millennial-maxing

A few summers ago, I witnessed black hawk planes fly over my head in the alley by my home. I jokingly remarked to a friend that the exhaust fumes emitting from behind the black hawks were chemtrails. “Chemtrails over the police state!” I yelled a little too gleefully.

The sun was setting, and everything looked sepia-toned. My family was preparing to break their fast indoors while I stood under the drone cameras whirring in the sky. I felt so exposed, so raw. It’s the same way I felt the previous summer, after George Floyd was murdered a mile away from my house, when the black hawk planes were first summoned. Between the southbound planes headed toward the airport and the black hawks headed toward the commotion of the protestors, I was too rattled to sleep much that summer.

I know my younger self, whose greatest playground wound was being abandoned on a field trip on the last day of sixth grade, would have enjoyed the voyeuristic quality of being potentially watched from above by drone cameras, the creative bounty of such an insignificant moment. In that moment, I became a main character, a protagonist in the unfolding story of my city.

As a teen, I was so preoccupied with the gaze of others. Did their eyes linger on me or did their eyes glaze over in search of something or someone more interesting to look at? Could I feel their retinas on my skin? Did it feel like a gust of warm air or a gun cocked to my back? This extrasensory proprioception is somewhere between a superpower and a survival mechanism. We often dilute our own perspective with an outsized awareness of being perceived by others. Only as an adult did I ever begin to consider my own gaze within the panopticon that is modern life: my winces that translate into skeptical squints; how my eyes often betray me when I’m not being honest; how I look at people when I think they’re too stupid to be in my presence; how I withhold my attention as a power move; and, how I  construct my own reality, tooling it to receive the attention that I want. 

In August, I was sitting in a cafe in South Minneapolis, when a homeless man barged in. He puttered around, disoriented, invading the personal bubbles of patrons. Minneapolis, post- Floyd, has a culture where people often hesitate to intervene in disruptions like this, so he wasn’t immediately kicked out. Instead, a protracted process of kindly, gently ushering him out of the premises began.

Afterwards, the barista–an African American woman who was the only person working that day—made the decision to close at around 6pm, two hours ahead of schedule. Almost as soon as she locked the doors, a gaggle of white women, likely getting off work, began knocking, hoping to pick up bouquets from a local flower shop as part of a partnership with the cafe. Their bouquets were right by the window, labeled and ready to hand over, but the barista chose to not let them in, needlessly inconveniencing them.

As the women piled up by the door, the barista engaged in a loud conversation with a regular—another Black woman, Caribbean—making pointed remarks about the white women. Given the circumstances, their remarks seemed harsh. They just wanted to pick up their flowers, but weren’t given the full context of why the cafe had shut down early. The barista could have supplied them with that information but chose not to, until, after a 30-minute stare-down through the glass pane windows, she realized they wouldn’t leave. That’s when she finally let them all in.

A month prior, at another neighborhood cafe, I, too, found myself reflexively engaging in the narcissism of small differences when I shit-talked a white couple, who are recent transplants to the city, to a Black barista. I’d known the couple in a tenuous capacity made even more tenuous by the pandemic. The wife and I had done an event together years ago, so I totally expected warmth when I bumped into them for the first time in the cafe. I found the couple’s social skills lacking–in a familiar way I recognize because mine, atrophied from being so much more extremely online post-Covid, are no better–but it bled into all of the other things I had going on at the time, how I felt about myself. So, I made it about their whiteness. The barista, with a smile on her face, kindly commiserated. 

At group therapy, the commiseration isn’t tribal. There is no in-group and out-group. There is only group, thus no opportunities for conjecture or scapegoating. It feels good to listen to others and provide non-judgemental feedback. Listening to hear not to talk, because crosstalk is explicitly banned in the group. I asked a soft-spoken woman if she would ever help her abusive mom, seeing as how her mother worked several jobs to feed her, and was more sympathetic in her story than her father who stayed in bed all day when he wasn’t actively harming them. She burst into tears overcome with compassion for her mother, a complicated woman who sacrificed for her and sacrificed her. All the people who hurt us are complicated in the same way, sacrificing in both directions as the lamb and the butcher. 

