What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation

From an award-winning journalist, a reflective, smart, and deeply reported look at the millennial generation that draws on the experiences of five diverse individuals and explores where we go from here

What happened to millennials? At the birth of America's largest living generation, the outlook was strong: unparalleled economic growth, the emerging Internet, the rise of the cell phone, and a geopolitics that had allegedly reached "the end of history" all set expectations exceedingly high for a cohort entering adulthood at the dawn of the new millennium.

That adulthood--a work in progress for more than a quarter century--has been disrupted by war, recession, pandemic, and a sharp turn toward cultural and economic polarization. It has also been endlessly critiqued by others as immature, lazy, weak, incomplete, selfish, and supposedly riddled with failure.

Now, 25 years after the first millennials began turning 18, Bloomberg News reporter Charlie Wells comes to the generation's defense with a cultural history of an adulthood disrupted. Drawing on hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with five millennials from across the country, he explores how the biggest events, ideas, and transformations of the century played out in private lives.

Between the data points and statistical studies, news reports and archival records, his brutally honest, on-the-record conversations about love, loss, work, addiction, tragedy, and sacrifice reveal how a generation once minimized can no longer be ignored.

What Happened to Millennials charts a path from our nostalgic past to a better future, shaped by the challenges we have surmounted, the people we have loved, and the adults we have become.

Author: Charlie Wells
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 09/16/2025
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.13h x 5.91w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781419770814


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/14/2025

About the Author
Charlie Wells is an award-winning staff editor and reporter at Bloomberg News. He writes about how the economy, society, technology, and politics influence everyday life and is a regulator contributor to Bloomberg television and radio. Before Bloomberg, he spent five years at the Wall Street Journal and then four years at The Economist. Like his subjects, he's a millennial whose life turned out a little bit different than he once imagined.