What Happened to Millennials

From an award-winning journalist, a reflective, smart, and deeply reported look at the millennial generation, drawing on the experiences of five diverse individuals and exploring where we go from here

What happened to Millennials? At the birth of America’s largest living generation, the outlook was strong: unparalleled economic growth, the emerging internet, the rise of the cell phone and a geopolitics that had allegedly reached “the end of history” all set expectations exceedingly high for a cohort entering adulthood at the dawn of the new Millennium. That adulthood—a work in progress for over a quarter century—has been disrupted by war, recession, pandemic and a sharp turn towards cultural and economic polarization. It has also been endlessly critiqued by others as immature, lazy, weak, incomplete, selfish and supposedly riddled with failure.

Now, 25 years after the first Millennials began turning 18, Bloomberg News reporter Charlie Wells comes to the generation’s defense with a cultural history of an adulthood disrupted. Drawing on hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with five Millennials from across the country, he explores how the biggest events, ideas and transformations of the century played out in private lives. Between the data points and statistical studies, news reports and archival records, he reveals from brutally honest, on-the-record conversations about love, loss, work, addiction, tragedy and sacrifice how a generation once minimized can no longer be ignored.

What Happened to Millennials charts a path from our nostalgic past to a better future, shaped by the challenges we have surmounted, the people we have loved and the adults we have become.