Lest I unfairly lay the blame solely on my peers of the “net generation” (possibly the worst and therefore most underused of our neologistic monikers), a distinct progressive middle-class youth culture with an aversion to adulthood started well before we started buying coloring books with our own wages. The “turn on, tune in, drop out” New Left is largely responsible for the modern cult of youth, from the Youth International Party, aka “the Yippies” (which was, ironically, informally led by an already thirty-one-year-old Abbie Hoffman), to Berkeley’s 1964–65 Free Speech Movement and environmental activist Jack Weinberg’s famous dictum of the era, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Of course, as a newly minted consumer demographic, flush with purchasing power from a postwar economy, capital was all too happy to flatter their new sense of identity as a Young Person (“I’d like to buy the world a Coke” — indeed, as long as everyone in the commercial is between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two, and incredibly hot). Thus the cultural — and, more importantly, political — fetish for youth was born.

Lest I unfairly lay the blame on the hippies, they could be forgiven for assuming everything from the Vietnam War to Jim Crow was simply the symptom of an ossified mind. The halls of power, now suddenly so visible via the television revolution, were all headed up by people much older than them. Staring at these graying men holding court in political, cultural, and economic institutions, we can forgive the young boomers for their certainty that they’d never be like their parents (no way, man!). To cut them a little more slack, their parents came from the broadly traumatized “Silent” or “Greatest” generations, and to cut them some slack, the PTSD of two world wars and an economic depression didn’t exactly make for a happy, well-adjusted adulthood. One of the biggest reasons generational politics are such a dead end? If you were from theirs, you’d most likely be one of them too.

It’s nobody’s “fault,” exactly, that prolonging childhood somehow became a cultural norm or even a goal — it’s just an evolving series of rational responses to material and political conditions. For boomers, things were pretty good: when The Who sang “I hope I die before I get old” in 1965’s “My Generation,” the band members’ ages ranged from nineteen to twenty-one. But by 1971, a decidedly more gentle and acoustic thirty-four-year-old John Hartford was imagining the bittersweetness of an office job as a “goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew, goodbye to flowers, and goodbye to you.” The last boomer sentiments of resisting adulthood were already burning off by this time, even in the counterculture — and rightfully so, as they would see after the 2008 financial crash, when their own children would have killed to be “going to work in tall buildings.”

Most of the New Left came to terms with the fact that affluent (or at least semi-stable) boomer adulthood was pretty groovy. Plus, it made sense for self-preservation: it’s pretty shortsighted to set an end date for your own social and political superiority. Logan’s Run with flower power — but an assured death at thirty — was a pretty raw deal compared to stable work, security, and the square, bourgeois family life they discovered could actually be loving, restorative, rewarding, creative, and even adventurous. As for the “abolish the family” left, when something desirable is unobtainable, you might as well call for its abolition and insist you never wanted it in the first place.

Conversely, after educated boomers (and to a lesser extent Gen Xers) spent their gap years damning the man and lolling in free love (or slacker-ing in grunge and MTV), they still had options, prospects, and — if not a guarantee — the high likelihood of a good future.

The aspiring middle-class professionals of my own generation, however, graduated with massive debt, into an economy where adulthood presents no reliable rewards — only risks, restrictions, insecurity, anxiety, and the end of leisure and sociality. Millennials went to college because everyone older and wiser told them that higher education was a pro forma bribe they had to fork over in order to reproduce their class position: pay to play. You grease the palms of the PMC, study hard (or don’t), get a degree, and you’ll have a mortgage, health care, job security, a spouse, and some kids — the whole shebang, just like your parents. Obviously, that didn’t happen, and without those milestones, what’s the point? Childhood is the only carefree time millennials can remember, so they regress into an obnoxious, cringeworthy parody of youth. To become a Disney adult is to throw a kind of tantrum, clinging to the last time they were truly hopeful, like a cranky baby with a raggedy blankie.

Additionally, the comparative poverty of educated millennials (if I’m saying “educated” a lot, it’s because the culturally middle class are the only group for whom generation is an identity) has resulted in a lot of jealousy and intergenerational resentment, poorly disguised as — and often confused for — class war. We did what we were told, but you welshed on the deal because you wanted to hog all the wealth. There’s an identitarian desire to distance ourselves from our elders in both affect and culture: “OK boomer” as gallows humor.

