Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Have Middle-Aged Millennials Jumped the Shark?

The “unluckiest generation” got a late start on life, and Gen Z seems poised to follow suit — only with more TikTok brain rot and less financial literacy.

June 22, 2025 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Tobin Harshaw

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

Get out of the water!
Photographer: Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images

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Although it’s an integral part of my job to eliminate clichés, platitudes, prosaisms1 and other banalities, I have a fondness for vast overgeneralizing about generations. I suppose the Lost Generation, the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation were lost, great and silent, respectively. Baby boomers think they invented the world. Gen X can’t be bothered. Millennials think boomers ruined the world. Gen Z would like Gen X to shut the hell up.