Millennial Cringe

Is literally every single Zoomer an illiterate Nazi addicted to slurs, ultraviolent pornography, and unlicensed brain health supplements shilled on nine-hour-long video podcasts? Probably not, but it certainly felt that way on election night, as the exit polls rolled in, with young men turning decisively toward Trump. As a card-carrying woke millennial, I felt antique as a hippie washed ashore in Reagan’s eighties. There I was, archaically respecting pronouns while everyone else bought Bitcoin and rediscovered the joys of calling things retarded. (Granted I’d never been sterling on the not-calling-things-retarded front, but I’d never been proud of this tendency, and I’d never thought calling things retarded was an ideology.) Worse yet, the Zoomers were mocking us. Maybe you saw the “millennial cringe” videos that were circulating on social media around this time—little skits in which Zoomers parodied the content creators they’d grown up watching on YouTube, mistaking them for everyday millennials. It was hard to take these clips personally: no one I’ve ever loved, for instance, has called a dog a doggo. But in light of the election, they seemed to speak to something real: a dawning sense that millennials were—to use what may be a Zoomerism, or just a millennial’s lame idea of one—washed.