What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation. By Charlie Wells. Abrams Press. $28.
It could have been worse. Coming after Generation X and before Generation Z, the people born roughly between 1981 and 1996 could have been labeled Generation Y, an identification that, had it stuck, would certainly have metamorphosed into “Generation Why” and thence to “Generation Why?” The question mark would have been permanently attached or, at the very least, implied. No generation deserves that.
Neither, though, does any generation deserve the unfairness with which Millennials have been treated by other generations, by the media, and for that matter by themselves: all being seen as entitled, immature, avocado-toast-obsessed, and so on and so forth and, and, and.
To the attempted rescue comes well-credentialed journalist (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg News) Charlie Wells, himself a Millennial (well, of course), with a book designed to mix statistical analysis, societal commentary, and personal experience, and thus provide, as its subtitle says, a “Defense of a Generation.” Ay, there’s the rub: this is a defense against – well, against whom or what is not entirely clear, with the result that What Happened to Millennials is something of a book in search of an audience. It seems mostly to be an exercise in self-defense, allowing Millennials to share themselves and their now-midlife thoughts and experiences with other Millennials who will immediately “get it” when a paragraph includes as touchstones both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and “the early 2000s MTV show Diary.”
One basic point Wells makes is that it is patently unfair to tar all Millennials with the same brush. True. It is equally unfair to tar all members of any group with the same brush – that is, to judge and critique the whole based on the actions, beliefs or characteristics of a subset. But we humans, being pattern seekers and pattern makers, tend to generalize and encapsulate, and there is nothing unique in doing so where Millennials are concerned: other generational cohorts get the same treatment, which is equally unfair no matter how and to whom it is applied. But the specifics matter, and this is where Wells’ extended interviews with five “representative” Millennials come in, giving statistics and pronouncements a human side.
“Representative” does belong in quotation marks, though, since four of Wells’ five exemplars are from a very narrow subset of the Millennial (or any) cohort. Two are from the New York City area, one from San Francisco, one from the business-and-banking-and-culture hub of Charlotte, North Carolina. Only one, who is from small-town Ohio, hails from and lives in what coastal residents have long dismissed as “flyover country.” This group of five, each person’s individual background and experience notwithstanding, is pretty much, socially and politically, what the confluence of The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Bloomberg News might be expected to assemble.
Nevertheless, Wells, an adept writer who can encapsulate an experience or a personality with considerable skill, does his best to show ways in which his chosen focuses humanize, personalize, individuate and at the same time can be generalized to Millennials as a group. To do this, he writes in a constant stream of what could be called Millennial-speak: one page refers to the TV series Family Matters and film The Meteor Man, another to “one of the realest songs on 50 Cent’s debut studio album” and to “the Neptunes producing tracks for Britney and Justin,” the very next one to the books The Care and Keeping of You and Trauma and Recovery. All these are presumably immediately familiar touchstones, if not for all Millennials, then for the ones with whom Wells wants to connect, and if not for them then for Wells himself – lenses through which he and/or they see, define and are defined by the world at large and by their peers. Miss out on the references and a great deal of What Happened to Millennials becomes incomprehensible.
In particular, Britney Spears seems to hold a hallowed place in Wells’ analysis in ways even beyond that of the terrorist mass murders of 9/11/2001. Wells goes on for pages about Spears on MTV, Spears’ 55-hour marriage, Spears shaving her head, Spears in rehab, eventually getting to Spears “doing better now,” her “social media presence,” the variety of photos she posts on Instagram – all leading Wells to opine, “I think Britney Spears is happy.” And so? Well, “so” nothing if you do not follow and fawn over celebrity culture, if you do not choose vapidity as the be-all and end-all of mastering the difficult art of living the best life you can. Wells insists that Spears is important by virtue of having evolved into “just another Millennial.” If that Spears connection does not work for you, you will be a less-than-empathetic consumer of what Wells has to offer.
And that brings up again the question of the intended audience for What Happened to Millennials. The pervasive specificity of carefully chosen referents – people, events, etc. – requires thorough familiarity with the “Millennial experience,” however defined. And that does seem deliberately to limit the book’s reach to other members of Wells’ generation, which he defines not only through the commonly used calendar dates but also as consisting of “seventy-two million Americans born between the founding of CNN in 1980 and Fox News in 1996.” Wells does periodically reach out to try to give his book connections outside those of his own age group: “Every generation has to confront society’s evolving assumptions about growing up.” But then he quickly asserts the unique nature of Millennial circumstances, about being “surrounded by stories of how our lives should look at the same time as we’re told to put our own on display. We post updates about moments as prosaic as drinking in strip-mall Irish bars or as private as childbirth, as personal as our first moves into apartments with our romantic partners and as sanctified as our marriages. It’s the kind of attention only celebrities used to get. Britney Spears does it. We do it. We are all storytellers now.”
Well, perhaps so. But there is much descriptive and virtually nothing prescriptive in What Happened to Millennials – and even if it is the wrong venue for recommendations, it would be nice if there were a little more “why” about Wells’ narrative: why pay attention to “how our lives should look,” why be told (and by whom) “to put our own on display,” why post about this and that and the other thing and so forth. It may be that Millennial readers will instantly know the why of this or that or will simply accept without thinking that “that’s how things are,” as other generations simply accept or accepted long-term employment or the ubiquity of cellphones. So Wells seems mostly to defend his generation against itself – a defense that, based on the quality of his narrative, is well-wrought but scarcely necessary.
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