What do we think of Millennials? Do they cop too much flak?

Look down. Stop what you’re doing, right now, and look down at your feet. And tell me: Can you see your socks?

If you can’t - if you’re wearing sneaker socks, designed to be invisible - you are almost certainly a Millennial.

Born roughly between 1980 and 1996, Millennials are now the largest adult cohort on the planet, according to the World Economic Forum. Our coming-of-age has been punctuated by a series of global order-defining events and movements, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the Covid-19 pandemic by way of the 2008 financial crisis and the #MeToo movement, and we’re influential in just about every sphere you can think of, from Mark Zuckerberg to Beyoncé, Lionel Messi to Trevor Noah.

Prince William is a Millennial. Taylor Swift is a Millennial. JD Vance, the man nearly one octogenarian heartbeat away from being the most powerful person in the world, is a Millennial.

We’ve lived through so much, we’ve achieved so much. But have we somehow failed to secure the respect of our peers?

“Ask people to identify today’s most selfish generation, and they’ll likely say it’s mine: Millennials,” writes Bloomberg News reporter Charlie Wells in his new book, What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation.

“We’re the ones reputed to spend money on short-term discretionary goods such as expensive avocado toast rather than long-term investments. We’re the ones who delay marriage, childbirth, and adulthood itself. And we’re the ones who spearheaded the notion of ‘cancel culture’.”

Those are the perceptions largely of the generations before us, Boomers and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Gen X. But we’re not getting it any easier from those who came after.

Take that sneaker socks trope, part of a body of Millennial lore also including but not limited to skinny jeans, side parts, the way we take selfies and our use of the cry-laugh emoji, that Gen Z, the generation just below us, finds “so cringe”. 😂😂😂

Wells is American, and his book is particularly interested in the experience of American Millennials. But Kiwi Millennials I spoke to recognised his findings.

“Boomers still seem to think we’re not rich because we’re too lazy,” said 37-year-old Aucklander Jess Hobson, “even though they could leave school at 15 and be middle-class within a few years.”

Hobson says she was raised with the idea that home ownership was the “gold standard for adulthood”, and that didn’t change even as housing got less and less affordable.

“Maybe my parents’ generation had this question of, why can’t you afford a house, what are you wasting all your money on,” says Hobson. “I bought a house by paying the maximum into my Kiwisaver… I saved for a house like they did, it just took a lot longer, because houses in Auckland are so expensive.” (Hobson and her partner bought a house last year, when she was 36 - one year younger the current Auckland average.)

39-year-old Anna Reed has also reckoned with the “lazy” stereotype. Both she and her husband work flexibly, partly from home and partly from the office, which she says Gen X struggles to understand. “They see working from home as not working.”

Reed grew up in Arrowtown but now lives, along with her husband and 7- and 10-year-old children, in Wellington, for work. She reckons the 1990s were the “sweet spot” for raising kids - her parents’ generation hadn’t lived through a war, like their parents, were in a more buoyant economic climate, and didn’t have to worry about the dangers of technology: “We wish our kids didn’t know what a computer was,” she says.

Despite those perceived negative attitudes to work, in Aotearoa, as elsewhere, Millennials are now becoming influential as leaders of politics and business. I spoke to Mimi Gilmour Buckley, the 41-year-old founder of the Burger Burger chain, to find out what makes her tick.

Buckley reckons one of our big strengths is that we’re what Wells calls the “bridge generation” - we remember a time before the total domination of the internet, before cellphones, before the polarisation that is so much a feature of modern politics.

“We understood what it was like to not have 5000 pieces of information,” said Gilmour Buckley, who also has skincare brand Iammi and recently opened new Auckland restaurant Mama. “Life was simpler.”

The result, she says, is that “we can hold a conversation around a table. We’re better at being present because we had an opportunity to be, before we all became so consumed with media”.

She agrees with other Millennials I spoke to that we’ve been dealt, in many ways, a bad hand, but says, “we’re really resilient and realistic. I think we were a generation that was taught to work hard… we had to work hard to make gains”. She adds: “I’m mind-blown they think we’re lazy.”

As for Gen Z, the Millennials I spoke to were far less concerned with what Gen Z thinks of them than, perhaps, Gen Z would imagine.

As 37-year-old Cat put it: “Do I care what a bunch of literal children think about what I choose to spend my money on or what I choose to do with my time? I do not.”

There was a feeling, too, echoed in Wells’ book, that Millennials are only just beginning to get their due.

“I think that Millennials are awesome and they’re all going to realise how awesome we are,” said Buckley.

Added Cat: “I think skinny jeans are my generation’s greatest contribution to society.”

Well. Zuckerberg may beg to differ.