A few weeks ago I asked a colleague a standard career question: what is your aspiration? He did not give me a career answer. Aspiration, he said in essence, is not something he can afford to spend time on. There are more important things. Enjoying life, for one. Most of the future has already been defined by former generations and their behaviour anyway.
My first thought is not printable. My second: he is right.
Run the numbers with him. An apartment: he will never buy one. Not because he is lazy, but because the math stopped working somewhere between my generation and his. Travel: makes the planet worse, and the planet is the one thing his generation will definitely inherit. Climate: not a debate for him, a condition he was born into.
I never chased the climate. I chased the „normal“ things. A car, for example. Today the car is supposed to be sustainable, which somehow made it more expensive than ever. New technology, they say. Even doing the right thing comes with a surcharge. For the generation before me the normal things were defaults. You worked, you got them. My generation still believed that promise, and we were the first to be openly disappointed by it. The generation after us skipped the disappointment. They never trusted the promise in the first place. They watched what it did to us.
You can hear the difference. Twenty years ago my generation listened to Hoobastank, Deftones and Linkin Park: loud, frustrated, accusing. But an accusation is a form of hope. You only scream at the world if you still expect it to answer. Crawling in the dark, but crawling towards something. The music after us is the opposite: calm, ironic, sad but chill. No more questions at the world, because nobody expects an answer.
They are not searching the dark for an exit. They are making themselves at home in it.
Call it giving up. I did, for about a minute. Then look closer. This is the healthiest, most self-disciplined, most community-organised youth generation in decades. They run in clubs, they climb in gyms, they train, they save, they build small worlds they can actually control. And look at how they build them. Sports clubs existed long before this generation, complete with a board, a statute, an annual fee and the duty to show up. The new clubs have none of that. No hierarchy, no membership, no obligation. You come or you don’t. And they come. That is the detail everyone misses: they did not lose motivation and they did not reject community. They stripped away the institution wrapped around it and kept the part that pays back, the people. And on the way they are relearning something my generation unlearned: that simply existing can be good. Existing is not the waiting room where you sit until real life starts. It is the thing itself. My generation needed burnout to figure that out. They start there.
Brands, by the way, are institutions too.
Here is why this is more than a bar conversation. I sell things for a living. Everyone who sells things wants customers between 16 and 28, and almost everything our industry knows about winning customers was learned on people who still believed in the ladder.
The learned pattern is simple. Build a strong brand, shoot cool images, make a decent product, buy reach, people buy. It worked for decades because people wanted to climb and to belong, and brands were visible proof of both. That pattern still reaches millennials. Honestly, mostly the well-behaved ones. It does not reach people who stopped performing for an audience.
The same shift changes what demand looks like. It used to be: brands are in trend. Segments, target groups, seasons. Clusters that made planning life easy. Now single products are in trend. A beanie. One shoe in one specific colorway. Hyper-specific, born inside one community, alive for a window of time, then gone. That is not a niche. A niche is small but stable. This is a moment. Demand has moved from the segment level to the product level, and the whole logic of planning, buying and marketing sits one level too high.
Premium moves with it. Premium used to be a formula: price plus logo, visible to everyone, signalling upward. Now premium means being exactly right in a specific context, and being legible only to the people inside it. The same jacket can be the most credible object in one room and invisible in the next. Football fans proved this decades ago: a Burberry scarf in a chic London bar said posh. The same scarf at the Liverpool stadium said „ready to fight“. Burberry got so afraid of the second meaning that it pulled its famous check from most of the collection to regain control. Retreat was the only weapon it had. Back then this was the exception. One brand, one subculture, decades in the making. Today it is the default, it happens at product level, at internet speed, and no brand gets a veto. Nobody will hand us a target group description for that.
What I am not saying: that brands need a youth line, a rebrand or a TikTok offensive. The fastest way to lose this generation is to visibly chase it. The brands they adopted, they found themselves. Mostly brands that never tried to be cool and never stopped being true to their sport.
What I am saying: the patterns we consider modern are already legacy. Reach is losing value, credibility is gaining it. Pushing is losing, being findable is winning. Owning the stage is worth less than being a welcome guest in rooms that belong to the community.
I am a millennial. The last generation that knew the world without the internet, and the first that cannot imagine it without. I used to think that made me a translator between the generations. The uncomfortable part of translating is that my own toolbox, performance marketing, funnels, campaigns, is part of what needs translating.
One more thing. If your company sells anything at all, the people who understand this best are already on your payroll. They are under 28, and they were never the target group of this text. They are the evidence. Ask them. I did, and it started with one honest sentence about aspiration.