A Millennial's Manifesto

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Millennials, according to the internet, are people born between 1981 and 1996. That's a bit of a gap, so it will be useful to narrow down the definition of our protagonist somewhat. This is a story about a relatively old Millennial, born in 1984. It is not at all inconceivable that this person will have a different perspective from a namesake born in the middle of the 1990s. This is a bias that we must accept such as it is. Even more specifically, this is a story about European millennial, born in Denmark, who has ended up in the United Kingdom. He is married to a Canadian woman of Guyanese, and ultimately Indian, descent, who is now a naturalised English citizen. The melting pot is real, and millennials are sizzling in its cauldron.

Our protagonist was one out of 133,379,000 million babies born in 1984, helping the global population to reach a total size of 4,733,308,000 in that year. 9,850,000 babies born in 1984 didn't make it past their first year, so he dodged a bullet straight off the bat, all things considered. The average life expectancy of men born in 1984 was just shy of 60 years. But being born in a rich and developed country, and barring an accident or illness, our protagonist can expect to live well beyond that age. He grew up in an upper middle class home with hard-working, loving and altogether proper and supportive parents. He wanted for nothing in his childhood, and this will invariably colour the rest of this manifesto. Deal with it..

A placeholder generation

Our protagonist has been told by his parents that they were afraid to let him sleep outside in his buggy during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, but he doesn't remember that. He was about six years old when the Berlin wall fell, but he doesn't remember that either. The Cold War is as distant to him as the Second World War. The first historical moment he remembers is the Danish national football team's triumph in the 1992 Euros, beating Germany 2-0 in the final. Huttilihut! The second is the Danish EU referendum in the same year. One morning, his parents told him that the people had voted no to something, but the next day they had voted yes. What happened? Answers on a postcard as far as he was concerned at time.

The 1990s are a bit of a haze, but he remembers important figures such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other so-called liberal politicians. The Social Democrats ruled Denmark through most of the 1990s, and they were described, by the adults he looked up to the most, to be a bit too red, a bit too heavy on taxes, and generally opposed to the free entrepreneurial spirit. But broadly, our protagonist grew up in a political age where middle-of-the road politicians, collecting the best ideas from the left and the right were celebrated and triumphed. "The Third Way" by Anthony Giddens is one of the first big ideas that he remembers from his social studies classes. It is the celebration of the synthesis between left and right, the best of both worlds, and the cherrypicking of the best centrist political ideas. It promises the perfect social liberal society with just enough of an incentive for the entrepreneur, and just enough warm embrace from a welfare state for those who fall through the cracks. Many millennials will feel short-changed on both accounts, and they're increasingly voting accordingly on either side of a disappearing political middle.

The first big historical moment our protagonist remembers, and which he lived as an equal with the adults, was the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. For first time in his life, the events shown on TV seemed life-changing, as if they were altering the fabrics of reality. For the first time in his life, everything was seen and debated through the prism of one singular event. It would be about twenty years before another of those would come around. In the grand scheme of things, though, 9/11 was a flash in the pan from the point of view of our protagonist. The war on terror, and the elevation of a bearded middle eastern Islamist to the arch villain of the West, was as much a cultural meme as it was something that made any difference to his life, save for one thing; 9/11 made air travel a uniquely stressful, time-consuming and altogether unpleasant experience. Score for the terrorists!

The political and military aftermath of the 9/11 attacks is why it is almost impossible to get someone like our protagonist to be worried or excited about conflict in the Middle East, Afghanistan and the wider Oriental world. The lived experience of millennials is that the Middle East is a political and military theatre where Navy Seals, cruise missiles, and overall Western might are brought to bear on even the slightest sign of trouble. This ensures that nothing that goes on in this part of the world will ever have more than a passing influence on the majority of cushy middle-class dwellers in the West. The surge in migration to Europe after the destruction of Syrian civil society in the middle of the 2010s , and the associated commercialisation of the trafficking of people from Africa to Europe, has shifted this picture, but only somewhat. Call us when Iran gets a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile.

The financial crisis happened, by a stroke of luck, as our protagonist was at university, paid for by the generosity of the Danish welfare state. By the time, he was finished and ready to face the slings and arrows of the labour market, things were still bad, but nowhere near as bad as during the zenith of the crisis. Our protagonist secured interesting and meaningful employment in an industry that pays better than the average job, with only modest student debt. In this way, his experience is unique in a way that might not be representative for the generation he is a part of. Many millennials were not as lucky as him. The working life of our protagonist has broadly taken place in a context of rising prosperity in the global and local economies, alike. But the gulf between the haves and have-nots has widened, and the cost of slipping through the cracks have multiplied. The political economy that exists to even the scores and smooth the path for everyone has become fragile, feeble and fearful of doing, even objectively, right and correct things.

