NEW YORK. – A few weeks ago, a group of friends and I exchanged news about their upcoming trip to visit me in New York. The topic revolved around what they should wear to look stylish at a number of trendy city center bars that they had heard about online and wanted to visit. They were a group of stylish women who had worked in fashion and media and usually had no problem dressing for the occasion. But after going to some of these places and witnessing the Gen Z trends I saw there, I had to break the bad news: There was nothing suitable in any of our closets. Now all the hot young girls dress like Adam Sandler: cargo shorts, oversized T-shirts, wraparound sunglasses. Our Rachel Comey blouses wouldn’t work for us. No matter how hard we tried, we looked exhausted.
In that moment, a feeling that many millennials have been feeling lately crystallized: that 2025 is the year we officially grow old.. This reality has been creeping up on us for some time, but it is now impossible to deny. The youngest in our group are soon turning 30 and the oldest are almost 45.which means we are now all residents of the stage of life that psychologist Clare Mehta called “established adulthood.” A challenging time that may involve balancing careers with caring for children and elderly parents.
Our generational avatars do cheesy, middle-aged things: Lena Dunham wrote an essay on “Why I broke up with New York”; Taylor Swift got engaged and wrote a song about her fiancé’s trusty penis; Ryan, from The OK: Lives of Othersmade a documentary about the dangers of cryptocurrencies. If one of our generation’s athletes continues to dominate, they will be considered a medical miracle. We are old enough to experience a kind of millennial entropy in which our icons decay. (See the relationship between Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry). We were the generation that was the first to search every aspect of our inner lives for content, but we don’t even like posting on social media anymore. Thanks to medical miracles like Botox and Mounjaro and solid-core Pilates machines, we are still physically attractive, but culturally our activities evoke less fascination, less worry, and less social anxiety. When they talk about young people, they no longer mean us.
It’s every generation’s turn to lament their cultural obsolescence, but it’s Millennials who are most bothered by it.. Growing up online has made us uniquely self-centered, or so the editorials proclaimed: an army of more than 70 million narcissists raised on BuzzFeed and Four Loko competitions, incapable of understanding how to be an adult, and demanding a gold star on our foreheads every time we do something. But now it’s Generation Z and Generation Alpha that are making marketing departments cringe. The timing of the Covid-19 pandemic made our farewell to the cultural sector seem even more dramatic: we sat at home, still mobile, and came out again with creaky knees a world that is being redesigned in the image of Generation Z.
How do we know we have aged? Sometimes a Zoomer She just comes out and says it to our faces, like when my 35-year-old friend recently went to her 23-year-old co-worker’s concert and was asked if she was “her mother’s friend.” Another friend received blank stares from his young colleagues when he said he wanted to dress up as Fred Durst for Halloween.
However, Most of the time, the demarcation of our generational divide takes place in a place that used to be ours: online. The Internet, once our safe space, has increasingly become hostile territory. The very existence of Millennials became so embarrassing to Generation Z that they coined a phrase about it: “thousand-year shudder“. The shudder, or shameful, includes the type of socks we wear (ankle length, not mid-calf) and the awkward pauses in our videos, the fact that we caption our messages with “Lol“, we overuse the crying-laughing emoji and know which of our friends are Gryffindors. Now we are etc (Uncle) and often out of fashion.
This year, latent tensions turned into open war. Millennials lambasted Zoomers — who reportedly party less, have fewer relationships and spend less time together — as illiterate, sexless recluses who waste their youth rotting their brains on TikTok and radicalizing themselves through streamers. white nationalists. If you’re reading this as a member of Generation Z, you probably already know all of this. And it’s also amazing that you’re even reading it.
Much of the millennial fear-mongering is about members of Generation Z – snowflakes who are “easily offended, lazy and generally unprepared.” The New York Post) is literally what previous generations said about us. After living under the microscope for the last few decades, Millennials should recognize that generational hostility is often just a way to avoid dealing with change by blaming young peoplewho are actually most affected.
