The myth of the millennial minimalists
Juanjo Gasull for BI
About a decade ago, I loaded a couple of midsize suitcases, three large Ikea bags, a pair of 10-gallon Rubbermaid totes, a laundry basket, and two heavily sedated cats into a U-Haul and moved from Toronto to New York City. All my belongings fit neatly into my tiny new Brooklyn bedroom, with plenty of square footage to spare. Turns out, my relative lack of stuff was right on trend.
At the time, millennials like me were buying and owning less, purportedly breaking the mold of American consumerism. We Instagrammed our sparsely furnished, overly beige interiors. We eschewed car ownership and suburban McMansions in favor of bikes, car-share memberships, and big-city apartments with roommates. We were spending our money not on things but on experiences — and blogging about it, too.
"If the millennials are not quite a postdriving and postowning generation, they'll almost certainly be a less-driving and less-owning generation," declared a September 2012 article in The Atlantic titled "The Cheapest Generation." Our reputation quickly found a nifty shorthand: Millennials were a generation of minimalists.
As I write this from the same tiny Brooklyn bedroom, I can see my closet doors straining against the weight of a nearly bursting trash bag filled with cast-off clothing I keep meaning to recycle. The three Ikea bags are stacked full of dirty laundry, which my partner or I would probably get around to washing if we didn't have plenty of other stuff to wear. Our dresser top is strewn with impulse buys you'd find in a drugstore checkout line. I can think of a few descriptors for the state of my surroundings, but "minimalist" isn't one of them.
While my fellow 28- to 43-year-olds have yet to shake our association with less-is-more living, that old stereotype doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny anymore. Consumer-spending data suggests we have no trouble dropping our hard-earned cash on goods and services — experiences and things. As we've built careers and started families, our buying habits increasingly resemble those of Gen X and boomers when they were the age we are now.
Millennials haven't been minimalists in years. In fact, we may have never been minimalists at all.
The minimalist-millennial myth began in the early 2010s in the aftermath of the Great Recession. As the "next generation" of leaders, workers, and spenders, my contemporaries' behavior was of keen interest to marketers, business leaders, and economists. So when my generation, rattled by a catastrophic recession, wasn't buying as much as our predecessors, concern spread that our diminished purchasing power — or worse, our somehow radically different priorities and values — might signal the end of the consumer-spending spree that had powered the nation's economy since the end of World War II.
It affirmed the widely held suspicion that we were a generation of coddled Peter Pans who refused to put down the avocado toast; buy some cars, houses, and house-sized volumes of stuff; and just grow up already.
Throughout the decade, a breadcrumb trail of survey data seemed to back up these concerns. In a 2016 Harris Poll, 78% of millennials said they would rather pay for an experience than material goods, as opposed to 59% of baby boomers. A 2015 Nielsen survey similarly found that millennials went out to eat at nearly twice the rate of their parents — they would rather eat their riches than stockpile them. The 2014 English-language translation of Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" sold over 9 million copies, spawning a cottage industry of aspiring millennial declutterers.
The minimalist trend wasn't entirely bogus from a cultural standpoint. "The recession was a real force for people fetishizing simplicity and turning frugality into a virtue, making the best of what you have rather than prioritizing consuming more or consuming flashier things," said the writer Kyle Chayka, whose 2020 book "The Longing for Less" digs into the perennial appeal of a more pared-down way of living.
The postrecession era also saw the rise of smartphones, which ushered in digital sensory overload. Seemingly overnight, apartments and Instagram grids were awash in the clean lines and open spaces of midcentury-modern design (or, at least, Ikea's approximations of it). "There's so much chaos in our phones," Chayka said. "Why would you want more chaos in your physical surroundings?"
Millennials' minimalism became an economic-anxiety Rorschach test. Depending on the beholder, our perceived underconsumption might have signaled a virtuous departure from the poisoned cycle of production, purchase, and disposal. For others, it affirmed the widely held suspicion that we were a generation of coddled Peter Pans who refused to put down the avocado toast; buy some cars, houses, and house-sized volumes of stuff; and just grow up already. Though it was largely an aesthetic trend, the myth of millennial minimalism was so central to my cohort's cultural identity that it may as well have been real.
But in reality, this theory of arrested economic development was always a bit of a mirage. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, consumer spending accounted for roughly 60% of US GDP; since the early 2000s, despite millennials' purported lack of spending, it's held steady at just under 70%.