On one area, however, our protagonist’s experience is certain to be somewhat representative; housing. He has come to believe that the commodification, financialisation and securitisation of land and housing represent serious flaws in an otherwise pretty well oil capitalist machine that has served humanity well since the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. This process which has gone through several metamorphoses has resulted in a political economy structured in such a way as to protect the insiders, who own property, at the expense of the outsiders, who do not. This is partly due to the composition of electorate. The wrinklies, with most of their wealth in property, out-vote the younger generations, at least for now. But it is also because of concentrated stakes in land, held by vested interests with financial resources to mould the political economy in their favour.

So be it? That is one possible conclusion. Capitalism will do what it does best, after all; which is to send rewards to an increasingly pointier top of the pyramid. But in this particular case, our protagonist wonders whether it wouldn’t be worth attempting to change the rules. Surely, the economic cost of keeping a vice on the supply and provision of something as fundamental for the working age population as ample and adequate housing is the equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Our protagonist can of course only speak for his own experience in the UK, but it seems like a general issue in the developed world that one country after the other are failing to build enough high quality, safe and desirable homes in the locations that people want to live. Our protagonist got on the proverbial ladder via a bog-standard two bed flat— leasehold of course, with all the misery this entails in the UK—in a dreary part of South London. He paid almost half a million pounds for the privilege. Why does it have to be so bad? Someone needs to do something about that.

Our protagonist woke up on the morning after the Brexit vote feeling ill. Here he was, exercising his EU freedom of movement to work and live in the European country of his choice. And then the people of that country decided to renege on the deal. The Brexit vote split the UK down the middle —EU referendums have a tendency to do that—and it will likely do the same to a randomly-sampled groups of millennials. But look, it was a dumb decision. Brexiteers have somehow convinced themselves that because things haven't turned out as bad as warned by the ill-fated Project Fear, it somehow proves the success of the project. It does not. Brexit was supposed to be the great liberation of England and the UK, Singapore-on-Thames, a miracle economy, sunlit uplands and so on. All of these prospects must now be considered casualties of the lies and incompetence of the politicians who were responsible for, and initially charged with carrying out, Brexit.

Brexit, with one devastating stroke, poisoned the political and economic discourse in UK. It shifted the prism through which the country’s political and economic success is seen to become inversely linked to the successes of continental Europe. How else to justify the project if it hasn't allowed the UK to upstage its erstwhile European partners? In foisting this change on the UK political economy, Brexit has pushed the country into the wilderness, severing a line to Europe which has been a defining part of Britain's society and economy for almost a century.

The UK has embarked on a selfish navel-gazing exercise, which might take more than a generation to undo. And for what? Because the EU made life difficult for the UK, because it is difficult to negotiate economic and political agreements with Greece, Portugal and Finland? You bet it is difficult; that is what Europe is all about. What does the UK want? A cookie and a glass of milk? In a critical moment, the UK decided to pull the plug on its participation in a project which rose from the rubbles of the Second World War, propelled by the pledge to never see conflict between Europe's major powers again. And for what? No upside, but plenty of downside.

The lockdown in Italy in February 2020 was the first sign to our protagonist that Covid was more than a fleeting presence. The two years that followed were strange. Looking back, he is increasingly of the view that the world went through a mass psychosis as the virus mercilessly and inevitably made its way through the population. How else to explain such a far-reaching and sustained coordination of activity and imposition of collective power. Please don't get our protagonist wrong. He does not subscribe to the view that we should have just "let it rip". He was there alongside the rest of you. Even if history finds that lockdowns, social distancing, masking and even MRNA vaccines were less consequential to the final outcome than we thought, it is also abundantly clear that politicians, authorities and our wider institutions had no choice. It is this dichotomy, between recognising that we had no choice and the ultimate futility of our actions, which is interesting, and frightening. Our protagonist found lockdown mildly annoying, but also a bit comforting. The ability to exit the house once a day to exercise saved his bacon.

Our protagonist took his two Pfizer shots eagerly for two reasons, like most people. Firstly, because he really wanted to go on holiday as the economy gradually reopened, and secondly, because he was genuinely worried that he could be a silent spreader if he didn't. We know now that the latter assumption was anywhere near as correct as initially feared. But it was a very nice holiday. He became a rebel during the booster campaign where the authorities told him that he must now take a third shot of something of which he had already taken two shots. And the reason he must do this is because the first two shots weren't very good in the first place. Sorry, but this doesn't make sense. Will we lock down again next time the an airborne virus escapes from a lab in China? Probably. We certainly know what to do this time.

