The Lost Zillennial

Holly Beddingfield, editor of Capsule, on slipping through the cracks of two generations—with two very different media landscapes.

Over the past few years, trend forecasters and marketers have been obsessed with categorizing things as either Millennial (cringe) or Gen Z (cooler, depending on who you ask). Jeans are a big battleground: Millennial denim is skinny or straight leg, a style born out of striving for modernity and forward progression. By contrast, the Gen Z preference is low-slung, baggy, or embellished with 90s motifs, a callback to a time they romanticize as more analogue and somehow simpler.

The prevalence of this debate and its infiltration into marketing efforts means that most people know which generation they fall into, and a few of the core identifiers. We know that millennials love Harry Potter, remember 9/11, and had childhoods without cell phones or social media. Gen Z grew up in digital space, lived their formative years through a pandemic, and generally have a preference for messy authenticity. 

But for cuspers, or Zillennials, a microgeneration born between 1993-1998, the neat categorizations dissolve. Instead, we’re stuck in the awkward middle, arriving too late to properly contribute to Millennial culture, yet feeling too old to fully embrace Gen Z trends. Many of us spent our childhoods idolizing millennials, and had older siblings which made us feel like we got it. We watched millennials upload photo albums of nights out taken with point-and-shoot cameras and dutifully copied the aesthetic—peace signs and pouts galore—confined to our bedrooms or nearby parks because we were too young to actually go out. And when the pendulum swung to Gen Z dominance in recent years, much of it felt fresh and fun (watching Addison Rae on TikTok, customizing your bag with charms, resurrecting the digital camera to create nostalgia-flushed photos), but ultimately, a bit childish—something of a regression. 

It’s difficult to properly define Zillennial culture because brands and marketers have neglected it in favor of our sibling generations. To me, it’s growing up watching Hannah Montana but leaving the Disney Channel behind at the same time Miley did, and being sat for each release of the High School Musical films. It’s wearing American Apparel disco pants to house parties but not the club. It’s painting your face with Dream Matte Mousse as a teen before graduating to Glossier as a young adult. It’s listening to Lorde whilst being the same age as her and being the first money in on Phoebe Bridgers. It’s being too young for Sex and The City, slightly immature for Girls but still enjoying it, and engrossed by Broad City but cringing at the Hillary cameo. It’s Blackberry BBM before iMessage. It’s being the youngest girl in the Topshop fitting rooms and pretending to relate to Mean Girls before you get to high school.

Camouflaging oneself into neighboring generations is a distinctly Zillennial experience, especially when it comes to digital publishing. In 2010, when I was on the verge of turning 14, two platforms that would become important to my life debuted: Man Repeller and Instagram. Suddenly, the internet was my direct line to the American fashion journalism scene, with people writing about style, life, and culture in a way that felt utterly new—casual, sassy, smart, provocative. Man Repeller staff felt like the Big Sisters of the internet, going beyond the “in/out” declarations of most fashion media and instead teaching you how to think, not just what to think. 

For the next few years, I was obsessed with this world of magazines. Physical copies of NYLON and V magazine. Scrolling for hours on Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie mag. Bookmarking every article on Man Repeller, Broadly, The Pool, The Debrief, and xoJane. The early days of The Cut, one of the only digital outlets from the 2010s era that has survived. I found articles by directly typing in the URL, or clicking a link from the author on Twitter, who I reliably followed. Although I didn’t have this language for it at the time, my favorite writers were using platforms like Twitter to build their personal brands in collaboration with the masthead they fell under.

I was younger than the target audience of most of these publications, but it felt right for me to be reading them, like prepping for a future self. I would write quotes I liked from articles on flash cards (I remember one distinctly: “Notice the traits you like in other people, and use these to think about the type of person you’d like to be yourself”), treating them as a mini Bible that coached me through my teenage years. 

Like they did for thousands of girls my age, these publications, alongside reality TV shows like The Hills and The City, made me want to work in digital media. This desire pushed me towards an English degree, and compelled me to start a Blogspot blog where I could compile evidence of my writing to show a future employer. 

But by the time I graduated in 2018, most of the outlets that inspired me as a teenager were gone. Website archives either stayed live for a few months with an ominous “this site is no longer being updated” banner or, worse, disappeared overnight. I’d also witnessed dozens of rounds of layoffs at the publications that somehow survived, and watched the general mood on Twitter shift from “check out my work” to “we’re all doomed.” I’d grown up hearing that print media was dying, but digital would be eternal, that the internet was forever. Before long, though, digital was failing too. I entered the job market facing a real scarcity of positions, and found that most junior roles demanded impossible experience. 

