The Millennial virtue economy is dead No one believes email work leads to progress

Millennials are having their post-Soviet moment: the truths, the lifestyles, the ideologies, and the religions that girded us through adulthood: all vapour. Our mode of social experience — in which boilerplate moralising, right-think, and right-language confer status — is coming to an end.

Many email jobs have disappeared overnight. The material economy of the Millennial manager is under pressure from automation; from DOGE-era disclosures about NGOs; and from broader, Trump 2.0 shifts back toward — or at least, an appreciation for — family and church, farm and toil. 

The Millennial economy was a virtue economy. Some of the most successful among us held managerial roles in tech, education, finance, arts, and politics that centred on controlling and reshaping language and brand perception — what might be called “virtue refereeing”. The most ambitious American Millennials, in a broad sense, became the apparatchiks of the globalised economy built by our parents, in part because there were few other pathways to the American Dream: stable jobs, home ownership, rising wages. Successful Millennials scuttled across the narrow footbridge between the eras. Many others, however, fell into the voids on all sides.

The new economic and political paradigm that is settling into place suggests redress, and greater social dignity, for those who didn’t land managerial email jobs in the first place, who didn’t sell out to become virtue referees. Put simply: many Americans look forward to paying fewer taxes indirectly into the managerial caste’s pocketbooks and to the potential reshoring of industrial jobs. Thus, these changes may be bad for the few and good for the many; many of them deserve to be celebrated.

Start with politics. Because former President Joe Biden’s staffers ran his administration, the Biden years were the first Millennial presidency: inauthentic, bureaucratic, neurotic, seduced by jargon and theory, indifferent to the needs of those outside their own caste. The Biden era was a great reveal: we saw the wizard behind the curtain (and that wizard talked like us, with upspeak and a tendency to twist declarative sentences into the interrogative tone). More damningly, the wizard also made things worse: there was a seeping sense of decline in the Biden years, which produced the inevitable political backlash. 

Beyond politics, virtue-referee work has lost its appeal, and the way Millennials talk about their jobs is shifting. Sunny, Obama-inflected language about contributing to progress is an embarrassment for all but the last true believers. My friend Sam Venis, for instance, a journalist and part-time corporate consultant, admits that he is “completely disenchanted by the notion of a ‘job’, which makes me much more comfortable exploiting the money slushing around the corporate world”. Halfway through this decade, he feels “freed of the delusion that that portion of my work matters in some spiritual [or] societal way, which allows me to view it transactionally, and take even more seriously my creative work”.

There were always, broadly speaking, two groups of Millennials (at least, among the millions with college degrees who attempted to make it in the big cities). There were those who, in some way, kept the faith of early-2000s hipster bohemianism — the late-30-something who still shares an apartment and doesn’t have a spouse or kids and has slowly turned toward Trump. The second group are the careerists and strivers, who built up good credit scores and used grad-student jargon to facilitate unnecessary meetings for the last decade and voted for Kamala Harris — the professional overclass.

While the two groups have always co-existed, socialised, even aligned politically for a long time, the bohemian caste not only voted for Trump, but did so with a deep sense of vindication. Trump’s high approval ratings aren’t coming from rural evangelicals or blue-collar voters alone. Recall that the areas that shifted most sharply to the GOP in last year’s election were the blue strongholds; the calls are coming from inside the house of urban liberalism.

This turn of events flows from 2008, the year of the financial crisis and a pivotal moment for older Millennials. The economy of our parents disappeared in that year. As a consolation prize, we were offered the opportunity to be morally better than them. Our generation might be a generation of baristas and bartenders saddled with debt, but we could nurture our own inflated sense of importance by being more socialist, less racist, more liberatory, more linguistically sophisticated. Maybe we wouldn’t own homes, but we’d have doctorates.

Those who managed to parlay moral superiority into actual, dependable, well-paying jobs remained staunchly progressive — because fervency unlocked job security. Those who didn’t manage this feel some sense of hope now, only because practising the verbal rituals of liberalism is no longer a prerequisite to social credibility.  

It would be fascinating to see time-lapse movies of Millennials’ Facebook pages (and later Instagram and Twitter feeds) from, say, the mid-2000s to 2025. Essentially, 20 years of social media: from apolitical to staunchly progressive to whatever we have now — sceptical, realistic, finally clear-sighted, and even optimistic in ways we have never had reason to be.

The weird reality of Facebook, the ur-social media for older Millennials, is that it has always been a place to advertise personal triumphs. I’m so excited to announce that I have been accepted into Georgetown’s security-studies programme; I’m delighted to share that I’ll be serving as an editorial assistant at The Nation this summer; here’s our first child. And secondarily, for fears: Can’t believe Orange Hitler is taking away the presidential fellows programme; climate change is so scary; I don’t feel safe here.

It’s a strange zone of contradiction, where the expectation is that one poses simultaneously as successful and fragile: I can afford to take an upscale vacation to Europe, and I’m afraid of the future and the responsibilities of family; a place where one’s network can watch and participate in this strange spiral of anxiety and bold confidence.

The Millennial virtue economy — the rump of the Boomer white-collar economy — had no room for people who couldn’t tap into this mix of anxiety and celebration, self-interest and “purpose”. They couldn’t do it, either because they’d chosen entirely different paths — farming, construction, small-scale entrepreneurship, odd jobs — that didn’t lend themselves to online self-celebration. Or because they were simply too dignified to post: I’m delighted to announce. . . 

I think of people with whom I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. One of them is working odd jobs in halfway homes, going for long walks, praying — essentially, a secular monk. Another, last I checked in, was working on a hydroponic lettuce farm, painting every morning, ever an artist. Another works on film sets when possible and bounces back and forth between New York and Bethlehem. They, and many others like them, may relish the collapse of the virtue economy and the rise of something once again material and dignified — or at least, less self-righteous, less bloated with gaseous smugness. 

Clearly for others, especially in the absurdly affluent DC suburbs, the pain is real. Friends from college and my early 20s in New York City, who successfully tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2010s, who became Obama-era media figures, seem to be confronting not just joblessness, but irrelevancy for the first time. The magic produced by saying the ritual words the right way has run out. No one’s up for progressive scolding anymore. You can’t make a career out of it. The outrage, the nitpicking, the Ezra Klein voice — it’s out.

That doesn’t mean that what comes next necessarily makes for a good society. Far from it. There is a plausible version of events in which many jobs are automated out of existence and universal basic income will play the role that state distributions of bread played in the late-stage Roman Empire: a fragile band holding together urban civilisation.  

Cutting fake, grating, pompous virtue referees from prestige jobs that drive up the federal deficit is inarguably egalitarian. It is no guarantor of substantial progress and meaningful social security, however. Moreover, the Right shows signs of creating its own, reciprocal patronage and virtue economy, stocked with influencers and thought-leaders who similarly produce little more than anger at their now dethroned Left-wing counterparts. That ought to be abhorred as much as its progressive forebear. 

2025 is partly about coming to grips with how tenuous, silly, and demoralising the last era was for the many; this clarity has to be exploited, not obscured in new ways. This is the Millennial reckoning: the end of the moral-superiority economy, and the slow, painful realisation that tangible value lies in places and communities many of us had long considered beneath us.

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