The final milestone in our protagonist's selective history for millennials is Vladimir Putin's decision to start a war in Europe by invading Ukraine. This could be a defining moment for millennials. War in Europe was supposed to have been made impossible by the institutions created in the aftermath of the Second World War. Granted, the Soviet Union, and latterly Russia, were outside the scope of such institutions, so it is perhaps not a surprise that is from this corner of the European continent that an escapist dictator is lashing out. Our protagonist does not buy the argument that the war in Ukraine is the West's fault for expanding the EU or NATO. Giving in to such arguments is equivalent to allowing Russia to do the thing that it says it should be allowed to do, with no ability, for example via NATO and European political cooperation, to do anything about it. That’s not how arguments work. Our protagonist has been to Eastern Europe and has seen the leap forward by erstwhile Soviet satellites. They're eager buyers of the product sold by the West, chiefly via combined membership of the EU and NATO, and why wouldn't they? There is a difference between Belarus and Slovenia for a reason.

But our protagonist also knows enough European history to know that the territorial lines in Eastern Europe have been redrawn more times than in most other parts of the world. Such occurrences usually happen when Western Europe either lets down its military guard or fail to show sufficient respect to Russia and its perennially bruised and paranoid ego. On this occasion Europe has failed on both counts.

The war in Ukraine is a sobering moment for millennials. Like many generations in the past, they thought they were special, that they would be in their prime when the next big leap forward occurred. But instead of a warp drive and a cure for cancer, they are now witnessing trench warfare in Europe every bit as horrible and pointless as in the Great War. Combine this with the attempt, primarily by the US, to make China the number of one enemy of the next few decades—despite openly working to integrate the very same country into the world economy at the start of the 2000s—millennials face a turning point in their understanding of the world they live in. They must now contend with the reality that the open, free-trading and peaceful post Cold War world they inherited from their parents and grand-parents is crumbling just as they're about to hit their stride in life.

This invariably creates a number of conflicting emotions. Some millennials will feel a call for glory, an opportunity to do something more worthwhile than scrambling to fill up their retirement accounts and exercising their thumb scrolling a smartphone. For others, the feeling of dejection and disappointment will be more prevalent. For if the worst the happens, what can Western millennials do other than use their final healthy years fighting battles they thought had long been settled or confined to the historical dustbins. Or failing that, they will get to watch their children do it in their stead? Not much raging against the dying of the light in that. A placeholder generation indeed. Our protagonist still hopes that the arc of history will swing in a more benevolent direction for his generation, but he is increasingly uncertain about that outcome.

The last of the analogues

Every generation must go through a more or less predictable cycle that ends with its members confused, concerned and critical about the technologies that prevail as they reach the twilight of their life. Millennials command a unique position in this regard. They were the last generation to be truly born in an analogue world and they will end their working life in a fundamentally altered world where digital technologies permeate everything and everyone. What resentment will they show towards technology in the latter part of their lives?

Our protagonist remembers well the joys of the pre-internet world. He learned to read early, and quickly became a voracious reader. One of the best memories of his childhood was the trip to the local library to load up on cartoons and books before the annual road trip with his parents to southern Europe. His fondest reading experiences were the Dragonlance novels which he consumed with great appetite at the same time as he was consumed with AD&D role play—2nd edition obviously—and Magic the Gathering; the actual cards not the app! He even remembers playing outside with his friends, with no adult supervision, not knowing what kind of adventure the day would bring.

Video games and computers crept into his life in his early teens, first with the Sega Master System II, and later with the Playstation I. Then came the first family PC, which he annexed as his own. He installed too many games and caught too many viruses from surfing some of the more questionable corners of the early internet. By the time he had enough money to buy his own PC—an AMD Athlon 800mhz with 512 MB and a post-purchase installation of a Radeon 64mb graphics card—the internet and its services had matured enough to offer significant entertainment. WebEx and Kazaa provided a doorway to all kinds of obscure files and content from the depths of a still-fledgling internet. Unreal Tournament, Diablo II and Starcraft were the games of choice for the online persona. Later, as our protagonist became more professional and career oriented, he was one of the early bloggers, and Web 2.0 practitioners. Social media, by contrast, crept up on him slowly, but ultimately also decisively.

As millennials take stock of the world in their childhood and youth compared to the all-encompassing digital world they reside in today, they must first and foremost contend with what they've lost. Our protagonist has, by and large, lost the ability to read, and social media takes up significantly more of his time than it should be. Indeed, screen time is a much bigger share of his life than he would like, but he is not quite sure what to do about it. Sure, social media procrastination can be more or less successfully reduced, and Netflix binging too. But the world is moving at pace towards a state where the fusion between the digital and all aspects of the individual's life and core functions is so complete that there won't be space for anything non-digital. Do you even exist if you don’t have a well-followed profile on one or more of the major social media networks, a Substack, a Youtube channel, a podcast or preferably, all of the above? Perhaps this was always going to be the natural evolution of human development in the same way that relatively simple economic structures ceded ground to more complex ones during the Industrial Revolution. For millennials, the memory of a world without screens, and digital identities still exists, but they will be the last generation to cherish such nostalgia.

