There is nothing you can say about millennials that hasn’t already been the subject of dozens of thinkpieces by our predecessors and/or devastating social media critiques by younger influencers. We’re too sensitive. We’re cringe. We’ve built entire personalities around “being depressed.” etc. etc. Sometimes these charges are justified (see: YouTube voice; those weird ankle booties with the cut-outs we wore with our rolled-up skinny jeans up until, like, 2019). But most of the attacks feel unfair. Not necessarily because those doing the criticizing are wrong, but because their criticisms demonstrate an astonishing lack of empathy, an unwillingness to entertain the possibility that we didn’t develop our habits and preferences in a vacuum. Yet the Boomers who shake their fists in our direction have no interest in reflecting on the role they played in making us the way we are, and the Zoomers—who also have it pretty rough—seem much less interested in forming an alliance than they are in mocking us into submission.
In our defense, we’re nowhere near as cheugy as we used to be. Outwardly, at least, many of us have come to reject the rules laid out for us by our parents and grandparents—work hard, go to college, get a good job, and poof, success is yours!—but we’re still playing it safe in ways we aren’t always conscious of until it’s too late. We scroll Instagram or TikTok, trying to escape for a little while, only to be ambushed by real world examples of this embarrassing habit of ours (usually in viral videos made by 22-year-olds).
“Millennial gray” is a term that, until a few hours ago, I was blessedly unfamiliar with. Per an Urban Dictionary definition cited by both HuffPo and Apartment Therapy, millennial gray is “the sad depressive hue of the color gray which many millennials coat their life in. The color reflects how Millennials went from non-sense happiness, looking at cartoon network and Nickelodeon in the 90s to Inflation and depression in the early 2020s.”
Millennial gray isn’t so much one specific color as it is a palette. You know the one. You’ve seen it on Pinterest and in West Elm catalogues, where rooms, in varying shades of gray and beige and greige, simultaneously convey pragmatism and sophistication.
That’s the intention anyway. Unfortunately, the result is often so blandly inoffensive that it somehow circles back around, causing offense with its impersonality, its lifelessness.
In an attempt to explain the “psychology” behind the trend, the aforementioned HuffPo article posits that millennials cling to our neutral color palettes because they’re “soothing” (an argument I don’t find particularly compelling) and because they’re a repudiation of the clutter and the blatant consumerism that defined ‘90s interiors. I find this theory more reasonable, but it still doesn’t fully explain it. It makes sense that we’d respond to sponge-painted walls and metal chicken statues with a more minimalist approach—but minimalism can still leave plenty of room for personality and color.
If you ask me (which nobody actually did, but you’re on my Substack which means I have your tacit permission to loudly and forcefully share my opinions): I think the real reason millennials have leaned into neutrals so aggressively is that every seismic global event that has taken place during our 28-43 years on this planet has instilled in us an understanding that stability is nothing but an illusion.
Millennials are afraid to leave marks, to claim anything as our own, in case it gets snatched out from under us. Many of us are renters, and believe we will be forever, which in itself inhibits the creativity we might display in our homes if we didn’t have to worry about getting a security deposit back.
But even among millennial homeowners, a sort of pre-resignation hangs over us like a cloud. We reflexively think to ourselves, This will probably get taken away at some point. This isn’t really mine.
Can you blame us? We were in middle and high school when 9/11 happened; we graduated college just as millions of people, who thought they’d built a solid foundation for themselves and their families, lost their homes and their jobs. It took us a little longer than previous generations to get on our feet, but once we did, we found ourselves facing another recession, this time coupled with a global pandemic, which underscored for everybody the precariousness of both our institutions and human existence itself.
Gray (and white and beige) millennial spaces reflect this mistrust of the future. Sure, we could choose to spend what little money we have after we pay our rent or mortgage on renovations and tchotchkes that make us smile. But: why go to the trouble of putting up fun tile when we might lose our jobs tomorrow and have to scramble to appeal to prospective buyers who have also watched too much HGTV and who, as a result, have come to think of Chip and Joanna Gaines’s aesthetic as some kind of default?
And so we mimic the modern farmhouse and/or stark Scandinavian spaces we see online, because they’re the kind of stylish-enough blank slates we assume everybody else wants.
I’ve been in my house for two years now and this is an instinct I’m trying very hard to fight against. I’ve bought weird art and colorful linens and even put up some fun wallpaper. Of course, said wallpaper is removable, and in the corner of this wallpapered room sits a can of dark green paint I ordered last fall, still in the box it was shipped in, which I thought I’d use to paint my bedroom. I’ll get around to it eventually, I tell myself. Once I know for sure I’m staying.
Recently, I saw a TikTok of someone arguing that rodent boyfriend summer marks a shift in how we think about beauty. We’re moving away from Instagram face and back to a world in which attractive people are attractive because of their unique features, not because they have glass skin or some ideal distribution of filler.
Is this actually happening? I would like to think so, but alas, I have no proof, and neither did this person. Although maybe they’re on to something, because a similar phenomenon is happening in interior design. Over the past couple of years, there’s been a move back towards maximalism and color and lightheartedness and personality. (Some refer to this as dopamine decor, for obvious reasons.)
I’m here for it, even though it can be scary, investing parts of you into whatever tiny corner of the world you’ve managed to carve out for yourself. But hopefully we’re all beginning to understand that, since nothing is going to keep the gray laminate flooring from shifting underneath us tomorrow or next week or next year, we might as well create spaces that make us happy in the here and now.
Today’s rabbit hole:
-From millennial gray to sad beige parenting (we have all the neutrals covered)
-What does your favorite color say about you? Nothing.
-Had to revisit Anne Helen Petersen’s 2019 deep dive into how Chip and Joanna transformed Waco
-I would be remiss if I didn’t include this who’s who of Hollywood’s hot rodent boyfriends
