why do millennials have to do everything 😰

On the unappreciated multi-talents of Millennials and continuing to lament the hyper-driving of culture.

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Lousy Customer Service ‘Designed For You to Give Up’
"required to let customers talk to a human"
A major change, which signals another Biden win in making American life easier by making something like canceling an account easier — and easier to talk to a human about it. Big loss for AI too!

Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success
This week in Trump Is Losing It™, which is bound to be a constant drumbeat hit at this week’s DNC.

Trump says presidential civilian award is 'better'
"The disrespect is legit dumbfounding"
“They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times with bullets or they’re dead.” Mind you, Trump is talking about his giving a Presidential medal of Freedom to staunchly pro-Israel billionaire Miriam Adelson.

Truss ambushed by giant lettuce
You gotta watch the video.

New strain declared a continental emergency
WHO declares mpox global health emergency
Dangerous mpox found outside Africa
This is escalating quickly. Be careful, please!

27 states at ‘very high’ COVID
I was sick three out of the four weeks of July, which is to say: y’all better be safe!!

Tubi’s Free Streaming Explodes
If you’re looking for proof that there is too much content and too little money to spend, the rise of a free streamer that allows you to indulge for nothing is it. (See also: TikTok and YouTube eclipsing traditional media.)

Disney+ terms prevent allergy death
"Disney Plus Subscription contract"
What’s happening in Disney+ world? Well, the streamer is using their terms of service to get out of a wrongful death lawsuit.

Cartoon Network Website Shuts Down
And, just like that, the digital black hole widens.

‘Washington Post’ reviews Taylor Lorenz's Biden jab
This is not funny but actually kinda really funny: Taylor Lorenz is in trouble with the Washington Post for posting about Joe Biden being a “war criminal” (which is a meme) to her Instagram close friends. Someone outed her, she claimed image manipulation, other friends verify her post was real. Internet literacy: gets you every time!

“I give notes and they don’t really address them,” a friend told me this week, about managing a team. “They don’t know that I can go in and redo it all because I worked as an editor and a copywriter and a social media manager. I can do all their jobs.”

“This hits close to home,” someone comments on LinkedIn, in response to the “social media managers are turning 40” story, specifically to a passage that included a note about social media being a job that is “marketing but also writing but also video producing but also always being online.”

“I’m a Millennial multi-tool,” I say on a call this week, explaining that my career was in entertainment and journalism and social media, worlds that run in and out of each other while keeping their distance, all while expanding my skills to other worlds like copywriting, strategy, design, editing, and more.

This idea of Millennials as multi-tools, of people whose careers have become vessels of multiple skill sets and multiple industries, was a theme for me this week — but it’s also a theme of my adult life and probably is a theme your life in these times too. To be a Millennial is to have lived and worked through periods of sinking and swimming financially. It’s to be overeducated and under-employed, rich in spirit but poor in assets. Our being multi-tools isn’t because we particularly want to have a multiplicity of expertises but is instead a reflection of the economic realities of this millennium: recession one pausing somewhat briefly before birthing (silent) recession two, which has been multiplied by intense political shifts and Covid fluctuations, all after being born on the bed of 9/11.

This isn’t to say other generations weren’t affected in similar ways or that other generations don’t have similar skills (As this is especially evergreen for creative persons!), but Millennial adulthood is defined by these items, as our lives have been squeezed and squeezed to a point of breathlessness, to where you will grab for anything to ease the pressure of the world falling down on you as it falls down on itself. You have to be scrappy when no one else is looking out for you! This is why so many Millennials went to law school only to not-practice-law, to realize that the higher-education-to-stable-career path no longer exists as the white collar hiring gap widens. Millennials created — and defined — the side-hustle and gig economy, which all comes from and was inspired by our starting businesses at younger ages in the hopes of winning the million dollar cash out. “Freelancing” went from a creative person’s resting state to a permanent state for all Millennials. The clearest sign of this trend, of our multi-tool-ness, is its trickle down and imitations: Gen Z are increasingly skipping college (as women do the same), seeking out freelance and side-hustles out the gate, all because they’re in the ashes of what was once a feasible adult life, angsty despite good job prospects. These two generations are forcing the larger working world to value work-life balances while prioritizing jobs that offer a sense of purpose. Change is here but nothing is different.

