About 10 years ago, I packed two medium-sized suitcases, three large IKEA bags, two Rubbermaid 10-gallon totes, a laundry basket, and a heavily sedated cat. We loaded them into a U-Haul and moved from Toronto to New York City. All of my stuff fits neatly into my tiny new bedroom in Brooklyn, with plenty of square footage to spare. As it turns out, my relative scarcity was exactly that.
At the time, millennials like me were said to be breaking the mold of American consumerism by buying and owning fewer things. We posted an interior with sparse furniture and too much beige on Instagram. We eschewed car ownership and suburban McMansions in favor of bikes, car-share memberships, and roommates and a big-city apartment. We were spending money on experiences, not things, and we were blogging about it too.
“If Millennials aren’t the generation that stopped driving and owning cars altogether, they are almost certainly the generation that drives and owns cars less,” The Atlantic wrote in September 2012. The cheapest generation,” the article declared. Our reputation quickly earned us the nifty abbreviation that Millennials are a generation of minimalists.
As I write this from the same tiny Brooklyn bedroom, I can see my closet door being squeezed under the weight of a bursting trash bag filled with discarded clothing I’m hoping to recycle. My three IKEA bags are full of dirty laundry, and unless I have a lot of other things to wear, my partner or I will have to do the laundry. Our dresser tops are littered with impulse buys like those found at the checkout line at a drugstore. I can think of several words to describe my surroundings, but “minimalist” is not one of them.
My fellow 28- to 43-year-olds have yet to shake our bond of less-is-more, but that old stereotype simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny anymore. Consumer spending data shows us that it’s okay to spend our hard-earned cash on goods and services – experiences and things. As we develop our careers and start families, our purchasing habits increasingly resemble those of Gen X and Baby Boomers when they were their current age.
Millennials haven’t become minimalists in years. In fact, we may not even be minimalists at all.
The myth of minimalism and millennials began in the early 2010s after the Great Recession. As the “next generation” of leaders, workers, and spendthrifts, the behavior of my contemporaries was of intense interest to marketers, business leaders, and economists. So when my generation, reeling from a devastating recession, didn’t buy as much as our predecessors, our purchasing power declined, or worse, our priorities and values somehow changed. There was widespread concern that this radically different trend could signal the end of soaring consumer spending. It has supported the country’s economy since World War II.
It confirmed the widely held suspicion that we are a generation of spoiled Peter Pans who refused to give up avocado toast. Buy a car, a house, something the size of a house. And please become an adult now.
Throughout the decade, breadcrumbs of survey data appeared to confirm these concerns. In a 2016 Harris Poll, 78% of Millennials said they would rather pay for experiences than material goods, compared to 59% of Baby Boomers. A 2015 Nielsen study similarly found that millennials go out to eat at nearly twice the rate of their parents. They would rather eat than accumulate wealth. Translated into English in 2014, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has sold more than 9 million copies and spawned a cottage industry of decluttering millennials.
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The minimalist trend wasn’t completely bogus from a cultural perspective. Author Kyle Chayka, who published his book “The Longing for Less” in 2020, said, “Recessions have made us worship frugality, turn frugality into a virtue, and discourage us from consuming more and consuming more ostentatious things.” “It’s had a huge impact on people making the most of what they have instead of prioritizing it.” ” delves into the timeless appeal of a simpler way of life.
The post-recession era also saw the rise of smartphones and the beginning of digital sensory overload. Overnight, apartments and Instagram grids were filled with the clean lines and open spaces of midcentury modern design (or at least an approximation of IKEA). “There’s a lot of confusion inside our phones,” Chaika said. “Why would you want to further disrupt the physical environment?”
Millennial minimalism has become a Rorschach test of economic anxiety. Depending on how you look at it, our perceived underconsumption may signal a virtuous break from the harmful cycle of produce, buy, and dispose. For others, it confirmed the widely held suspicion that we are a generation of spoiled Peter Pans who refuse to give up avocado toast. Buy a car, a house, something the size of a house. And please become an adult now. It was primarily an aesthetic trend, but the myth of millennial minimalism was central to my peers’ cultural identity, so it may have been a reality.
But in reality, this theory of stagnant economic development has always been a bit of a mirage. In the 1950s and 1960s, consumer spending accounted for approximately 60% of U.S. GDP. Since the early 2000s, that share has remained stable at just under 70%, despite indications that millennials are underspending.
