This is the first instalment of Drew Austin’s new VICE column, MILLENNIAL PAUSE. You can read him in each issue of VICE Magazine—subscribe here.Is it possible to pinpoint the exact moment when millennial culture finally died? Did the generation ever collectively acknowledge that its time was up and willingly pass the baton to Gen Z? The pandemic was an obvious inflection point, encouraging (or forcing) millennials to embrace their geriatric tendencies while upending so many of the prior decade’s cultural norms, killing the ZIRP economy, and ending the End of History. But maybe, more precisely, the generation’s run ended in summer 2021: the post-vaccine vibe shift, as described by the writer and trend forecaster Sean Monahan, when everyone came out of the house and all the latent change built up during the preceding year coalesced, with millennials stumbling into the blinding sunlight and realizing they lived in a bewildering new world.If the millennial corpse had already been stiffening for a while, another death certificate was issued in early 2024, when two pillars of the generation’s identity, VICE and Pitchfork, already significantly changed since their original 90s/00s incarnations, both approached the brink of vanishing altogether. VICE Media announced that it would no longer publish new material on VICE.com, while Pitchfork would be merged into GQ by its parent company, Condé Nast, which had owned it since 2015. Although neither actually happened—you’re reading this, after all—both close calls hinted at the fragility of the millennial generation’s legacy going forward. They also raised an existential question: What have millennials left behind that’s actually worth preserving? In the twilight of their cultural relevance, a scan of the horizon reveals few enduring monuments that are solid enough to cast a shadow. The monuments that have endured also attest to the generation’s decline. The electric scooter boom of the late 2010s—arguably the millennials’ swan song, and an exemplary symbol of their distinctive culture—produced a strange but predictable side effect: piles of discarded and destroyed Bird and Lime scooters littering embankments and ponds and other marginal urban spaces. The literal trashing of these whimsical avatars of the millennial economy, documented in an Instagram account called Bird Graveyard, was also a fitting metaphor for the eventual state of so many other millennial artifacts: expired but still visible, scattered throughout the urban environment, persistent reminders of an embarrassing recent past. Today, these proverbial junk piles contain more than just scooters, but also IPAs, escape rooms, listicles, smash burgers, Garden State, MySpace, brunch, @shitmydadsays, tight jeans, sans serif fonts, life hacks, axe throwing bars, Williamsburg, speakeasies, Urban Outfitters, electroclash, fast casual bowls, food trucks, food delivery apps, ridesharing apps, laundry apps—apps for every conceivable action—and even 44th US President Barack Obama himself. Much of this remains permanently embedded in the landscape. No longer fresh, it’s now just the mundane infrastructure of everyday life. What IPAs do you guys have on draft?The same month as the VICE and Pitchfork news, the New York Times published a piece by Joe Bernstein, “Hark, the Millennial Death Wail,” about millennials’ fraught relationship to their own aging process. Bernstein notes that the generation’s insecurity about their waning relevance has been inseparable from their need to keep talking about it. Every month, it seems, there’s a new thinkpiece about how millennials are washed, usually written by millennials themselves (including this one, I suppose)—but the generation seems unconvinced by its own self-deprecating argument. “Millennials’ ability to drive a cycle of discourse around our age means we can still shape the conversation,” Bernstein writes. “For millennials who criticized their boomer parents for decades for not shuffling off the stage, the ‘look how old we are’ act may serve another purpose: prolonging our own time in the spotlight, and our own sense that we are the protagonists of history.”This kind of navel-gazing, of course, has always been a millennial hallmark. Millennials invented social media and were immediately its most dedicated users, becoming the first generation who could expect their own audience regardless of how exceptional they were, and the first to enjoy a forum where they could process their neuroses and insecurities in public. One could hardly expect millennials to bow out gracefully after 20 years of such preening online; talking is what they do best, and it’s becoming clear they’ll still be doing it when no one else is listening. They don’t know how to stop. 2023, Max Read wrote in the NY Times, was the year that millennials finally aged out of the internet. But don’t get too excited: That doesn’t mean they logged off.After all, millennials have nowhere to go. The internet is where they live. The boomers own property and land; in lieu of more traditional assets, the wealth that millennials accumulated online is their generational nest egg. “We often ridicule boomers for being unable to grow up, but at least they had something else to move on to,” writes the literary essayist Chris Jesu Lee. “At this rate, millennials look to be fighting for TikTok territory against Zoomers as every single one of us enters middle age. And then comes Gen Alpha.” Of course, Boomers never willingly passed the baton either, but they held a stronger position when their time came. Bernstein quotes Cheryl Russell, the former editor of American Demographics magazine, who declared that “the era of the rule of the young is over” just as boomers were reaching middle age in the 80s. “The boomers would still wield cultural power; they would just leave childish things behind.” That’s easier to pull off when your power is grounded in the material world.Boxed in on all sides, then, millennials will indeed go down fighting—a zombie generation resisting its scheduled euthanasia, or a hydra that grows two new heads for every one cut off by a self-conscious thinkpiece, gorging on its own looming irrelevance and shitting out content. Reports of the millennials’ demise may yet be premature. Someone will have to ask them to leave, politely or not.But that kind of closure is a thing of the past. One of the emergent qualities of the digital culture millennials shaped is that nothing ends any more. Wars and pandemics drag on; aging bands keep touring in a perpetual state of reunion rather than breaking up; politicians circle the drain into their eighties and nineties; bygone aesthetics and styles are forgotten and rediscovered in shorter and shorter cycles. We seem unable to fully metabolize experiences and move on, for better or worse; we suffer from cultural acid reflux.The paradox of the internet is that it enables this endlessness while also making culture less durable and more disposable. Millennials, again, were the first generation to bank a large share of their cultural capital online, which now seems to guarantee its swift erasure. As the generation’s Obama-era heyday recedes farther into the past, its most significant accomplishments feel increasingly elusive, hazy, out of reach, or just illegible, revealing the digital ground it all stood upon to be an unstable foundation. The rewards for millennials’ technological adventurousness have been obvious—wealth, attention, convenience, abundance of all kinds—with the drawbacks mostly becoming evident only later. And one of these drawbacks is ephemerality: The millennials’ curse is to have built their castles on sand, to see their contributions begin fading as quickly as they once appeared, to leave no lasting proof of their erstwhile relevance. The cultural significance that was attainable in the 20th century has itself become a casualty of the internet. All those moments lost in time, like tears in rain. In 1999, a formative millennial text taught us that if you die in the Matrix you die in real life. As it is turning out, the generation’s own longevity doesn’t extend far beyond its digital footprint either.For a true millennial death rattle, there is no better example than one of the generation’s most important representatives and in many ways the architect of its identity: Mark Zuckerberg, now 40, who recently overhauled his public persona in the very “hype dad” style that Monahan’s ‘vibe shift’ essay ridiculed (as an example of those left behind by the vibe shift), embracing streetwear and MMA and exposure to sunlight, in jarring contrast to his familiar nerdy image. As the rest of the millennial zeitgeist fades from view, Zuckerberg’s status as an American oligarch—a position he attained by encouraging and then exploiting his own generation’s narcissism—ensures unavoidable visibility. If not for the business angle, it would be tempting to call his transformation a midlife crisis, but those belong to prior generations.Millennials hang on for dear life until the end.Subscribe to Drew Austin’s KNEELING BUS newsletter on SubstackThe post An Obituary for Millennial Culture appeared first on VICE.