This is not millennial optimism. It’s WhimZ
I’m in Lisbon for Web Summit! Let me know if I’ll see you!! —Kate With the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime, Artemis II mission, World Cup, and results of the midterms (and in New York, historic Knicks championship win), some people on TikTok are ready to declare 2026 the year of hopecore—a view so optimistic it’s downright millennial. It’s been so long since there was good news without any kind of caveat, since we had any kind of victory that wasn’t eked through and laced with concessions, that this feeling marks a return to what many of us remember as “normal.” The term for this, “millennial optimism,” first surfaced last year but really picked up steam in January as we hit the ten year anniversary of 2016. (“The long 2016” ending with this November’s midterms has become another meme.) Gen Z are getting their first taste of that happy—previously “cringe”—feeling. As Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said on Instagram, imagine this feeling plus electing Barack Obama the first time you voted, and you can see why that era was such fertile ground for stomp-clap music, listicles, and opening up $18 burger joints. As I wrote Friday, some Gen Zers are even joking about applying to BuzzFeed. Perhaps the most millennial thing about this moment, though, is that millennials are brazenly claiming it. We do love a reboot. But this moment is new, and well-earned. It’s being called “whimZ.” When I first wrote about millennial optimism in 2025, I contrasted it with Gen Z’s cultural experience:
First-time voters in this election were eight years old when Donald Trump became president. Our bizarro world has been their normal, going from a Trump presidency to a half-hearted Biden presidency in the shadows of a pandemic to another Trump presidency, without hope that things would be getting anything but worse for them—until one week ago. Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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