A 38-year-old is at a family dinner, seated between her father and her 22-year-old cousin. The father wants to know when she’s going to stop renting. The cousin wants to know how she bought a condo in 2019 and still complains about money. Neither of them is going to let it go.
That seat, between the generation that raised them and the generation coming up behind them, is where millennials have lived for about a decade now. The oldest turn 45 this year. The youngest are 30. They’re no longer the kids, and they’re not yet the elders, which means they get the complaints from both ends without the deference from either.
Boomers and Gen X have their long-running list of things they don’t respect about millennials. Gen Z has a newer list, mostly compiled on TikTok. What’s strange is how often the two lists overlap, even when the accusations point in opposite directions. The same behavior gets called lazy by one side and try-hard by the other.
Millennials have heard all of it. They’re mostly done arguing. But it’s worth laying out where the fire is coming from, because being wrong from two directions at once is a specific kind of exhausting.
1. Millennials are blamed for the housing market from both directions
To older relatives, the millennial who rents at 36 didn’t want it badly enough. Too many lattes, too much travel, not enough sacrifice. To younger relatives, the millennial who bought at 33 got in before the door shut and has no business complaining about anything.
The data doesn’t flatter either accusation.
According to Redfin’s analysis of Census data, 57.2% of 36-year-olds owned their home in 2025, compared with 61.2% of Gen Xers and 63.7% of boomers at the same age. Millennials as a whole crossed 55% only in the last couple of years, later than any generation before them.
The part Gen Z tends to skip is in the same report. At 28, today’s Gen Zers own homes at a slightly higher rate than millennials did at 28. Millennials got there late, in smaller numbers, and after a decade of catching up. Nobody pulled a ladder up behind them.
2. Millennials are called both too lazy and too obsessed with work
Boomers spent the 2010s describing millennials as entitled job-hoppers who needed constant feedback and a nap room. Gen Z looked at the same decade and saw something different: girlboss posters, “rise and grind” captions, side hustles stacked on side hustles, and a generation that made overwork into a personality.
Both critiques have stuck. The millennial manager now gets told by her director that her generation never learned to pay its dues, and by her 24-year-old report that her generation invented the burnout he’s refusing to inherit.
Gen Z has been explicit about the second part.
Fortune described the “lazy girl job” trend, which took off on TikTok in 2023, as a direct rebuke of the “lean in” and “girlboss” eras that shaped millennial women’s careers. One Gen Z founder told the magazine, “We don’t want to be lazy,” just not to work so hard in a system working against them.
Millennials would point out where hustle culture came from. They graduated into a recession and were told that outworking everyone was the only way to survive it. Then they got blamed for the survival strategy.
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3. Millennials are blamed for how bad the internet got
Older generations have been telling millennials to put the phone down since the phone was a flip phone. Narcissism, selfies, oversharing, the whole indictment was written before Instagram existed.
Gen Z doesn’t think millennials are on their phones too much. Gen Z thinks millennials are bad at it.
The “millennial pause,” the half-second of dead air before someone starts talking in a video, became a running joke in 2021 after a creator pointed out that even Taylor Swift does it. Writer Kate Lindsay, who popularized the term, noted that where boomers and Gen X came after millennials for their real-world habits, Gen Z’s complaints are “distinctly digital”: the pauses, the zooming in for emphasis, the earnest captions, the BuzzFeed cadence.
So the same person gets told by her mother that she lives online and by her niece that she doesn’t know how. Millennials built most of the platforms everyone is now arguing on. They were also the first generation to get old on them in public, and nobody warned them about how that would look.
4. Millennials are told they talk about their feelings too much and in the wrong way
The boomer version of this complaint is familiar. Snowflakes. Participation trophies. Everybody’s in therapy, nobody can take a joke. The trophies, for the record, were bought and handed out by boomer and Gen X parents, but the kids who received them got the blame.