The nail in the coffin came in 2020. The pandemic accelerated the trend of media layoffs and outlets closing. There was also the great reckoning of (white) women’s media in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and nationwide demonstrations in the U.S., which ultimately led to Man Repeller’s closure (founder Leandra Medine was criticized for her publication’s lack of diversity and laying off Black employees). And of course, the rise of TikTok, fracturing attention spans and deprioritizing the written word. The Millennial media era of the 2010s (article-focused, masthead-driven, fostering writers' personal brands within an editorial structure) felt definitively over. 

Suddenly, everything was about Gen Z: short-form video, solo creators, microtrends. Millennials were now in their 30s, and Zoomers were shaping the next wave of culture. Gen Zers even started using TikTok to poke fun at Millennial culture (see: side parts and the “millennial pause”). To cope, millennials who’d started in digital publishing migrated their audiences over to Substack, with many building financially-stable media brands of their own without the infrastructure of traditional outlets (Haley Nahman’s Maybe Baby, Hunter Harris’s Hung Up). Gen Z creators began their own direct relationships with their audiences through TikTok and YouTube. (Mr. Beast and Emma Chamberlain were already popular at this point.)

But for those of us sitting at the cusp of two generations, everything felt awkward. Too late for the media golden age we were raised on, too old to be throwing it back on camera or making get ready with me videos. There was a sense of grief, too. Losing a publication wasn't just losing content; it was losing that curated constellation of voices talking to each other and to us, under a shared banner. They reflected a specific sensibility and created places for people who shared that sensibility to engage with the world. When they vanished, it felt like a part of that identity and the cultural touchstones that helped define our cohort vanished too.

One of the hardest blows was the realization that the dream these publications inspired—a fulfilling career in digital media, shaping culture, writing essays that mattered—was largely built on shaky ground. The collapses and endless layoffs suggested the path we'd been preparing for didn't really exist, or at least not in the form we'd imagined. We discovered that the adult world was harsher and more precarious than the glossy pages and sharp voices had led us to believe.

Much of the writing on Substack is excellent, and the levity of TikTok culture cuts through the stodgy formalism of traditional media. But a media landscape made up of either legacy players or direct-to-reader relationships poses other problems. Substack allows individual voices to thrive, but it atomizes the conversation. The shared context, the editorial frame, and the accidental discovery of a new favorite writer within a trusted publication is much harder to replicate.

This atomization also poses issues for creators: reader algorithms can be so different that only the top writers are paid well. Siloed discovery results in fewer opportunities to connect over media, which Millennial-era sites were particularly good for. Man Repeller worked because there was space for each writer to carve out their own niche or personality, but they all huddled together under a shared general philosophy. The current landscape fosters individual brands but weakens the connective tissue of a shared media culture. 

And there’s the looming worry about how stable it all is. On Substack and other creator platforms, writers depend on readers for revenue, be it from their paid monthly subscriptions or affiliate links, and there’s no guaranteed monthly salary if it starts to dwindle. The precarity feels very real when some Substackers struggle to take maternity leave or worry more about pausing the flow of content than they would in traditional employment. And although media outlets like New York Magazine and brands like TheRealReal and American Eagle have recently joined the platform, “successful Substacker” isn’t really a job young writers who are starting out can apply to. 

The siloed algorithm experience of today also mirrors what’s happening with AI adoption. Millennials currently show a greater overall comfort and understanding of AI, especially in a professional context, and are more actively driving its adoption and integration into their work lives. Gen Zers are more skeptical: while they are more likely to use AI for creative means, they are also more fearful about job security and being replaced. Gen Z and now Gen Alpha also see AI more like an education tool, the thing they use to speed up homework and reach word counts in a quicker time frame. We await the full impact of this shift, but early signals (like the type of quick-hit content that goes viral on TikTok) suggest that the next generation may not prize essay writing or deep reading in the same way cuspers or millennials do. 

As Embedded recently summarized: “it’s not lonely Gen Zers who are championing AI use. It’s burned-out millennials.” As you might expect, the Zillennial experience is somewhere in the middle. We dabble in doomerism and don’t love the idea of AI replacing creatives, but because we’ve entered adulthood and the workplace before widespread AI adoption, we feel more equipped to cope with a transition. Many of us are already part of companies using AI, so the question is not whether we should use it but how. 

Forget jeans; our relationship to AI delivers the ultimate metaphor for being a cusper: a constant negotiation of what came before and what is emerging. From navigating the volatility of digital media to forging an identity in a cultural landscape that has disillusioned and overlooked us, cuspers are adept at existing in liminal space. But when you’re raised without rigid divides or established norms, you become skilled at inventing your own. The more I think about it, the more I see that the Zillennial experience is exactly that: an attempt to fill a gap. 🕳️

Subscribe to Capsule.