We know that the reason we couldn’t buy houses wasn’t because we bought too much avocado toast, but rather that the things we worry about in Generation Z are a result of the world they inherited. Actually, We have a lot more in common with the next generation than we think. We both came of age amid major economic crises and inherited the same polarized and dysfunctional politics. In a survey conducted by Deloitte in 2025, 48% of Gen Zers and 46% of Millennials said they felt financially insecure, while 74% of Gen Zers and 77% of Millennials expected artificial intelligence to reconfigure the way they work.
Millennials have more debt, marry and have children later, and buy homes later (if they can afford it) than their parents. Many of the traditional markers of middle-class adulthood—family trips to Disneyland, professional achievements—are well out of reach for our generation. This allows us to feel “younger than any middle-aged generation before us,” as Emily Gould said in a recent New York Magazine essay about older millennials.
Maybe that’s why many of us try so hard to hold on to our youth: We face old age with all the baggage and none of the benefits we expected.. But all of this should lead to us understanding the next generation better, not less. We can simultaneously be horrified by the TikTok creators in their tiny sunglasses while recognizing that we are all in this situation and that the current political, financial and technological crises will affect us all.
Although Millennials can no longer control online discourse or recognize more than 20% of the Coachella cast, Our generation is taking on more and more institutional power. After years of calling for an end to gerontocracy, we are finally starting to see it. We have a Millennial Vice President, a Millennial Mayor-elect of New York, and a Millennial Vogue Editor. Millennials are entering the executive ranks (outdoing poor Generation X again) and redefining family life with gentler parenting strategies. Our task now is to figure out how we can age gracefully in this new phase of life’s generational cycle, even if we don’t always agree with the children growing up behind us.
The characters who have always had the greatest cross-generational appeal are not the ones who become bitter, grumpy old men.. Rather, they are those who are willing to evolve and are still curious about what younger people are interested in now. Remember: David Bowie’s early appreciation of internet culture. Or more recently, Charli XCX in her “Brat” era, whose aesthetic Lo-fi and collaborations with young artists like Billie Eilish and Addison Rae appealed to the mood of Generation Z, even as their lyrics evoked fundamental Millennial concerns about fertility and finding the best bathroom for cocaine.
In return, members of Generation Z are engaging and appreciating elements of the Millennial canon in ways we haven’t always done, whether through watching Girl with admiration instead of a fearful speech or waiting in line to see Caroline Polachek and Mac DeMarco in concert. Our generation has given the world some good things (Super badGoing out tops, 2000s Williamsburg) and a few bad things (Theranos, mustache finger tattoos, 2020s Williamsburg), but it’s not always up to us which of our cultural touchpoints stand the test of time. While it can be annoying to see younger people claiming your icons, especially when you’re competing with them for gigs on Ticketmaster, it’s the reinterpretation that keeps the culture alive.
The writer Anne Helen Petersen rightly states this Our generation must be vigilant to avoid the grave sin of our ancestors Boomersin which “we climb the ladder to relative stability…and then pull it back behind us.” While many of our colleagues follow the age-old tradition of becoming rich idiots, she senses a troubling solipsism even among those who weren’t employees with shares in ride-sharing companies in the mid-2000s. “We realized how willing society is to let many of us down,” she writes, just as we were beginning to feel “too exhausted, too old to fix things.”
However, some of the most influential political leaders of our generation are those who have figured out how to talk about what matters to the next generation. JD Vance and Zohran Mamdaniin diametrically opposite ways, address the economic fears of young voters by promising a departure from voters’ usual politics Boomers. Mamdani, soon to be New York’s first millennial mayor, won the election with 78% of the under-30 vote. This happened in part by responding to young voters’ concerns about housing and affordability while using tools like short videos in a way that felt organic rather than indulgent. But he also accepted his millennial problems: Much of his early campaign — a 33-year-old man standing on a street corner getting less than 1% of the vote in a YouTube video and asking random people why they voted for President Donald Trump — was objectively embarrassing. There was something about Mamdani’s goofy sincerity that younger voters appreciated.
Generation Z may shy away from our seriousness, but they also value authenticity. In some ways, Millennial shame is synonymous with Millennial optimism, the sincere (and sometimes naive) feeling that improvement is possible. But it’s worth preserving as long as we can separate it from the clapping and stomping music that so often accompanied it.
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