The Big Quit, the Job-Hopping Generation, Polyworkers — whatever the media wants to call it, these things are all saying the same thing: to be a Millennial is to be versatile, opportunistic, to go where the money and the world takes you, as autonomy is optional and control is fluid. So we try this and we try that, taking on new types of work that jumble our resumés, bloating experience to that outside (resumé) viewers see our history as jumbles, confusion. The Millennial (and Gen Z) narrative is still being defined but, in so many ways, it has been set: we see ourselves as the multi-tools that we are while others just see a mess. Until we enter the era of portfolio careers, our task — if we’re creative enough (And we are creative enough!) — is to repackage and reframe this narrative as an asset, to help others see our disconnected experiences as having a through-line, to display our reflection of a precarious world as a stunning vision of resilience.

In Italy, blue crab invasion upends tradition
One of the most interesting reads of the week: how invasive blue crab are ruining seafood harvests in Italy and forcing the culinary culture of the country to shift. Climate change manifesting on plates!

Is It Harris’ or Harris’s?
Everyone bookmark this story on punctuation for names like “Harris” and “Walz.”

Man Sues Museum of Ice Cream
I’m not laughing at this person but I am laughing that such a big spit is being made onto the grave of this extremely 2010s trendmaker that permanently stained the idea of museums and immersive experiences.

Burning Man ticket sales dry up
Quite the sequel to last year’s event. Maybe this will reset the event, taking it back to its roots?

Is My Cat a Prisoner?
I’d argue very loudly that pet ethics is huge emerging space and The Cut rightly tapped into it. The Charlie Engman photos are incredible too but it’s the Emily Schubert prosthetics that really shine. (We need to also study this editorial team’s knack for inspiring unhinged Twitter discourses too.)

“sorry WHAT”
It Ends With Us's Ellen Obsession
Amidst the drama of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, I think we all missed that a lot of It Ends With Us is…in the epistolary form and written to Ellen Degeneres. What am I doing with my life, trying to write a damn literary novel? 😭

The 100 Best Movies of the 2000s
Nail me to a cross but I deeply agree with the top pick (especially given these times and things like AI) (lol).

Julia Garner in 'Rosemary's Baby' Prequel
‘Apartment 7A’ Inspiration in New Poster
The Apartment 7A movie isn’t new but it really hit me this week with the poster that we’re out here making prequels to Rosemary’s Baby. The bottom really has fallen out! What’s next? A Jaws prequel? Wait.

The Reddest and Bluest Baby Names
I saw this on TikTok and it’s super interesting. It boils down to this: red names are more about land and family heritage while blue names celebrate diversity and tradition. Same, same but different. (An unnamed story here is the phonetic differences too — as you’ll def notice them too.)

La Goony Chonga | Goonyverso
A late summer entry from last November that is quickly becoming my warm weather personality. Miami weirdo neoperreo energy: let this take you to feral places.

It’s been a dream of mine to write for The New York Times and, while that dream has yet to be achieved, I somehow have been blessed to have my name (ostensibly) in print: the fabulous

Ross Barkan

cited this lil trend newsletter in a great story about how the left has moved beyond figureheads, which is backed up by an essay I wrote about TikTok being very good at propelling ideas instead of characters. This is major! Very proud benchmark moment! Thank you all for reading!

Also: if you want to see me in a Speedo, upgrade to a paid account because I’m going to humiliate myself in the name of confidence in the next paid post.

Is drag the gesture of our times? I don’t mean this in the sense of donning a full face of makeup but in the sense that performance politics has pushed code-switching into a permanent practice (whether for necessity or “for the culture”). From “busy bragging” to onine and offline languages, this behavior is a practice normalized by celebrities: Paris Hilton’s voice changing before Congress; Ariana Grande’s personality shifting to align with eras; Kylie Jenner’s new Vogue cover serving as a trojan horse for revealing she actually has a personality (before masking her history with cosmetic procedures); Khloe Kardashian using Dolly Parton cake boxes to literally prop up her birthday cake, which builds on the larger Kardashian family’s use of food-as-prop; “My whole persona is just me trying to honor that version of myself that I was never allowed to be,” Chappell Roan tells Trixie Mattel in Paper this June, a story that described the artist as being the missing link between pop stars and drag queens.

Our culture is steeped in performance, in pretending, which means it’s now okay to “skip to the good part” and just fake everything. It’s not even fake it till you make it anymore: it’s delulu as solulu it until you get caught. The scammer wins again! If “drag”-cum-scam-fakery is our cultural couch, seated contently at the center is AI, selling you sham products, using the non-human instead of the real, and images that all look the same.

