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R emember when the word “millennial” was shorthand for “cool”? My generation – those born roughly between 1981 and 1996 – were talked and written about endlessly by the media, our every characteristic salivated over, scrutinised, scorned. For more than a decade, we were creatures of fascination, our cohort a byword for all things trendy. We were flat white-drinking hipsters; avocado-on-toast-eating snowflakes; fans of rose-gold finishings and the inspiration behind an era-defining eponymous shade of muted baby pink .

Though we hadn’t grown up online, we’d got our first mobiles in our teens, smartphones in our twenties, and were the right-aged demographic for the launches of the first mainstream social media platforms of MySpace and Facebook, making us more tech-savvy than our predecessors. While we were often blamed for the entire world’s problems – the banking crash and global recession weren’t the reason we couldn’t afford houses, it was our own profligate purchasing of pumpkin-spiced lattes – we were also, undeniably, the hip young things. Boomers were past it, mocked for their lack of internet literacy; Gen X had no real defining traits, or at least none that could be summed up in a snappy headline.



For my twenties and much of my thirties, I experienced an en masse version of “ main character syndrome ” – millennials were the stars, outshining our out-of-touch forebears. Anything and everything we did was, by default, interesting and cuttin.

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