What is new about millennial generational warfare is the strong current of wealth envy, and since Occupy Wall Street and the two Bernie Sanders campaigns brought class politics back, we’re just as stuck to the idea of “capital” as a metonym for Hunter S. Thompson’s “forces of Old and Evil.” To be old is to be evil; to be young is to be good. The very invocation of youth is tantamount to endorsing the future, rather than a barbaric past, an inverse of the right-wing “kids today!” that proudly proclaims, “I, too, am baby.”

Faced with the highly unrealistic task of having and raising children capable of reproducing the class position of the parents of millennials, one that most millennials never reached, it doesn’t even feel like a responsible decision to consciously start a family, compared to previous generations. Often we turn instead to crafts and the upbringing of an Instagrammable array of houseplants. (Allegedly low-maintenance succulents are still quite popular, though many listless gardeners quickly find them surprisingly easy to kill.) If we can manage something with as many needs as a pet, they are our “fur babies.”

At the peak of Teen Vogue mania, editor Welteroth told the Guardian, “I learn a lot from the girls we feature, and [star of Disney show Girl Meets World] Rowan Blanchard wrote how ‘activism is a need to know, a need to explain, and a need to help. So, by this definition, I am an activist. And I think the readers that we reach would all consider themselves activists, too.” It also follows, then, that to be young is to be an activist, and to be an activist is, therefore, to be young. Welteroth, by the way, would have been about thirty-one at the time. (Yippee!)

To confuse things further, millennials don’t “feel old” (or at least we don’t want to admit that we do), which begs the question: “What does ‘old’ feel like?” Or at least, “What should old feel like?” We don’t appear to have aged as hard as generations before us, by which I mean we objectively don’t look as old. I mean, I have yet to see a millennial that looks like a thirty-five-year-old Lee Marvin (unfortunately). Hotness, they hope, will preserve us. “Kim Kardashian just turned forty-three, and she’s still relevant, right? Maybe? Teen Vogue thinks she is! So maybe I am too!” (Please, just put me on an ice floe.)

Boomers, however, got to make getting old cool, or at least fun. And it’s not so much death that millennials fear as not being cool, meaning our own irrelevance, which makes a kind of sense: our cultural capital is the pittance of a concession we had to accept in the absence of economic capital and political agency. The only politics at the fore are in the culture, and generational warfare is the doting wife of culture war. Of course, actual children (like the ones Teen Vogue wishes they had as readers) are not very powerful political actors either, but they’re great mascots, and they sure are gullible when you tell them they’re the future. Youth is by its very nature shortsighted, and it usually fails to realize that the new is always destined to become the old.

As unsatisfying (and embarrassing) as it may be, the adage works both ways: if you treat someone like a child, they will act like one, and unlike boomers or the jaded (but relatively adult) slackers of Gen X, smol bean millennials missed the well-timed benchmarks of traditional adulthood, so they were held back a grade or two, socially, psychologically, and emotionally speaking. As a result, they long for a preschool UBI world, with soft surfaces and hard rules, and they reminisce about the days when they didn’t feel stupid for having (relatively modest) dreams about what they would be and do and have when they grew up.

For millennials, middle age feels more like a kind of death than actual advanced age, the literal senescence of our parents and grandparents notwithstanding, because the middle itself has died. I mean, look around, where do you see any middle?

Gone is moderation, the middle class, the middlebrow, even the mid-budget. Everything is either gargantuan and bloated or measly and weak. There are stagnant wages and unaffordable housing alongside hyper wealth concentration at the very tippy-top. There are a million comic book movies a year with a tiny bit of room for a few annoying, micro-budget, indie mumblecore features. Age of Ultron for nearly half a billion dollars with few to no kid-unfriendly films. Coffee? No, it’s either caffeine-free adaptogenic mushroom brew or a lemonade energy drink that makes your heart explode. And have you smoked weed lately? It’s almost impossible to find mids. No one just wants to put on Maggot Brain and giggle, they want to lie prone and see the face of god.

If you’re approaching middle age right now, adulting is harder than it has been for generations. You can’t do your taxes because they’re intentionally byzantine, so you doomscroll and rage post about Taylor Swift. You enjoy the most juvenile and lowest effort entertainment because you don’t have the brain or the stomach for anything with teeth, and you take your little naps because you’re exhausted, anxious, and depressed (which is also why you can’t get out of your pajamas, cook a whole meal, or clean your room).

For a lot of millennials, there’s just nothing to look forward to — no rewards to go with the responsibilities of age, nothing cool or fun or exciting or even dignified about getting old. It just beats the alternative.