Dear Millennials, Where do We Go From Here?
Nobody likes an earnest person on the internet. As a millennial, I understand the painful truth behind this 100% factual statement. There was a blip in 2017 about “being kind” in the wellness influencer community but that was quickly replaced by the biting sarcasm, lack of feelings, and self-deprecation evident in the popular internet personalities of today.
A comedienne friend recently lamented that the future of comedy would be front facing videos and she’s not here for it. I had to ask what she meant by a front facing camera, but I’m sure you already know, so I won’t tell you. I joined TikTok for the second time a couple of weeks ago and my algorithm now knows I enjoy ironic quips about corporate America, gags about drinking your “panoramic” feelings away, hating capitalism, plant care, cleaning hacks, cottage core and alas elder millennial content. During my 20 minute scroll this evening I discovered that I am officially old. Marketers will soon be done with me. I use the tears of joy emoji with abandon and until five minutes ago I thought the internet would celebrate me for my well-intentioned, soul bearing attempts to share my feelings in a non-ironic way.
I have spent the last decade attempting to be recognized. First I thought I was special enough and beautiful enough to be an actor. Los Angeles was quick to let me know that I am in fact too quirky looking and unconventionally pretty. Perhaps, if I’d been discovered earlier I’d have had a chance at finessing my craft but the blinders of youth quickly eroded and before I had even been at it very long I had decided that I didn’t want to “leave my fate in the hands of other people”. I.e. casting directors, agents, managers and producers. When I was in college, “agency” was the word du jour. It was edgy, only the real liberal arts kids took classes where professors, often the only tenured professor in the department, used words like “agency” to describe how strong female characters took control of their own lives by redistributing the duties of housework or choosing to be public in their desires to have a lot of sex with different partners. Back then we probably didn’t even use the word partner, we just assumed the women were having sex with men. I was merely expressing my agency as a promising young woman (sorry I had to) in the field of entertainment and making a bold choice not to capitalize on my looks. I was going to use my god damned brain to write and direct my way to the top.
I created a web series. I acted in it, directed it and co-produced it with a dear friend. I look back on that time with hope. I made a couple of short films, a few showed potential but most fell flat. I finally thought I was going to make it when an industry titan signed a shopping agreement for a project I was developing with a friend. I used to throw that one around pretty loosely when people asked what I did when I wasn’t shooting content for the Jordan brand.
Sidebar. Can we please stop using the word content? What is content?! It’s literally everything. Content can be made in your bedroom for $0 and distributed on TikTok or it can be a $150million international production that you stream in your living room. I don’t know how we should ultimately define content but I do know that we should come to an agreement as to what it is and let films be films and books be books. I’ll let Gen Z decide since they’re the only ones who matter now.
Time went on. I wasn’t an auteur. I’m not an auteur. Turns out I’m really good at being stressed about managing other people’s money and delivering what they want on schedule at the expense of my mental and physical health. Do what it takes, smile, be enthusiastic, first one in and last to leave was the ethos of my generation. If you did that in the media industry and didn’t end up hosting a docu-series on VICE or being the voice of a popular podcast pre-2018, well where are you now? Probably somewhere like me where you make enough to buy $100 sweatpants and get them delivered to you in a matter of days, but not enough to make any sort of real life progress like buying a house. Although, after seeing the entire West coast burn and my mother lose two homes to hurricanes (ONE WAS IN NEW YORK CITY and they were consecutively owned, one wasn’t the summer home in the Hamptons lol) I’m not sure that the good ol’ American dream is gonna hold up for me.
Wealth means you own shares in the market. The fucking market. I’m learning about this thing from 23 year olds on YouTube and tech bros who disrupted the industry and went out on a limb and said hey listen to me, not Charles Scwhab — I’ll tell you what to do for free, just subscribe to my Youtube channel. None of the important men in my life growing up, many of whom happened to be involved in the stock market, ever taught me a thing about how it worked. They handled that part.
It’s like the world gave up on us. First we were too spoiled, we couldn’t take criticism (there are few things I hate more or that make tears well in my eyes more quickly than feedback). We needed a trophy for every minor accomplishment like getting to work on time or remembering to book a dental appointment for ourselves, we needed to be acknowledged for every success no matter how great or small. None of us knew hard work or hardship because our parents gave us everything, after all they invented helicopter parenting. Most of us watched a terrorist attack, the first of its’ kind, live on TV. We saw the nation come together. We hated Bush. We wanted the genocide in Darfur to end. We peacefully protested, shouting “drive out the bush regime, help us help us the world can’t wait”. I may be getting two different march anthems confused. One is in reference to Bush invading Afghanistan and one is about universal access to contraception and a woman’s right to choose abortion.
We had been a rowdy bunch, having lots of sex, drinking too early, I was high for a lot of high school although only my marine biology teacher knew. I smoked a two foot bong at 13 and coughed my lungs up in the back of a parked Subaru. I rode in the passenger’s seat of a brand new BMW, the fancy series, down a pitch black, curving backcountry road too scared to speak up for fear of not being cool when all I could think about was dying in a car crash and how my mother told me not to get in the car with high boys. Or drunk boys. I did both, obviously. And thought I was a horrible person for doing it, but that’s another story.
Now we’re all doing what every generation before us has done. Getting married, settling down, having babies. The coolest girls in high school now live in boring suburban towns and have fat husbands named Matt and Keith with receding hairlines. The girl who bragged about her boyfriend eating her out for the duration of an entire episode of Grey’s Anatomy, while her mom sat downstairs, has a child of her own and posts instagram friendly pregnancy updates that seem a little too art directed for the eyeballs of her 604 followers. The girl bosses are publishing books about their empires, the former sorority queens jetset to wine tasting trips in Napa with sisters they hate but they’ve made an enemy of everybody else. The men have gotten careers doing stocks or really I’m not sure what they’re doing. In sales at a tech company? lol. It seems that the people who make the most money have jobs that I don’t understand, where they “make deals” and get flown across the world in first class to do so.
But it seems like this Y2K generation that got such a bad rap for being entitled and irresponsible is now doing what every generation before us has done. We are predictable and we are procreating even in spite of the endless climate disasters and political upheaval that defines our time. If I were someone else this essay would end with something positive like “because that’s what we’ve always done. It’s biology. Evolution happening as it should”. And maybe it is, in part, but I also have lived through enough once in a lifetime events to know that maybe we aren’t just pushing along like always. Maybe meeting the moment looks like taking a pause and admitting that we don’t know and that we are scared and that the future looks different than how we thought it might be. We are being called upon to do things differently. There I go, too earnest again… But really, I’m scared.