Take one of the most talked about large purchases that millennials were eschewing: cars. Automobile ownership has been a central tenet of the American dream since the '50s, when the health of the automobile industry became closely tied to the country's economic growth and prosperity. No longer needed for building tanks and munitions to ship overseas, factory assembly lines "newly renovated with Uncle Sam's dollars" were repurposed to build tens of thousands of new cars, which American consumers eagerly bought up, the Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen wrote in her 2004 book, "A Consumers' Republic." Even now, demand for cars is looked at as a bellwether for consumer spending and the US economy more broadly.
It's no coincidence then that millennials' apparent resistance to car ownership, in particular, jumped out as evidence of our radically shifting consumer ethos. One widely circulated data point came from a 2010 CNW Group analysis, which reported that 21- to 34-year-olds in the US were responsible for just 27% of new-car purchases, down from a high of 38% in 1985. News outlets cited this data as proof that millennials, as a whole, were less interested in buying cars than their boomer parents or their older Gen X siblings. What they failed to consider was how present circumstances — such as the ripple effects of a then very recent economic crisis, especially among young adults just entering the workforce — might alter how people spent their money, especially on big-ticket items like brand-new cars.
In 2016, the Federal Reserve Board issued a report that sought to set the record straight by pointing out that the anti-car narrative about millennials didn't take the Great Recession into account. 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 happening at the same time. Proving the point, young adults were back to buying cars by the mid-2010s. Nowadays, millennials have fully caught up: Since 2020, we've accounted for almost 30% of the nation's new-vehicle registrations, a rate that's roughly on par with baby boomers and only slightly below that of Gen X, Experian research found. But by the time the Fed report was released, it was already too late. The truism of millennials as minimalists was entrenched.
So if millennials aren't minimalists, what exactly are we? Sociologists would likely tell you that's the wrong question to ask — people's behaviors and lifestyles change over time, as do societal norms and priorities. The question isn't how to best define millennials as consumers but whether millennials' young-adult spending was markedly different from that of prior generations.
For answers, we can turn to consumer-spending records. Since 1984, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been conducting its Consumer Expenditure Surveys to see how different American age cohorts spend money. Granted, the picture it paints is somewhat incomplete; by 1984, most boomers were well past their early 20s, making a direct comparison with millennials challenging. Still, it offers a useful baseline for comparing different age groups' spending over time. Sure enough, when adjusted for inflation, Americans under 25, between 25 and 34, and 35 to 44 have spent roughly similarly across most major consumer categories for the past four decades, with momentary dips overlaying periods of recession followed by bounce backs. While it's true that millennials are spending more of their budgets on airfare and vacation rentals than older generations did at the same age, the same can be said for Gen Zers, Gen Xers, and baby boomers — everyone is splurging on travel right now.
Because younger adults tend to have fewer family responsibilities and far less wealth than adults in their professional prime, they spend less overall. As their expenses and income accrue over time, they spend more — especially once kids enter the picture, bringing new mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, and hobbies to equip. Now that millennials have families of their own, they're even more overwhelmed by clutter than their boomer parents before them, buried under piles of ever-cheaper toys.
In other words, millennials' style of spending isn't special; it's cyclical.
To further the point, millennials now account for the largest share of homebuyers, making up 38% of the homebuying market, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors. Our tilt toward homeownership isn't new, either. We'd nearly caught up with our boomer parents way back in 2019, according to Freddie Mac; 43% of us owned homes, just shy of the 45% of baby boomers who were able to buy their first homes between 25 and 34. Whatever we weren't buying in our 20s, we are making up for in our 30s and 40s.
"There's the ongoing narrative that millennials can't afford housing or don't own houses, that they're renters, but when you look at the data, 25- to 34-year-olds are just as likely to be homeowners now as they were in 1993," said Bryan Rigg, a BLS economist who oversees Consumer Expenditure Survey microdata for public use. "Really, a lot of the expenditure patterns are similar." One major exception is that today's 20- and 30-somethings are a lot more comfortable taking on debt to buy things — like cars and homes — than in the past.
For better or worse, public memory is short. Many of today's young adults might not even be aware that the current crop of 30-somethings were ever considered minimalists in the first place. There's evidence that the rest of us are starting to forget, too. Maybe you've read about the new TikTok trend sweeping Gen Z: a mindful alternative to the "haul" culture that's grown around ultrafast fashion and ultracheap e-commerce platforms. It's a whole new approach to stuff. Some have said it might even slow down the economy. This time around, we're calling it "underconsumption core."
Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.
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