Millenials vs. GenZ
Is there actually beef?
There’s been a level of mutual criticism between Millennials and Gen Z on the internet for quite some time now. The question is: will it always be this way? Does it have to be this way? And is there actually beef, or is there a bigger force at play?
Disclaimer 1: I’m neither a Millennial nor Gen Z. I’m cusp (I refuse to say I’m a Zillennial)
Disclaimer 2: I don’t think either generation is better or worse than the other
Intergenerational beef, reignited
I thought the beef between Millennials and Gen Z was settled until this tiktok landed on my FYP the other week. For context: it was in response to a since-deleted video that basically says “we should send Millennials on a (social media) bootcamp”, implying that Millennials don’t know how to act online.
Watching it, I was mesmerised. I saved, liked, and sent it to friends as @whereisperdida took me on a journey of fast quips, hot takes and (sometimes brutal) call-outs. It was probably the best piece of content I’ve seen this year. But it was entirely one-sided, entirely in favour of Millennials, and entirely critical of Gen Z.
I went, as I always do, straight to the comments, which are in almost unanimous support of @whereisperdida’s soliloquy.
It’s a pile-on:
TLDR; the comments can be grouped under two opinions:
Gen Z can’t do anything without using technology
Gen Z lack basic (social) skills
The sentiment in this corner of the internet seems to be consistent: how dare Gen Z tell us how to do anything?
A full 180?
The last time I checked, Gen Z had paused on their criticism of Millennials: they were instead romanticising life in the 2010s. Millennial optimism, trending only at the end of 2025, had swathes of people online expressing nostalgia for a time they felt they missed out on.
Instead of focusing on how cringe Millennials are (we’ll get to that), this felt like a mass mourning of a life that was promised to them, a collective feeling of what could have been.
Tracking the timeline
Given that these threads of discourse seemed to be very contradictory - and in very close succession - I wanted to understand if there had always been so many intergenerational ups and downs. My first attempt at a timeline looked like this:
Millennial cringe —> Millennial optimism —> Millennial bootcamp —> Millennial pile-on
(the first three are driven by Gen Z, you can understand why some Millennials think Gen Z are obsessed with them?)
The reality is, it’s impossible to accurately track. Scrolling through the headlines for any of the above ‘trends’ is a hectic experience. This is what came up just from searching ‘Millennial cringe’:
Skimming through these gave me whatever the online equivalent of whiplash is. I wondered: how much of the beef is real and how much is churned out by the media?
The media-ification of generational stereotypes
Maybe the overrepresentation of Gen Z in the media is what feeds the beef the most. Tired of seeing endless statements about Gen Z, Millennial frustration gets unleashed in the comments section.
Every headline about technology and trends seems to be about Gen Z (“Gen Z are logging off”, “Gen Z grew up glued to their screens”, “Gen Z are exploring sobriety”...), when actually the same statements could be applied to Gen Alpha, Gen Z and Millennials. Gen Z are in the media all the time because putting “Gen Z” in your headline = clicks, the system Millennials built… (coming from the Buzzfeed era that some Gen Z ironically romanticise, handed a commodified internet they had no say in). And so the stereotypes perpetuate…
What is cringe to me is every man and his dog using “Gen Z” as a catch-all term for “young people”, when in reality it’s also Gen Alpha now (the oldest is already 16 years old). What’s also cringe are the assumptions that continue to be made that Gen Z are ‘woke’ (they’re not - necessarily: see for example the rise in young voters for Germany’s far right party AfD) or that they’re all eco-warriors (some of them love Shein). They’re just as complex and nuanced as all the generations that came before them.
How much of the generalisations made about Gen Z are about age, and how much of it is about their generation? Millennials and their predecessors potentially got away with more in their youth. Gen Z seem to have been put under a particularly omniscient microscope, aka The Internet, with their coming-of-age moments packaged into trends and spat out as headlines.
The topics that Gen Z have become the poster children for are also symptomatic of our time (which, don’t forget, all other generations are living through): pre-, during- and post-pandemic life, geopolitical crises, technological advancements, climate change... We hear a lot about how many hours they spend online, but what about our Gen X/Boomer mums on their tablets scrolling Facebook Reels? I think social media addiction is a generation-agnostic issue.
Gen Z are simply the generation du jour. We’re always going to be fascinated with how young people move through the world. I’m intrigued to see Gen Alpha take their place, and I’m intrigued to see if similar beef ensues between them.
At some point we’ll be too old to care
Gen Z will always be the (maybe slightly annoying) younger sibling to Millennials, Millennials forever their (possibly cringe) older relatives. The two generations are always going to be adjacent to one another so they may always be compared. Will this be a perpetual cycle of mutual mild disdain or will we all get old enough to not care about our (very minor) differences? Fast forward 50+ years and the headlines will be obsessing over generations that haven’t even been born yet. We’ll have a laugh in the care homes we’ll be living in together… or we’ll be so unbothered that we won’t even read them.
Lucy Aldous is a Strategist, researcher and writer based in London. You can find her on LinkedIn, Instagram and Substack.
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