Emily Articulated: Peak millennial

By Emil Erickson
Reader Columnist

When I started this column, I was intrigued by other generations’ perceptions of the Millennials. We were the butt of jokes, reduced to and generalized as “young people” who grew up on participation trophies and too much screen time, stymied at every turn of our adult lives due to poor planning, bad attitudes and too many orders of avocado toast.

I personally never felt like I fit the Millennial bill, forging my own unique and circuitous path through adolescence and into adulthood, deciding to reject the conventional path before it could crumble underfoot (taking my hopes and dreams with it). 

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

But when I started to think about the construct of the Millennial, it occurred to me that I could conjure very few convincing and real-life examples of the cultural caricature within my peer group or the people my age whom I encountered. Instead, I knew a lot of people like me. 

We were 20- (now 30- and very early 40-) somethings with a large appetite for the experiences our parents waited their whole lives to enjoy, an entrepreneurial (if a bit scattered) approach to making money, a loose tie to our expensive college degrees and a deep wariness of the systems we were told would work for us if only we bought into them entirely.

It turns out that this shared mentality — and my journey to feeling connected to my peers instead of being an anomaly among them — wasn’t just happenstance. It was earned. 

New York Times writer and economist (and fellow Millennial) Jeanna Smialek, coined the term “Peak Millennial” in her article, “It’s Me, I’m the Problem. I’m 33.” 

She explained, “If demographics are destiny, the demographic born in 1990 and 1991 was destined to compete for housing, jobs and other resources. Those two birth years, the people set to turn 33 and 34 in 2024, make up the peak of America’s population.”

Being born in 1991, I’m officially as Millennial as they come. This, coupled with having the name Emily (one of the top five names for girls born in the United States in the 1990s, according to the Social Security Administration), crushes any perceived claim on originality I thought I had.

Smialek described the implications of being a part of the peak of America’s population, with an emphasis on the economic impact, writing, “As the biggest part of the biggest generation, this hyper-specific age group has moved through the economy like a person squeezing into a too-small sweater. At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake. My cohort has an outsized amount of economic power, but that has sometimes made life harder for us.”

She describes this stretching effect starting in our college years, forcing even the institutions built on accepting anybody to turn away a record-high number of applicants. This influx of enrollment effectively opened the doors to climbing tuition rates and a diminishing ratio between student debt burdens and starting salaries. 

The Peak Millennial disruption also applied when we entered the workforce. 

“When peak millennials graduated from high school in and around 2009, they were a flood of potential workers pouring into a labor market rocked by recession,” Smialek wrote. “The unemployment rate hovered at a near-record 16% for 18- and 19-year-olds that year. The labor market remained weak even when those who went to college began to graduate, and employers had their pick of hires for years on end.” 

Cue the “Bartenders-with-Bachelor’s Degrees Era” (please hold while I raise my hand, again).

Throughout the article, Smialek details this Peak Millennial effect stretching everything from the housing market to wedding venues and forecasts a future with an upside-down pyramid of social resources — dooming us to a lifelong competition for resources and an inheritance of too few nursing home beds and even fewer reserves of Social Security funds. This will be thanks, in large part, to our delayed (or lack) of procreation — “Kids? In this economy?”

I’m self-aware enough to understand that writing about how important Millennials are, and specifically “Peak Millennials,” is indulgent enough to stoke the flames of the self-absorption of which my peers and I are often accused. But I’m bolstered by the fact that we now have data to back up the bulk of our complaints — however whiny (even if that same data seems to also support the claim that we do, in fact, ruin everything we touch).

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.