Millennials

Human risk assessment is not a dispassionate numbers-crunching game. Those who fear flying have to know we’re four times more likely to die in a car crash than in a fiery plunge from the skies, even if we’re boarding a Boeing. The fear of flying may be common, but only a select few will rule out the jet engine entirely. When it comes to emotional risk evaluation, there is one area where phobia prevails over reason: our increasingly sterile view of what constitutes a good bet when it comes to marriage and family life. Since the second half of the twentieth century, American society has been on a mission to eliminate risk. Seatbelt and helmet laws reduced deaths in automobile and bike accidents at the expense of comfort and self-respect.

Between the deranged cancellations still roiling online life the Muskification of Twitter, and the undead nature of the Donald Trump-attention economy, there is no shortage of legitimate matters to depress someone like me who cohosts a podcast about internet bullshit. And yet for some reason, I’m fixated on an insignificant issue: LOLflation. The majority of you know what “LOL” stands for: “laughing out loud.” What it’s supposed to mean, when communicated via text or direct message or (less often) email, is: you just wrote something funny enough that I physically laughed. This is touching not just because it’s flattering to make someone laugh, but because it temporarily breaks the spell of the online world.

One day during a recent visit to my parents in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, my best friend and I met up and went on a daytrip. We drove around Edison’s Oak Tree Road corridor to the east, a heavily Indian neighborhood in a suburban sprawl setting. It’s a really interesting place, but the highlight of the day was probably going over to my friend’s house later that evening. We grew up together — we were fellow homeschoolers in our church group — and I know his house as well as the one I grew up in. I’ve written before about how thankful I am to have grown up in one house, in one place, as my friend did. But I guess we kind of grew up in two houses, because we knew each others’ so well. Both of them are thick with memories.

East Austin is a Proust’s madeleine of a neighborhood: picture a zombified resurrection of Brooklyn’s 2000s Peak Hipster moment with a veneer of Instagrammable gloss on top. If an aging millennial cast a spell that encased just under ten square miles of Texas in a bubble made up of his happiest memories, this would be the result. Williamsburg, NYC circa 2008 was, as the zoomers now say, a whole vibe. Except that the zoomers did not say this, not then, because they were still in diapers. This was a millennial moment: we were still in our twenties then, clad in American Apparel-brand basics made of cotton so thin it was practically transparent, not yet cursed with middle-aged pudge. The millennial infestation was thickest on the ground in gentrifying Brooklyn.

I spent my twenties drinking beer. I spent my thirtieth birthday drinking beer and eating oysters. And I remember thinking how far I'd come. Thirty. That number can blaze with dread in the young adult imagination. For years, it loomed ahead of me like some kind of buzzkill apocalypse, the exact moment when everything I loved would come to a screeching halt. The carousing would stop, the long nights would turn to early mornings, the glittering friends would metamorphose into glowering Dursleys. Thirty meant adulting, as our pathetically adolescence-obsessed culture calls it, and adulting meant not freedom but obligation. Admittedly some of that has come to pass.

Millennials — roughly defined as the generation born between 1980 and 1996 — love Halloween. Barely an instant after the sun sets on Labor Day, giddy social media posts announcing the arrival of #SpookySeason” start replacing #SummerVibes faster than you can say “sweater weather.” Pumpkin-spiced IPAs and photos of girls wearing floppy, completely impractical Indiana Jones hats supplant selfies with spiked seltzers and cut-off jeans. “The modern Halloween is for millennials as much as kids,” reports businesswire.com. In 2018, the site said that “59 percent of millennials planned either to attend or throw a Halloween party.