Millennials Are Stuck in an Old, Lazy Story
Avocado toast epitomized a narrative in which US millennials saw themselves as disadvantaged. Data shows that story needs a revisit.
Illustration: Fromm Studio for Bloomberg
Like any good fable, it was a little bit funny but felt revealing. Woe betide millennials, it went, who were so shortsighted that we blew potential down payments on avocado toast. The charge became a shorthand dig at my generation’s consumption patterns, just as 72 million of us started working in an economy defined by the sharing of common nouns: the house, the car, the desk, the job itself. The received wisdom was that millennials wanted to skip the trappings of adulthood and couch-surf through life.
The avocado-toast argument has become such a prevalent part of the US economic imagination that you might be surprised to know its origins. It took off in late 2016 when a columnist for the Australian wrote a piece called “Evils of the Hipster Café.”