Millennials Were Never Cool

A viral article asked how millennials became cringe. My answer: We always were.

Recently, Chloe Hamilton (a fellow millennial woman writer) wrote a piece for The Guardian called Cringe! How Millennials Became Uncool. I only found out about it because I was tagged on it several times. People thought the associated cartoon looked derivative of my work (it wasn’t; it was done by Edith Pritchett, who has been creating cartoons since a little before me, actually.) Other people thought the whole article just looked like something I would write.

I did write a few things that were, say, adjacent to this, although I don’t think I was copied. A while ago, I wrote about how the “Karen” archetype was being replaced by the “liberal millennial white woman” as the Queen of Cringe. This wasn’t specifically about age, but also about gender and to some extent race and class. I also write about how liberalism in general has become a bit cringe, especially to young men—this position was recently underscored by liberal activist David Hogg. Comedian Andrew Schulz also decried the liberals as uncool and the antithesis of pussy-obtainment on Charlamagne’s podcast. I’m not saying either of these people read CHH, or got the idea from me, but I’m not not saying that! Let’s ask them about gooning and see what they say.

So yes, Chloe’s article was CHH-adjacent, but not actually something I’ve written. Therefore, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and read it.

I have to say, Chloe is up against some of the most ridiculous criticism of her work—mostly, by people who didn’t read the article (and they don’t have the PAYWALL excuse—it was free.) They saw the title (and if my freelance work is any indication, the author doesn’t usually pick the title) and assumed that Chloe was genuinely confused about why people currently in our thirties and forties aren’t considered cool by the younger generation. Others piled ire on Chloe herself, saying that the only thing lamer than being a millennial was “freaking out” about not being cool. (I absolutely hate this criticism; writing something doesn’t mean you’re freaking out about it, and the article itself was mildly humorous, well-written and not “freaking out” in any way.)

The worst thing you could say about the article is that it’s kind of a non-story. Like, I don’t think that Chloe needed to interview a bunch of experts in their fields about “how” people got less cool as they got older. We got older. Duh. But what I want to examine—since apparently this topic is CHH-coded—is the fact that millennials never became cringe at all. Millennials were reviled from the moment we became a generation, first by those older than us, then by those younger than us, and often by millennials themselves.