One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

One In a Millennial examines the influence of the late eighties, nineties, and aughts culture on members of the millennial generation. As Kennedy explains in the collection’s introduction, “millennials are people born between 1981 and 1996” (11). However, the term was originally used “to simply represent a group of people coming of age around the start of the new millennium” (11). The millennial identity has since been defined by older generations as lazy, self-centered, haphazard, and noncommittal. Throughout One in A Millennial, Kennedy seeks to interrogate these negative notions about the millennial generation and to prove that millennials are like every other generation, in that they are “a product of [their] time, having faced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” when first entering the workforce (12). Indeed, according to the Pew Research Center, millennials have higher levels of “student-loan debt, unemployment, and poverty, along with lower levels of personal wealth and income than preceding generations” (12). Kennedy argues that these trends are symptoms of larger-scale cultural, economic, and social change unrelated to millennials. Throughout her 12 essays, she identifies key facets of the millennial experience and argues in defense of millennials’ subversive trajectories and outlooks on life. Other key facets of the millennial generation that Kennedy addresses throughout the collection include millennials’ familiarity with the internet, mobile devices, social media, technology, the postponement of marriage and reproduction, and waning interests in religion and spirituality. Economic downturns, the Great Recession, and COVID-19 have had significant effects on the millennial outlook and identity as well.