will recall how their parents thought they were so cool as a teenager because they had their own landline telephone (imagine that!) “Thank goodness we enlightened millennials refrain from getting excited over the usage of such primitive technological achievements!,” think millennials. “While I’m on the subject of feeling superior to my ancestors, I’ll go update my Facebook status about said subject!” This also is one of the chief sins millennials commit: being far, far too thrilled with social media. This can manifest itself in several ways, one of which is simply an egregious lack of self-awareness on such sites. Far more insidiously, however, millennials’ social media addiction has given rise to awful things like the selfie, memes, a renewed obsession with celebrities, and – worst of all – the selfie stick (there are no words to describe how awful the selfie stick is. All I can say is that it epitomizes the worst of contemporary human culture.)

At any rate, the humans of 2050 will have hours of fun deriding the humans of 2017 for their usage of things like the selfie stick: this is one of the primary reasons why I am publicly distancing myself from the generation of people who invented them. I am not a millennial.

Millennials Love The Past While Simultaneously Shunning It

But the worst crime millennials commit is duplicity on their feelings towards the past. On one level, millennials shun the past. The quotes purported to be narrated by naïve millennials in the above paragraphs exemplify this (albeit hyperbolically.) Millennial culture has a pervasive attitude of arrival, as in, “we’ve arrived as a culture at our final destination. Our stylistic choices will permanently be in good taste. Phooey on previous cultures that thought the same thing about themselves.” Yet there is a simultaneous glorification of the past. How else might one explain the penchant for vinyl records, typewriters, or even beards?

Simultaneously, millennials seemingly revere agrarian society while eschewing the Industrial era. One sees this in millennials’ passion for boots, beards, flannel shirts, and most painfully, faux-folk pop music like this and this. For a generation that embraces new technology as much as any other yet, one might expect less cultural regression. Or perhaps there is actually a causal relationship: millennials, surrounded by technology, are attempting to escape it, even in ways as trivial as growing beards.

I Am Not a Millennial

Since I espouse none of the aforementioned millennial idiosyncrasies, I intellectually distance myself from millennials themselves. Indeed, I’ve begun referring to myself as a Dot-com Boomer. Being born in the heyday of a major micro-industrialization, namely, the dot-com boom, I can’t help but be captivated by the ever-accelerating forward march of human scientific and technological progress. Having operated a computer since approximately the age of five, I’m not as interested as millennials in simply using the digital products created by Silicon Valley, but I’m far more interested in integrating the IT benefits of the dot-com boom with other non-digital industry. Nor can I say that I don’t secretly sympathize with the exponential singularitan rhetoric that permeated the late 1990s. The dot-com boom alone may not have provided a permanent technological singularity, like some futurists of the era might have thought, but in the long run, Industrial society is doing just that. Thus, I discard the retrogressive nostalgia of millennials and look ahead to the next dot-com boom, the next micro-industrialization, the next singularity.

Everyone is a Millennial

A large part of my complaint about millennials is that their culture implies a sense of arrival – that subtle but intoxicating notion that history has reached its apex in its birth of a particular generation. To refute that claim, I’ve argued that every generation feels that way, so millennials must not have a place in history fundamentally different than that of any other generation. Yet making such an argument defeats the purpose of complaining about millennials, since one might make the same complaints about every generation.

Indeed, every generation will surely have its own traits that, as they become more apparent with the generation’s increasing age, infuriate subsequent generations (and possibly preceding ones.) I make no claim that dot-com boomers are the exception to this rule.

Of course, not every millennial is equally complicit in their generation’s annoying idiosyncrasies. Therefore, even if one is not a millennial, knowing that one’s generation must inevitably have these idiosyncrasies gives one the ability to remain aloof from them, and in many ways, transcend generational fashions.

¹ The Economist