Gen Z is Doing Their Best, They’re Just Scared of Turning 30

On the edge of adulting, where existential dread is chic

Hey everyone,

Continuing my 8 Days of Kidman celebration, I ended up watching To Die For this morning, followed by an afternoon Nosferatu delight. While I don’t have much to add culturally about Nosferatu, I can’t help but note that To Die For somehow gets funnier with each viewing. (Also, I’m glad that Lily-Rose Depp is finally getting some theatrical vindication for that monstrosity known as The Idol and able to show off her acting chops in Nosferatu).

As I was marinating on Babygirl last night, it struck me how the film’s May-December dynamics reflect something I’ve been avoiding discussing, partly out of fear of sounding old and out of touch: the generational tension and anxieties between Millennials and Gen Z. This isn’t just about cultural differences—it’s about Gen Z’s subtle erasure of Millennials, which I believe may not be intentional but stems from their generational self-centeredness and fear of aging, irrelevance, and ultimately, becoming us.

I’ve always cringed at the term “Millennial.” It’s infantilizing, not to mention reductive—like a cheap marketing gimmick meant to sell our struggles back to us, because that’s basically what it was. No wonder no one takes Millennials seriously—who would, with a name like that? This dismissal feels even more pointed as Gen Z rises to cultural dominance, reducing our contributions to caricatures while confidently claiming their own innovations as wholly original (hello, DIY culture, my old friend).

While Millennials grew up with the internet, Gen Z grew fully immersed. Their perspective on time and technology is wildly different from ours. Millennials remember a time without smartphones when everyone had reasonable attention spans; Gen Z blocks or deletes anything that doesn’t align with their curated feeds—including us. Start-up culture exploited Millennials as creative workhorses, always chasing the next trend—which explains a lot about Gen Z’s youth-obsessed culture and anxieties about hitting the 30-year mark without landing on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list.

I think about this contrast every time I reflect on Facebook’s early days, back when it was just “The Face Book” and you needed a college email to join. My school was among the first ten included in Zuckerberg’s social experiment. There were no walls, no one had smartphones or filters, and the platform felt like a digital extension of campus life—a hub for drunk party photos and inside jokes that mirrored our real-world connections.

That sense of safety didn’t last. When Facebook expanded to community colleges and, eventually, parents, no one was ready. Some deleted their accounts outright, but the damage was done. For Millennials, this was our first taste of the internet’s permanence—a stark contrast to Gen Z, who’ve always known the internet remembers everything. This awareness led them to create private accounts and Finstas early on, avoiding the public-facing oversharing that defined us. But they also now live in an image-driven culture they’ve created with ideals and pressures that they can barely live up to. Different internet, different problems.

This dynamic of navigating life—online and off—has become messy and disconnected. Millennials, disillusioned after years of burnout and false promises, struggle to reconcile with Gen Z, who seem equally anxious about their future but dismissive of our experiences.

Take the workplace: Millennials slogged through 60-hour weeks tethered to laptops, only to watch entire careers and portfolios dissolve with 48 hours’ notice. Meanwhile, Gen Z has AI. They don’t even have to write or care where their information comes from. They often bypass in-depth research for quick, digestible content on TikTok.

While TikTok democratizes creativity and AI streamlines work, their reliance on speed and surface-level engagement often sacrifices depth and accuracy—and this is why they get mocked relentlessly for it. It also reflects a lack of appreciation for the enduring challenges Millennials faced: two decades of content production that rarely led to meaningful upward mobility—something Gen Z seems to think they are both uniquely exempt from and entitled to.

At a press event earlier this year, I witnessed this generational disconnect firsthand. A young Gen Z social media tastemaker with a following that dwarfs my own by the thousands boldly declared, “Why are so many Millennials and Gen X sitting on that stage? Gen Z is the future.” The three panelists—journalists grappling with the collapse of food media—struggled to comment without sounding pretentious or irate at the audacity. Meanwhile, a Zennial attendee expressed frustration about her post-pandemic media stagnation, seemingly unaware that she wasn’t alone. She was working hard, not getting ahead, and taking it personally—as if this hadn’t been happening to everyone in the room for decades. Who’s going to tell her?

This kind of generational disconnect is everywhere. Millennials, tired and disillusioned, know better than to expect upward mobility in traditional systems, while Gen Z, desperate to avoid the same fate, clings to new strategies that often dismiss the lessons of the past. It’s a cycle we’ve all seen before, but hits harder living in a world that moves faster and forgets even quicker.

Maybe that’s why Babygirl feels so relevant. It captures the tension between generations—full of contradictions—and Millennials conspicuously absent, likely busy working from home. I found myself both amused and annoyed by the Gen Z characters trying to navigate the workspace, especially in a film that’s one explicit scene away from being labeled porn.

Young men, captivated by the allure of older women—confident, experienced, and sexually adventurous—often find themselves disoriented by the reality of their depth, independence, and emotional nuance, highlighting a clash between fantasy and lived complexity. Older women, conditioned to question their own relevance, find themselves both empowered and unsettled by the attention.