The culture wars

Wokeness, identity politics, and political correctness washed over millennials in their 30s and early 40s. Their waves are still reverberating as this manifesto is being written. The stakes are high, as is the entertainment value. LGBTQIA+ vs Jordan Peterson is a good movie, after all. As a white male, with still a bit of self respect, out protagonist has tended to be a silent supporter of the purportedly ring-wing faction of this battle. This will earn him no accolades. From the left, he will be accused of being racist, misogynistic, and perhaps even fascist, and from the right, he suspect that the front-line will out him as a coward; one who didn’t speak up when he should have. Our protagonist will let others decide whether he has been speaking his mind with sufficient clarity and courage.

To be completely honest, our protagonist is a bit tired of it all. To him, the discussion about whether there is, in fact, fundamental differences between men and women, whether 2+2 can, in some instances, equal 5, or whether white people should send some percentage of their pay-cheque to a random person of colour to atone for the crimes of slavery represent one thing, and one thing only; a massive opportunity cost and a waste of time. It is deeply depressing that millennials have had to spend a significant part of their productive life watching this theatre.

The climate guilt

For millennials, the discussion about climate change is mainly one of a guilty conscience without much in the way of a change in behaviour. Life is for living, and millennials seem to be doing just that without much regard for the increasingly dire warnings from the scientific community about the state of the planet. Sure, millennials opt for the occasional organic vegetable, a non-meat dinner, and perhaps even an electric vehicle on the drive, but this is mainly to buy absolution rather than to affect any real change. Our protagonist has sympathy for this somewhat blasé approach to climate change. He can’t predict the future climate, but because he is unsure whether scientists can either, with any degree of accuracy, he is disinclined to be too alarmist. Or to be more specific; he is disinclined to discount the future in a way that allows for the radical changes that the most climate anxious scientists believe are needed.

If the choice is between not travelling, not procreating, not consuming—not living?—and “que sera, sera”, relying on the hope that a warp drive, fusion technology or carbon capture solves the problem, our protagonist is inclined to opt for the latter. This could well be a flaw in his character, and if so, he must apologise for that. But he suspects that he isn’t the only one of his generation to feel like that. The climate emergency is, to him, as much an exercise in left-wing insanity, as it is a fact-based project to save the planet. The need to upend economic and political structures to save the climate, and to solve the coordination problem among sovereign nations, was always going to be a difficult project to sell. But it could have been sold a hell of a lot better than it has to date, all the same. It is an also, in its current iteration, a project that leads to tyranny. For if the problem is that there are too many people on earth, living lives too comfortable for the good of the planet, we have tools to remedy that. They’re blunt tools in the end, but they will work. Our protagonist sincerely hopes it does not come to that.

Immigration

Immigration is the elephant in the room for millennials in the West and their place in civil society. This generation will see immigrants everywhere they go, and many will see one in the mirror too. Millennials in the developed world have come of age in a time where the freedom of movement in the EU and an open and welcoming North America have encouraged the mixing of populations. Our protagonist recently joined his neighbours in London for a garden party gathering people from Denmark, the UK, Canada, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, Georgia, Greece, Brazil, Poland, Italy, Germany, Japan and more that he has now forgotten.

Millennials in the West are now entering middle age in a world where immigration is fast becoming one of the most contentious political and social issues. For many millennials, the politically correct response to such controversy is to see opposition to immigration as racism, if not a rejection of their progressive identity. But our protagonist wonders whether this isn’t now a rather stale projection of millennials’ position. You can be opposed to unchallenged and uncontrolled immigration, and the socially deleterious effects in the areas and communities affected, while also being an immigrant yourself. You can be opposed to illegal immigration, and the crime and anti-social behaviour that it entails, while simultaneously being a law-abiding immigrant and citizen in your community. Our protagonist wonders whether many millennials aren’t now adopting either of these two positions as their own, regardless of their own migration status. If it is considered far-right to believe that a country should be able to police its borders, then I guess our protagonist should be considered as such.

Average, with an option on great

Millennials are an average generation, with an option on greatness. They haven't done anything terrible, but they haven't been a shining light either. They still have the chance to be great, to make smart choices and to find that cure for cancer, a warp drive or a comprehensive solution to climate change. But they also still have to option to make bad choices, to be selfish, especially as they age and inherit the vast fortune amassed by the baby-boomers. As all generations, they're price-takers of history and major events such as they unfold, and they must respond on the fly. Let's hope they do so with intelligence, bravery and foresight.