Take cars, one of the most talked about big-ticket purchases that millennials have avoided. Car ownership has been a central tenet of the American Dream since the ’50s, when the health of the auto industry became inextricably tied to a nation’s economic growth and prosperity. No longer needed to manufacture tanks and munitions to be shipped overseas, factory assembly lines “newly renovated with Uncle Sam’s money” were repurposed to build tens of thousands of new cars that would serve American consumers. were eager to buy it, writes Harvard University historian Lizabeth Cohen in a 2004 book. Book “Republic of Consumers”. Automobile demand is still seen as a bellwether for consumer spending and the broader U.S. economy.
It’s no coincidence that Millennials’ apparent resistance to car ownership in particular has emerged as evidence of a fundamental shift in our consumer psyche. One widely circulated data point comes from a 2010 CNW Group analysis showing that 21- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. accounted for just 27% of new car purchases, up from a high of 38% in 1985. It is reported that it has decreased since. Media outlets cited this data as evidence that millennials as a whole are less interested in car purchases than their baby boomer parents or older Gen X siblings. What they didn’t take into account was that the current situation (such as the ripple effects of the very recent economic crisis, especially among young people entering the workforce) is changing the way people spend their money, especially buying expensive new items. The question was how we might change the way we spend money on goods. car.
In 2016, the Federal Reserve released a report attempting to set the record straight, pointing out that anti-car rhetoric about millennials doesn’t take into account the Great Recession. The report argued that the economic downturn almost certainly shaped people’s spending as much or more than the technological and cultural changes that were occurring at the same time. Proving the point, by the mid-2010s young people were buying cars again. Millennials have now fully caught up, accounting for nearly 30% of new car registrations in the U.S. since 2020, roughly on par with baby boomers and just below Gen X. A survey by Experian found that. But by the time the Fed’s report was released, it was already too late. It was an established truism that Millennials are minimalists.
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So if Millennials aren’t minimalists, what are we? A sociologist would tell you that’s the wrong question. People’s behaviors and lifestyles change over time, as do social norms and priorities. The question is not how best to define Millennials as consumers, but whether their spending from youth to adulthood differed significantly from that of previous generations.
For the answer, we can look to consumer spending records. Since 1984, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has conducted the Consumer Expenditure Survey to study how different age groups in America spend their money. Admittedly, the picture this piece paints is somewhat incomplete. By 1984, most baby boomers were well beyond their early 20s, making direct comparisons with millennials difficult. Still, this provides a useful baseline for comparing spending across different age groups over time. As expected, when adjusted for inflation, Americans aged under 25, 25 to 34, and 35 to 44 have spent about the same in most major consumer categories over the past 40 years, making recessions more likely. There was a temporary slump during the period, and then it recovered. While it’s true that Millennials spend more on flights and vacation rentals than older generations of the same age, the same is true for Gen Z, Gen X, and baby boomers. Everyone is splurging on travel these days.
Young adults tend to have fewer family responsibilities and far fewer assets than adults in their prime working years, so they spend less overall. As your expenses and income increase over time, especially once your children enter the workforce, feeding new mouths, clothing bodies, and equipping them with hobbies will add to your spending even more. Now that Millennials have families of their own, they’re even more cluttered and overwhelmed than their baby boomer parents, who were buried under a pile of cheap toys.
In other words, Millennials’ spending style is not unique. It’s cyclical.
What’s more, Millennials now make up the largest percentage of homebuyers, accounting for 38% of the home buying market, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors. Our inclination towards home ownership is also not new. According to Freddie Mac, in 2019 we nearly caught up with our baby boomer parents. 43% of us owned a home, just below the 45% of baby boomers who were able to buy their first home between the ages of 25 and 34. What I couldn’t buy in my 20s, I make up for in my 30s and 40s.
“While there is an ongoing narrative that Millennials cannot afford to buy a home or do not own a home and are renters, data shows that 25-34 year olds are now more likely to be homeowners. That was in 1993,” said Brian Rigg, an economist at the BLS, which oversees the Consumer Expenditure Survey’s public-use microdata. “In fact, many spending patterns are similar.” One big exception is that people in their 20s and 30s today are much more likely to borrow money to buy things like cars and homes than they were in the past. It’s getting easier.
For better or worse, public memory is in short supply. Many of today’s young people may not even know that people in their 30s were even considered minimalists in the first place. There is evidence that the rest of us are starting to forget, too. You’ve probably read about the new TikTok trend that’s taking Gen Z by storm. This is a conscious alternative to the “carry” culture that has grown up around ultra-fast fashion and ultra-cheap e-commerce platforms. It’s a whole new approach to things. Some say it could even slow the economy. This time we call it the “under-consumption core.”
Kelli María Korducki is a journalist focused on jobs, technology, and culture. She is based in New York City.