This tension plays out in a different way professionally, however, in Romy’s mentorship dynamic with Esme, the young, ambitious, polished intern played by Sophie Wilde. Esme is eager to learn and climb the professional ladder—something Romy might have embraced wholeheartedly if her brain weren’t preoccupied with Samuel’s you-know-what. Unbeknownst to Romy, Samuel is also canoodling with Esme, adding a layer of generational tension and betrayal to the mix.

As Romy and Samuel’s passionate affair becomes office fodder, Esme seizes the moment to assert herself within the company. Calculated moves, cloaked in language about “mentorship” and “setting an example” as a trailblazing woman in STEM, reveal an ambition that is both admirable and unsettling (mainly because they’re both screwing the same guy and everyone is confused about the power dynamics and their shared responsibilities—but it also speaks to the larger cultural shift). While her actions reflect ambition, they also underscore the generational disconnect between these women. Romy, caught off guard, ultimately ships Samuel off to an internship on the other side of the world, allowing for a return to professionalism and intersectional Girl Power.

The resolution feels pragmatic but anticlimactic, highlighting the messy intersections of power, age, and ambition, and reflecting a quiet pragmatism that Millennials are just beginning to internalize as a midlife crisis: that relevance actually isn’t about keeping up with trends. It’s about knowing when to step back, recalibrate, and move forward with purpose. It’s an explosive existential dynamic that offers clarity to one side (Millennials) and confusion to the other (Gen Z). It’s also a perfect metaphor for the broader generational tension: the fear of irrelevance, the longing for connection, and the struggle to reconcile fantasy with reality.

I couldn’t help but feel the pull of my own existential questions. Sitting here, on the cusp of 40, unmarried, unattached, and sometimes consumed with thoughts of what could have been, I realized my ambivalence toward Gen Z’s coming-of-age dilemma might stem from a deeper place. Part of me resents their optimism and innovation because it reminds me of the hope I used to feel before the grind of adulthood set in. Another part feels mildly resentful, like they’ve sidestepped a set of struggles we were forced to endure. The pandemic didn’t do anyone any favors either, erasing a few years from our prime 30s.

Then it hit me: Gen Z is scared of what they’re doing to us right now. Millennials aren’t inspiring to them. We’re tired. They know it. They’re going to be tired. Another generation will make them feel irrelevant, and it’s a trap. They’re afraid of turning 30 and want reassurance they’re not going to die. Meanwhile, we’re at the precipice of 40, looking to our Gen X elders to explain shit like perimenopause and reassure us that “40 is the new 30.” We’re all failing each other by not just “adulting” and making a generational connection with these unapologetically self-assured kids.

I started noticing Gen Z’s quirks, like their fascination with lines. In New York City, it’s a running joke—90% of any line is Gen Z. No one waits in a fucking line because people have jobs, but for Gen Z, waiting in line feels like a rare analog experience in an increasingly digital world. It’s their way of finding community and creating moments of purpose by taking the online experience offline. While I would rather stick needles in my eyes than queue up for overpriced bagels, I begrudgingly understand the appeal. We just took photos of our food before going about our day.

For Millennials, the idea of spending hours in line feels absurd because we’ve already seen behind the curtain. We know the Wizard of Oz is just an old guy pulling levers. We’re disillusioned, fatigued by overwork, and still grappling with the fallout of a system that promised upward mobility and delivered burnout and years of fleeting “exposure” instead.

Gen Z, on the other hand, is still living in the hopeful part of the cycle, albeit tinged with anxiety about whether the clock is ticking faster for them than it did for us. They are growing up in a much different world than us, even though we’re only a decade or so apart. They’re disillusioned after years of facing lockdown drills at school, increasingly fatigued by the onslaught of information at their fingertips they struggle to properly distill, and deeply concerned about the future but unsure what to do about it. Gen Z may be unintentionally erasing Millennials, but Millennials are all too happy to erase themselves and let them fight it out.

Gen Z might be scared of turning 30, but so was I—and so was every generation before us. The fear of irrelevance is universal; it just looks different depending on the tools, trends, and cultural scripts we’ve been handed. Every generation has to navigate that fear in their own way. For Millennials, maybe that means letting go of the idea that we have to prove ourselves to anyone. For Gen Z, it might mean learning that erasure isn’t a solution—it’s just a shortcut to repeating the same mistakes.

And here’s the thing: the movie boldly asserts that older generations are not dead or irrelevant. In fact, some of them are having the best sex of their lives—an idea that remains largely subversive but suggests it’s becoming the norm. We’re living longer, looking better, and learning together.

None of us are as far apart as we think. Maybe Babygirl isn’t just about power plays or office politics or really hot sex (though it’s mostly that for sure)—it’s about the shared experience of trying to find connectivity in a world that’s always moving too fast. It’s a reminder that creating space for nuance, complexity, and connection isn’t just nice; it’s more necessary than ever. Because even when things feel messy or uncomfortable, those moments of understanding are what make us human, no matter our generation.

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