Gen Z has a different objection: millennials are emotional in a corny way. “Self-care Sunday,” bath bombs as mental health, “adulting,” treating a glass of wine as a coping strategy and posting about it. Gen Z talks about anxiety constantly, but in a flatter, more clinical register, and they find the millennial habit of dressing feelings up in cheerful branding faintly embarrassing.
So a millennial who says she’s overwhelmed gets a “toughen up” from one direction and a “why are you being weird about it” from the other. Either way, the complaint lands on the delivery and leaves the feeling alone.
5. Millennials’ taste is treated as a character flaw by everyone
Boomers spent years mocking millennials for brunch, tattoos, craft beer, oat milk, tiny apartments furnished from one Swedish store, and a general unwillingness to buy the china and silver their parents were trying to hand down.
Gen Z arrived and mocked the same person for the opposite reason: she was too settled, too safe, too 2014. Side parts, skinny jeans, the laugh-cry emoji, the word “doggo,” Live Laugh Love, wine o’clock.
Rolling Stone summed up the second wave under the word “cheugy,” a Gen Z term for someone out of date or trying too hard, and noted that most of the mockery was lighthearted while some of it, aimed at millennial corporate feminism, was more serious.
The whiplash is the point. A generation that was told for a decade it was too weird is now being told it was never weird at all. Millennials have largely decided to keep the jeans.
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6. Millennials are told they’re raising their kids wrong by people on both sides of them
Grandparents see gentle parenting and see permissiveness. A four-year-old being asked to name his feelings while he screams in a grocery store reads, to someone who was raised on “because I said so,” as a parent who has given up.
Gen Z’s complaint runs the other way. They grew up as the first cohort whose childhoods were posted online without their consent, and they have very strong opinions about millennial parents who turn toddlers into content. To them, the gentle-parenting monologue in aisle five reads as a performance for the camera, with the kid as the prop.
The numbers show how far millennial parents have moved from their own upbringing.
In a Lurie Children’s Hospital survey of 1,000 millennial parents, 74% said they practice gentle parenting, and 73% believe their approach is better than that of previous generations. Pediatric psychologist Miller Shivers, quoted in the same report, cautioned that the approach “should not be confused with permissiveness.”
Which is roughly what millennials keep saying to their parents. It’s a hard sell when you’re also being filmed for the grid.
7. Millennials are told to grow up and told they’re old at the same time
Now for the one that gets under the skin, because the two accusations arrive within minutes of each other.
From above: you’re 40, why do you still have roommates, why haven’t you had kids, why do you talk about “adulting” like it’s optional. Millennials were labeled the Peter Pan generation somewhere around 2010 and the label never got retired, even after they had mortgages, kids, and knee problems.
From below: you’re 40, why are you still on this app, why are you dressed like that, why do you think you’re one of us. Gen Z treats a millennial who references a 2012 meme the way millennials once treated a dad who said “rad.”
So the same person is simultaneously not adult enough and too old to be here. There’s no age at which both stop being true, because the accusations depend on where you’re standing rather than how old you are. In the middle, both edges look like you.
Getting blamed from both sides is what happens to the generation in the middle
Very little of this is new, and the older generations know it.
In 2013, Time put a girl taking a selfie on its cover with the line that millennials were lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Slate noted at the time that the narcissism research behind the cover was disputed by a number of psychologists, and that the study’s own authors said young adults tend to score higher on those measures at every point in history, not just this one.
Boomers were the original “Me Generation” in the 1970s. Gen X got a Time cover too, about how they’d rather hike than climb a corporate ladder. Every generation gets called soft, selfish, and strange by the one before it. The only new thing millennials experienced is getting the second round from below while the first round was still going.
Gen Z will get theirs. Gen Alpha is already old enough to find the “Gen Z stare” funny, and the phrase “it’s giving” will sound like “rad” sooner than anyone on TikTok expects.
Millennials, meanwhile, have mostly stopped defending themselves. Not because the accusations landed, but because answering the same charge from two directions for fifteen years is its own full-time job, and they already have one. Two, if you count the side hustle they’re still being mocked for.
