Rewinding
I generally don't care about generational labels and tend to think they are mostly projections of one generation's shortcomings onto another. You may agree, or you may think that tells you all you need to know about my own generation and me, a typical Gen Xer who is overinvested in the fantasy of unilaterally exceeding social labels and transcending the mainstream. This conversation between Ayesha Siddiqi and Charlie Markbreiter of the New Inquiry, which ranges over a variety of examples of "millennial culture," does a good job of getting at some of the stakes of generational framings, the different sorts of work they can be made to perform.
After having been used as the basis for a lot of dubious popular culture debates, millennials are now facing a slow fade into relative cultural insignificance. Gen Z appears effortlessly itself while millennial strategies for authenticity (i.e. the coherence imposed on them by mainstream commentary) appear worn and suspect. Normally the compensation for that is the assumption of more direct forms of power — more property, more decision-making control, families who must live by your rules, etc. — but millennials are positioned to inherit less than earlier generations. They find themselves priced out of the conventional paths to "adulthood," in an economic system that is rapidly unraveling on a planet that is unmistakably careening toward deepening environmental crisis.
That fact changes how the many commentaries on the millennial identity should be interpreted. Many of these, as Siddiqi points out, were insistent "on elevating a certain type of white woman every so often as a stand-in for the insecurities people have about the 'millennial' identity”: that is, "millennials being narcissistic, navel-gazing, hypocritical, apolitically political, aspiring to a radicalism they don’t live, over-educated and underemployed, what else ... oh, romantically awkward and emotionally stunted."
Siddiqi and Markbreiter suggests these characters — e.g. the people in Sally Rooney novels — have a "relatable" appeal for their target audience because they romanticize certain kinds of failures to take adult responsibilities. Of course, their living conditions may be such that they can't for reasons beyond their control, but "millennial culture" tends to make stunted life opportunities for a social demographic (white bourgeois) not accustomed to such prospects appear as a sad badge of honor, an idiosyncratic distinction that speaks to the individual white millennial's unique demands on the world. It's not the way of the world that is falling apart or changing; it's just you — that's how important you are.
Siddiqi castigates "mumblecore" — a somewhat niche distillation of what's propounded as millennial aesthetics — in sharper terms, as "an aesthetic for white liberal evasion of responsibility and fetishization of an innocence they don't have but want to claim." On that reading, the white millennial's failure to benefit from earlier regimes of white supremacy and other forms of exclusion would serve as a guarantee of their blamelessness and a rationalization for the limits to their "ally-ship." To put that differently, millennial culture was a veiled expression of patriarchal heteronormative white supremacist capitalism's emerging failures in reproducing itself; it covertly and ambivalently expressed cross-generational anxieties that are now being proclaimed in far more direct ways, in openly fascist practices. Trump rallies are mumblecore for all ages.