Why Millennials are the most nostalgic generation yet

Millennials – people born between 1981 and 1996 – belong to the pre-internet age where thought and expression weren’t as close to each other as they are today. (Photo by Maria Orlova via Pexels)

“Not all those who wander are lost”, JRR Tolkien wrote in the pages of The Fellowship of The Rings. Tolkien was obviously writing in the context of a noble continental voyage, set against the backdrop of a great humanitarian crises. To most millennials this sounds like Wednesday, spent navigating traffic to get to work that we might not even like doing. On Friday it’s a calling, on weekdays it’s a bit of a slap on the tired back. This is a generation that has seen socio-political upheaval, economic transition and technological disruption to the point that stability, in any tangible form, feels unnatural. Even our songs have now been remixed to resemble bawdy carcasses. We are millennials, part-restless, part rooted in chaos and part at peace with where we come from. Torn between tradition and modernity, culture and excess, we neither know what we want nor are we clear about how to get there. We are simultaneously woke and conservative, forward-looking but also likely to push a '90s anecdote down your throat. There is no telling what we’ll do next, because we probably couldn't tell you either.

Millennials – people born between 1981 and 1996 – belong to the pre-internet age where thought and expression weren’t as close to each other as they are today. Opinion and outrage required curative processes, criticism and judgement, on the other hand, necessitated entire educations. We have obviously struggled to make this transition to a time where everything, from food delivery to opinion delivery, is so instantaneous it practically robs you of the opportunity to double-think - a flaw, we built entire personalities around. Most millennials weren’t asked what they wanted to become. So we went where others went, assuming someone knew what they were doing.

Existentialism attaches itself to us in many forms. Financial, cultural, social, political - the list is endless. Our privileges have been cast, but so have our responsibilities. We belong to both conservative and woke schools of thought, forever hamstrung by our incapacity to commit to either. It places us on the cusp, but never quite at the centre of things. It probably explains why we are the most nostalgic generation yet. Everything we cannot decide for the present, we look for in the past. When you’re clueless about the journey ahead, the vacant chair at home that you leave behind feels like the warmest, most hospitable place in the world. Not for no reason has Indian stand-up comedy taken off, after millennials took to the stage. There is so much to laugh about when you are scared of the present, and terrified of the future.

Technological churn, political upheaval and culture’s shifting sands, have left us clutching at hollow bags of watery ideas. We aren’t the social media generation but are dictated by it nonetheless. We aren’t careerists, but we aren’t extroverted enough to turn minor jobs into major feats either. We can’t laugh at the jokes we used to, nor can we submit to the frightening speed at which workplaces function or fall into dysfunction. We weren’t inside gyms in our teens or twenties, as much as we aren’t inside cafes pretending to type away semi-important things. We like to glide, because we were made and raised by borders as much as the reluctant experiments that helped us cross some. Breaking, maybe, was never our thing.

Millennials have never been as carefree or impulsive as the generation that has followed them. We have had to literally look for our destinations in the dark, feel them before hesitantly accommodating them. From relationships to jobs, from political choices to aesthetical indulgences, modesty has remained a cornerstone to most of our decisions. But as Gayathri Jayaraman’s book Who Me, Poor? illustrates, even millennials have been coaxed into seeking validation. We feel left out (FOMO if you absolutely want to) but also find it silly having to do any of it. We are both old-school and new-age, confused but also attached to our designs. It takes a lot to break out of patterns, even longer to break out of prejudices seeped in caste, culture and class. But we’re getting there.

To most Indian millennials baffled by the audacity, and point-blank attitude of the younger generation, we must urge temperament. To the dated ideas of the ones who came before us, we must continue to offer a stage. We must also accept our role as shapeshifters, people who help tide over an age of uncertainty by becoming what it demands. We have grown on drizzly ideas of love, the virtue of permanence and the fickleness of conflict. To us, the most important events, still occur off of social media platforms, inside rooms and attics where we spend nights talking, chowing food that is filling as opposed to ‘grammable’. Our dreams might not have known fancy destinations, but they were mixed in pots without vanity. “All that is transitory is but a metaphor,” Goethe once wrote. We might feel unmoored, undecided, between a rock and a hard place all the time, but we have in our way shaped this country, by enduring its transitional turbulence.