7 Things That Are Completely Wrong With Millennials (as A Millennial) That Make Us Completely Lovable and Cringe

Let's get one thing straight before we start: I'm not here to defend millennials.

We have real problems. We killed the high street, we over-explain ourselves in emails, we have been through ALOT and we cannot receive a compliment without immediately deflecting it with self-deprecating humour.

Some of this stuff is embarrassing.

Most of what gets lobbed at us as criticism is also, somehow, the stuff that makes us genuinely decent to be around. So I'm writing this as a full admission of guilt, point by point.

1. We're absolutely obsessed with our feelings

We talk about our mental health constantly. Most of the time for good reason - hey - I'm neurodivergent myself. I have SEVERE OCD and agoraphobia. But, no, seriously. It's bad.

We're in therapy, we're recommending therapy, we're asking our friends if they've thought about therapy. We use words like "boundaries" and "emotionally unavailable" in regular conversation and we mean them.

Previous generations find this baffling. We find it baffling that previous generations don't do it.

The result is that millennials are, on the whole, better at noticing when a friend is struggling and actually saying something about it.

We've normalised asking "are you actually okay?" and waiting for a real answer rather than accepting "fine" and moving on.

It's the opposite of pretending everything's fine when it isn't, which, historically, hasn't gone brilliantly for anyone.

2. We need constant validation from strangers on the internet

The Instagram generation. The selfie generation. The YouTube generation. I'm still trying to be a YouTube sensation and I'm 36, and no I don't feel embarrassed because I am a MILLENNIAL.

We post everything and we want people to like it. There's a whole industry built around telling us this is narcissism, and maybe some of it is.

What it also is, though, is community-building in a generation that moved cities for work, scattered across the country, and lost the pub-on-a-Friday-night version of staying connected.

When you've got friends in Manchester, Edinburgh, and Melbourne, the group chat and the occasional Instagram story is how you stay in each other's lives.

It looks like vanity from the outside. From the inside, it's maintenance, keeping people close when geography has made that genuinely difficult especially because us millennials like to travel ALOT.

3. We can't make a decision without researching it to death

We don't just book a restaurant. We check Google reviews, then Tripadvisor, then look at the menu online, then check whether anyone on Reddit has been recently. We do the same for mattresses, TVs, washing machines, and GPs.

It drives people mad. It also means we're significantly harder to rip off.

We grew up being told we could access all human knowledge from a small rectangle in our pockets, and we believed it, because it's true.

Millennials comparison-shop everything because we have the tools to do it and we watched our parents get stung by decisions made on less information.

We've overcorrected, if anything. But I'd rather overcorrect toward informed than wander in blind.

4. We have absolutely no loyalty to employers

Job-hopping used to be a red flag on a CV. For millennials it's basically standard practice.

We'll leave for a 10% pay rise, a better title, or the option to work from home two days a week. Older colleagues find this baffling or a bit rude.

What changed is that the old deal broke down. The idea that you give loyalty to a company and the company looks after you in return, redundancies, pension cuts, and zero-hours contracts made that feel like a fairy tale.

If the contract is transactional, both sides treat it transactionally. We didn't invent that logic. We just applied it. Remote working is a millennials best friend. So is van-life, or watching YouTube videos about van life which is the same thing to us.

5. We're absolutely terrible at answering the phone

If you call a millennial without a prior warning text, you will almost certainly be sent to voicemail.

This is not personal. We don't hate you. We just have a genuine, pavlovian stress response to an unexpected phone call that nobody in our generation entirely understands but all of us share.

We're fine on email. We're fine on WhatsApp. Ring us out of nowhere and we'll stare at the phone until it stops, then text back "hey, sorry I missed your call, everything okay?"

I don't have a good defence of this. It's objectively a bit daft.

But it's oddly reassuring to know that, according to BankMyCell, 81% of millennials experience apprehension anxiety before making a phone call, so if you're in this camp, you're in very large company. You can ring us if we have prior knowledge and we have scripted said conversation first. Many thanks.

6. We turned avocado on toast into a whole thing and we're not sorry about it

Yes, we spend money on food. Nice coffee, good bread, the occasional £14 brunch.

This got turned into a strange moral argument in the mid-2010s, most famously by Australian property developer Tim Gurner, who told 60 Minutes Australia in 2017 that millennials could afford houses if they stopped spending money on smashed avocado and coffees.

The numbers don't support that. Average UK house prices sat at around £290,000 in 2024. No amount of skipping brunch bridges that gap for most people in their twenties and early thirties.

What we actually did was decide that if we couldn't afford the big things our parents expected to have by our age, we'd find pleasure in the things we could afford.

That's not recklessness. It's adaptation and us, millennials we can adapt.

7. We over-explain everything, especially apologies

A millennial apology rarely goes "sorry about that."

It goes "I'm so sorry, I completely understand if you're frustrated, I should have been clearer and I'm going to make sure I handle it differently next time, please let me know if there's anything I can do." Every time. We sound like excellent customer service.

It's a lot. It can read as performative, or as covering all bases to avoid blame.

I think it mostly comes from having grown up online, where tone is invisible and context is everything, and from being the generation that got very into the idea that an apology should actually mean something rather than just being a social formality.

We over-correct in the delivery. We over-correct ALOT. We repeat certain phrase we like ALOT. The intention, though, is to be taken seriously rather than to just say the word and move on.

That's not the worst instinct in the world, even when the result is a three-paragraph apology for replying to a text four hours late.

We're a generation of people who grew up during two recessions, did most of our socialising through a screen, got told we were special and then graduated into a jobs market that emphatically disagreed, and came out the other side still trying to talk about our feelings, practice actual empathy, research every purchase, and apologise properly.

There are worse ways to turn out.

Most of the time - we just want a quiet corner, nice food, maybe a decent coffee, a comfy bed and to be left alone. I think that's okay.