Last month, The Economist told the world to stop feeling sorry for millennials and it pissed me off.
The piece opens with the usual clichés, how much American millennials spent on avocados last year ($1.5bn by their own rough estimate), and how we really do buy more craft beer than everyone else.
Fine, guilty as charged. But if it wasn’t enough to define a whole generation based on their shopping list, they’ve gone one step further and said the stereotype that millennials are struggling no longer fits the facts.
Their main argument? In rich countries, millennials are out-earning their parents, moving into positions of real power and finally buying homes.
And on paper, that makes sense. That’s exactly my problem with it.
The numbers aren’t wrong, but I think they’re measuring the wrong thing
To be fair to The Economist, I’m not about to argue with their data.
The incomes are adjusted for inflation, and they even admit that in Britain progress has slowed, with millennials here only slightly ahead of Gen X. (That’s basically the headline for those of us in the UK, and it gets one sentence in the whole piece.)
Partway through, while explaining why we were slow to buy homes, the article asks a question I’ve been pondering for the last two years myself. If money isn’t the problem, what is it exactly?
Their answer is…we stayed in education longer and got married later in life.
Which of course is an interesting answer. It’s just too simplistic for most of our realities. Because in the same year The Economist is declaring us a success story, Deloitte’s 2026 survey found that 45% of millennials feel burnt out, and 30% feel stressed or anxious most or all of the time.
So by all accounts, we’re a generation that is Successful on Paper, and yet, we still don’t feel it. I didn’t need a survey to tell me that.
If you’ve made it on paper and yet still feel flat in real life, you are the exact person I’m writing for.
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Every generation chased their own version of success
Boomers chased stability, the ‘work hard and life will reward you’ generation. The playbook that many of us are still following, even though the rules have changed.
Then there’s Gen X. They chased independence because they knew better than anyone else that no one’s coming to save you.
Us millennials, well, we were told we could have it all. As long as we worked hard enough, healed our traumas, optimised every inch of our lives, and somehow still managed to enjoy every minute of life.
Somewhere along the way, the brief grew to include building a personal brand, manifesting, having boundaries (but not being a bitch), keeping up with AI, being present, and of course, my personal favourite, don’t burn out.
Like anyone would put that on their goals list.
Gen Z took one look at the brief and said no thanks
Gen Z’s version of success fits into four simple words: I’d rather have peace.
I’ll be the first to admit, Gen Z’s attitude towards most things made me roll my eyes a little. But now I’m wondering whether they’ve worked out something we haven’t. Not only are they ignoring the brief, they’re not afraid to say so.
Since September, high school students across France have been out on the streets protesting against underfunded and overcrowded schools, and it’s now grown into a movement across Europe.
On the surface, peace and protest don’t go hand in hand, but I think they come from the same place. Whether it’s on the streets protesting or how they choose to work, Gen Z is refusing the brief they were handed.
Which feels familiar, because in the early 2010s, that was us. The Economist itself points to the millennial-led movements, from UK Uncut to Occupy Wall Street, as proof of how fed up we were with the status quo.
And yet fifteen-odd years later, I think a lot of us are exhausted by the number of unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime events and have quietly accepted that this is the system we have to play in.
We stopped trying to change the game and just got very good at playing it instead.
Sure, some of us are trying to break out, but most of us are just trying to make the most out of a bad situation without burning out.
We’re not the burnout generation because we’re weak
Do you remember Anne Helen Petersen’s 2019 essay in BuzzFeed? I do, like it was yesterday. She called millennials the burnout generation and it went everywhere. Seven years on and the label has stuck, with many of us feeling it whether we want to admit it or not.
Being called the burnout generation so publicly makes us sound weak. We’re not. We’re the first generation trying to succeed in our careers, relationships, finances, health, personal growth and happiness all at the same time.
Life for us millennials has just become this one long list of things to optimise and be scored against. Like the annual performance review somehow leaked out of the office and bled into every part of our lives.
Send this to the friend who’s stuck between ‘heal your trauma’ and ‘don’t burn out’.
It might be our economy now, but it doesn’t feel like ours
The Economist ends with “Don’t pity millennials. It is their economy now.”
Funny, because it doesn’t feel like it, and I’m sure I’m not the only millennial who feels this way either.
Think about the last few years. A lot of us were only just finding our rhythm again after the pandemic, and then AI arrived. Now every industry is changing, and as the generation filling the management roles, we’re the ones expected to lead everyone through it. As soon as it feels like you’ve caught up, something else lands.
Yes, we are earning more, but earning more and having more aren’t the same thing. So when someone tells me we’re richer than ever, my first response is: how much is left over at the end, after paying for everything? Shortly followed by: do you know how much it takes out of us to earn that in the first place?
Because that’s the real story. The price of doing everything right to look successful, ticking every single box and yet still feeling like you’re behind.
So I want to know: does it feel like our economy to you, or are you still trying to catch up?
I'm so glad you commented on my note, or I may never had found this article and your page! I totally agree with what you're saying. It's wild how much we're expected to take on and keep up with. There's no real "winning" for millennials though, if we moan, we're ungrateful and if we stay silent, we get stressed and burn out and then we're "statistics" on how we can't hack it 🙈🙃
The first 7 years of my career I spent in as a federal employee in the US in a low cost of living place with good benefits. I definitely could feel stressed sometimes, but now after a few years in big tech (arguably, one of the cushiest fields to work in), I regularly find myself dealing with waves of burnout (hence why I started a Substack because obviously I had to write about it haha: https://abfarr.substack.com/p/how-good-enough-talked-me-past-the?r=379pwu&utm_medium=ios). I feel like I’m joining the economy and had no idea what it was like for the rest of the millennial generation. I agree that measuring success only on the financial scale isn’t capture the huge metal cost. Thanks for this thoughtful read!