All my belongings fit neatly into my tiny new Brooklyn bedroom, with plenty of square footage to spare.
Turns out, my relative lack of stuff was right on trend.
We Instagrammed our sparsely furnished,overly beigeinteriors.
We were spending our moneynot on things but onexperiences andblogging about it, too.
Our reputation quickly found a nifty shorthand:Millennials were a generation of minimalists.
Our dresser top is strewn with impulse buys you’d find in a drugstore checkout line.
Consumer-spending data suggests we have no troubledropping our hard-earned cashon goodsandservices experiencesandthings.
Millennials haven’t been minimalists in years.
In fact, we may have never been minimalists at all.
The minimalist-millennial myth began in the early 2010s in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
Throughout the decade, a breadcrumb trail of survey data seemed to back up these concerns.
Theminimalist trendwasn’t entirely bogus from a cultural standpoint.
“There’s so much chaos in our phones,” Chayka said.
“Why would you want more chaos in your physical surroundings?”
Millennials' minimalismbecame an economic-anxiety Rorschach test.
But in reality, this theory of arrested economic development was always a bit of a mirage.
Take one of the most talked about large purchases thatmillennials were eschewing: cars.
But by the time the Fed report was released, it was already too late.
The truism of millennials as minimalists was entrenched.
So if millennials aren’t minimalists, what exactly are we?
For answers, we can turn to consumer-spending records.
Still, it offers a useful baseline for comparing different age groups' spending over time.
Our tilt toward homeownership isn’t new, either.
Whatever we weren’t buying in our 20s, we are making up for in our 30s and 40s.
“Really, a lot of the expenditure patterns are similar.”
For better or worse, public memory is short.
There’s evidence that the rest of us are starting to forget, too.
Kelli Maria Korduckiis a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture.
She’s based in New York City.
