It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the “millennial” began to disappear. Every passing day brings more buzz about Generation Z and fewer hot takes about avocado toast. We've stopped using “hipster” as an epithet and college campuses are quieting down. America's whiniest or “wokest” generation—depending on who you ask—is graduating from college and leaving the spotlight.
Postmortems are appearing in bookstores, including several by millennials—Malcolm Harris's Kids These Days and Shaun Scott's Millennials and the Moments That Made Us both came out in 2018. But the genre's most notable entry came last fall with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's The Coddling of the American Mind, a follow-up to their 2015 Atlanticarticle of the same name.
Coddling sums up millennials' experience in a way that suggests their moment is ending. It's as if an experiment is over and Haidt and Lukianoff are social science detectives reviewing the results to diagnose the problems they first identified in 2015. Coddling, however, is more like an autopsy than a whodunit. It examines its subject for wounds, disorders, and signs of struggle. The authors collect the data, report the facts, and, though they stop short of a clear explanation, their findings—and shortcomings—can help readers puzzle out how identity politics emerged and how millennials lost their minds.
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