When it was my turn to speak, I stopped making eye contact with her and the others. I monologued incoherently and vaguely for three minutes, my eyes affixed to the gray carpet, still uncomfortable with the premise of sharing myself so soon and so intimately in a group setting, yet too dysregulated to stop myself from sobbing throughout my introduction. At lunch, that young woman from the group sat with me. She asked me questions about myself, curious about the incomplete narrative I shared in the group. She doesn’t know that the non-judgemental version of myself is a total fabrication. The real me is a judgemental freak who listens to hear and talk, as well as a gross, third thing: so I can harvest the story for my own story. 

There is a gentleman in the group who looks like Bradley Cooper but also looks like my half-white brother who looks nothing like Bradley Cooper. Like the rest of us, he recently experienced a crisis that’s landed him in the group. He often speaks of a loss of identity from losing his job after an injury, which forced him to pivot into another stressful career during the early pandemic years. There, he was told about who he was in the most uncharitable ways, in ways that aren’t in line with the philosophies of the group but would be perfectly fine online or at a local cafe. 

In recent months, my TikTok For You page has been rife with lamentations of the lack of so-called third places. The intensity of tribalism that these discourses produce on TikTok is part of why I can’t commit to the platform, though I’ve had a couple videos go viral. I also still find it embarrassing to talk to the camera in the way that taking a selfie was embarrassing in the early stages of social media. A friend of mine once tried to trace back when it stopped being embarrassing to post a selfie of yourself online, but it’s not one of those things you can just go in the Wayback Machine to double-check. It feels tied to our collective coming of age and consciousness online, as young adults, in the same way it’s been normalized to monologue in front of the camera on TikTok. Attention—to want it, crave it, and actively seek it—is no longer a private shame.

Those third place lamentations were sandwiched between videos of aging millennials doing the viral “Apple” dance to Say Anything’s “Alive with the Glory of Love” and indie sleaze analyses from various young scholars who are not millennials but have found themselves millennial-maxing nonetheless. If you think about it, we were all there, even younger people who weren’t, thanks to the internet. I feel like I simultaneously exist in the category of someone who was there and someone who wasn’t, simply because so much of that culture, with social media taking off at the time, was documented and experienced online. I can’t fault anyone for feeling like they know something just because they saw it on their computer, especially in our post-Covid world. Sometimes being on the computer watching other people’s art process videos or scrolling through the most beautiful images ever created on Pinterest or reading Substack essays makes me feel like I’m producing work or a part of something. I imagine that witnessing a subculture or an era on your computer or phone feels the same way. I wrote about this for Vox  a few years ago, about what being there, during the hipster era, felt like, and it triggered a lot of people mostly because people get really weird about cultural criticism when they’re not the person doing it, but also when they don’t view the source as legitimate. The panic around legitimacy–and the status anxiety baked into that panic–coincides with all the nostalgia in the culture right now. 

The most significant part of experiencing the hipster era was developing a sense of personal taste based on what I saw others doing and conversations I was having about those things. To that end, beginning in the late aughts, I tried on various styles—from crustpunk to twee. My enjoyment was my own, but it was also about finding a tribe. You found your tribe by following the clues, which often amounted to breadcrumbs because there was so much gatekeeping. I got a lot of my earliest music references from my cool older cousin Abdul who wanted to share the cool with me–recognizing there was enough to go around–and then I got the rest of my eclectic taste from music blogs, and conversations with other people doing the same thing. My alternative tastes and commodities that I got from the internet made me feel like I belonged for once.

But of course, looking at the internet does not always produce a feeling of belonging. More often than not, looking at the internet makes me feel like my life will never be beautiful enough, that I will never have all the things that make a beautiful life. I was stirred by the same feelings watching Sofia Coppola films in my teens and 20s. As I scroll the internet, everyone else’s documented life appears to be imbued with an elegance and charm, floating effortlessly between states of dream and reality. It’s important to remember that indie sleaze and girlhood—and everything else we’re nostalgic about currently that can be encapsulated in a -core, -pilled or -maxing suffix—is simply consumption. 

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