Be it drag gestures or skipping to the good part, each fast forwarding slims culture, as The Trend Report™ covered back in March and which continues to be a theme of the year. “fast food, fast fashion, songs being sped up, tv show seasons being only 8 episodes long, replacing youtube vlogs with fifteen second ‘day in the life’ tiktoks, people in their twenties complaining about being too old...everything is so rushed, we have lost the art of lingering,” a viral tweet explained at the end of July. “I miss mindfulness in content,” someone reacted on TikTok, which somehow seems to prove the initial post’s point.

We know these times are about speed, as children skip birthday pizza parties for Sephora birthday parties: no one wants to take their time anymore, let alone enjoy their lives. “Work-then-die” is the motto as teens increasingly aspire to — And achieve! — entrepreneurial success before they even finish middle or high school. “I’m 17 years old and my Amazon side hustle brought in $409,000 in 2023,” CNBC shares, inspiring double takes with their story. Should a high schooler have a “side hustle”? Is this not the main hustle? Is this not just being in the workforce, if not representing a new way that semi-privileged youth can take a giant step up and into the world, leaping over a canyon of difference between the next generation’s haves and have nots?

But why stop there? We’ve physicalized this in our bodies, changing everything because we don’t like it, because someone else is doing it. Play god for a bit, as a treat! Being “fat” is now a choice because of ozempic, which is already bearing a cultural conversation of what it means to be fat. BBLs walked so that leg lengthening procedures could run, despite mixed results. Fly to Turkey, get a new head of hair. Fly to Korea, get a new face. Hate your filler’d face? Take them out and start all over again.

“When things are transactional, they’re less special,” fragrance writer and scent sommelier Tracy Wan shares on TikTok, about her experience going to the source of what she loved and longed for: working at a perfume store. “When something is too available, I no longer want it. I remember when perfume for me was a thing of rarity, something I would travel to get, wait years to get. Now I get it whenever I want…They become commodities, no longer special gems.” The future was always about convenience, about ease, about machine assisted cultural euthanasia that deletes parts of humanity in the process. Cribbing your life is fun — but have you ever tried longing? Working toward a goal? Not taking your gifts for granted? Dreaming? Patience? Fasting for so long that you get a glimpse of god? Perhaps the future isn’t getting what you want without work. Perhaps it’s a truth that we’ve always known: living.

"honestly having seperate spaces to decorate"
This is not a funny post, but I do think it captures the severe child and anti-adult nature of “sleeping in separate rooms” as a couple. Why have a relationship if you’re going to equate your bedroom as your locker? Get a life.

"If your middle manager is a mid 30s"
“being a Millennial in the workplace means”
"So real."
Something else to add to the Millennials Getting Squeezed At Work™ which we discussed earlier this year.

“damn unc”
Gen Z REALLY is looking older than their years.

“Stop fighting”
"One ticket for"
”one ticket to”
"bumped into a group of alien fans"
"the ALIEN 3 Xenomorph whippet"
Please keep the Aliens posts coming.

"prepared with a PowerPoint presentation"
@slideshow.show
Another very 2020s item that I don’t think we’ve seen the end of — and that I want to see continue — are the rise in Powerpoint parties and non-work presentation culture. We’re about to see a second coming! Why? Read the first essay: we’re all experts in so many things but without a space to share. This will feed our desire for and lack of community!

"One thing about Bushwick"
Cue “The Grad Student Shuffle,” community organizers.

“BRO??”
Again: we have to talk about Gen A (and maybe about their use of YouTube Shorts).

“Rizzler”
I just know of the Criterion Guys, the Rizzler’s gonna give Salo a BOOM. (I, too, am Rizzler pilled.)

"imagine my face when i played the audio"
Sabrina Carpenter confirmed troll.

"strongest argument in favor of gen AI"
“she’s talking to a robot”
Some actually good AI posts. (However, the trend of AI prank calls on [human] service workers seems like a unique form of 2020s torture.)

“pray for my bro”
Type 1 😭

“unable to read the words Funko Pop”
But what is Kamala Harris going to do about Funko Pops?

"i scream everytime i read this"
This is my Letterboxd review of Star Wars, if you care.

And, finally, what I have been drinking whilst on vacation.

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