What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation

About This Book

From an award-winning journalist, a reflective, smart, and deeply reported look at the millennial generation, drawing on the experiences of five diverse individuals and exploring where we go from here What happened to millennials? You've heard the litany of obsessed with avocado toast, addicted to the Internet, hapless job hoppers, not as cool as Gen Z, enabling a Great Resignation, too woke to function, and too wedded to unrealistic dreams to accomplish what our parents did by the time they were 40—an age many of us are within striking distance of, if not there already. But these takes are lazy. They fail to capture the diversity of this generation, and more significantly, they fail to examine how we got here. Consider, for Millennials grew up in boom times that went bust. Our 1990s childhoods took place during the second-longest period of economic expansion in US history, when unemployment was falling dramatically and new technologies promised a brighter, easier, more efficient future that never quite came, or at least not in the way we had planned. Meanwhile, divisions were taking shape in our nation. CNN was born just before the oldest millennials, Fox News was born alongside the very youngest, and as we grew up, America found itself plunging back into the culture wars with newfound vitriol. How did all of these factors shape our generational identity and fate, on levels both micro and macro? With What Happened to Millennials, award-winning journalist Charlie Wells sets the record straight. Tracking five subjects—the first DREAMer, a polyamorous tech worker, a veteran struggling with opioid addiction, a child of 9/11, and a stay-at-home dad—Wells shows how millennials arrived at this disappointing present, and where we can—and must—go from here.

Preview

Reviews

Sign in to write a review.