Millennials began turning 40 this year (and why that matters)

The oldest Millennials — those born in 1980 — are now turning forty years old.

Note: Though there is disagreement amongst demographers about when particular generations begin and end, I’ve decided to use 1980 as the year in which we first start to see some convergence among the idea of where “Millennial” begins.

Consider this for a moment. The generation that became a byword for the young and entitled, snowflakes of avocado-toast-eating fame, end of history kids. Now we’re turning forty.

This was a theme about which I wrote often, though often subtly, in Field Blends. At times the story feels to me that of premature midlife crisis in the age of… I’ll let your imagination pursue that idea further. On occasion I addressed the idea directly as in the passage below.

“‘In their minds millennial has just become a stand in for someone in their early twenties. I don’t think they realize that millennials age, too.’ Ava sounded reasonable.

One of the old men whipped out his phone and passed about some meme he had seen. The irony of this amused us all.

Erik walked over to them.

’There’s something really sick about a country that places the burden of its longest war nearly exclusively on one generation, defers all its bills to them, and then pillories them with memes like that.’

They stared at him blankly.

’You’ve got a lot of damned gall.’

He walked away in a huff.

And there we sat. An entire generation on the Group W bench.”

— Field Blends

“Older Millennial” friends (and kids) who are as close to me (third adult from left) as family. They’re brilliant at work, and decent humans at home.

There’s truth in this. Though pilloried, Millennials lived their youth in the shadow of the collapsing Berlin Wall. We were told that this was the end of history, and promised that it was all on the up from here. Some began school without the Internet. All were shaped by it. We were young enough to harness the technological revolution in which we came of age, but old enough to require a little ingenuity if we were to bend it to our will. Many of us began university before Facebook, entered the workforce before recession. Others in our cohort were less fortunate. And, in America, there were those old enough to put on a uniform in memory of a Tuesday in September that in hindsight feels may have been the end of the end of history even before the end had truly begun.

For years the world wondered what would come of us, mocked and derided for changing jobs too frequently or for not working hard enough at all. Though, it turns out, there’s emerging evidence that the broader economy could do for Millennials changing jobs more often.

For years the question was of what the Millennials would do at some seemingly distant time in the future. How we would lead humanity towards the world we were to make.

That the oldest are now turning forty is important not just because it must auger the end of an era when Millennial was a byword for the young, but also because it must auger the beginning of an era when this generation’s leadership in the world is a thing of the present. That era is here and now, not some distant time in the future.

It’s not just Sanna Marin and Jacinda Ardern and — yes — Kim Jong Un. It’s all of us. And as we enter this decade, “the twenties” (another rather mind blowing idea), we’d be wise to consider the world as we’ll make it. Because the age of preparation has ended. The age of Millennial action and ownership of the world in which we’ll be living has begun.