For the past few weeks, users on Instagram (the platform of choice for those of us born between 1981 and 1996) have been encouraged to share throwback pictures of themselves aged 21.
The “Let’s see you at 21!” feature has transformed my social media feed into a heartwarming trip down memory lane, an endless carousel of beautiful faces exactly as I remember them. We were all so young, so enthusiastic, so naturally full of collagen!
Encouraging this kind of navel-gazing has proved predictably popular among Millennials, a generation famously obsessed with ourselves (especially our hot 21-year-old selves). But the more “Oh My God, look how lame I was!” posts I came across, the more I began to suspect the appeal extended well beyond nostalgia or vanity.
In a cruel twist of fate, the internet has turned on the very generation that made it cool in the first place: Millenials are (avocado on) toast. Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Millennials desperately needed to remember what it was like back in the day because elsewhere on the internet, our demise was being widely trumpeted. No matter where you looked, the downfall was making news, a different headline for each part of the decay.
From Why Midlife Is Going to Be Especially Hard On Millennials to Millennials Don’t Know What To Wear, and this incredibly specific-yet-alarming one, Colon Cancer Becoming More Common Among Millennials, Doctors Warn, the future was grim and the truth hard to ignore.
Millennials have grown up, grown old and grown out of fashion.
Then came the final blow when Josephine Bernstein of The New York Times posed the question we’ve been too afraid to ask ourselves: Are Millennials Obsolete? Bernstein argued that Millennials have “hit middle age, started to show signs of ageing – even of ageing out of the internet.”
It was a bitter pill to swallow, and my gut instinct was to drum up the outrage. Millennials ageing out of the internet? We ARE the Internet. Back when it was all AOL and MSN, we migrated online and made it a cool place to hang out.
If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be watching Netflix and ordering UberEats
6
0
10.02.2024
For the past few weeks, users on Instagram (the platform of choice for those of us born between 1981 and 1996) have been encouraged to share throwback pictures of themselves aged 21.
The “Let’s see you at 21!” feature has transformed my social media feed into a heartwarming trip down memory lane, an endless carousel of beautiful faces exactly as I remember them. We were all so young, so enthusiastic, so naturally full of collagen!
Encouraging this kind of navel-gazing has proved predictably popular among........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
