Summary of One in a Millennial by Kate Kennedy: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

 

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of One in a Millennial by Kate Kennedy: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

One In a Millennial is a podcast by Kate Kennedy, a pop culture commentator and host of Be There in Five. The show explores pop culture, nostalgia, and life lessons learned from coming of age as a member of a largely criticized generation. Kate's humor and vulnerability make her podcast a heartwarming and insightful exploration of millennial culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Jan 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223664499

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The author reflects on their childhood, a time when they were unsure of what was right or wrong. They recall buying beads, eating cereal, and reminiscing about their love for music. They long for a time when others' approval was not a concern, and they longed to impress their parents and teachers. They reminisce about digital seductions and the importance of self-love. They also reflect on their experiences with tragedies, pop songs, and male validation.

They acknowledge the sex-and-diet culture and misogyny, and how they struggled with mental health. They reflect on their quest for self-love, obsessing over popular women and the pursuit of sameness. They contemplate becoming a parent and the girlhood represented by Limited Too, questioning if girl power was empowering them. They hope that by sharing their millennial memories, they hope others will honor their own.

introduction

Passion of the Zeitgeist

The author shares her spiritual inspiration from Britney Spears' song Circus, which resonated with her as an observer. She identifies as a put-on-a-TVshow kind of girl, feeling more defined by her role as an audience member rather than a performer. She is vulnerable to open up her observations to the world, as she feels like an Erika Jayne on Opposite Day, caring about everything, including friendship, feelings, fandoms, fitting in, and feminism.

Throughout her childhood, she made her first online profile around age ten, and social media introduced her to a new layer of information gathering, cultural celebration, and comparison. She obsess over popular culture and popular girls, studying group dynamics and developing a passion for the millennial girls' zeitgeist that has carried throughout her life and into her career.

For most of her early life, she felt like an amalgam of people, pop culture, and zeitgeist around her, forgoing the discomfort of forging her own identity and instead burying it in others' preapproved coolness. She took cues from popular media and popular kids in school to curate a version of herself that was not defined by what she liked but by finding ways to get people to like her.

The author acknowledges that many people now look back and cringe about many of the things they did to fit in, forgetting that avoiding being unique at all costs was the right thing to do. They blame spending K-12 on learning about things like SOHCAHTOA instead of personal finances and have been tricked into signing up for credit cards at football games.

The author shares her experiences as a millennial, a person who struggled with self-consciousness and societal expectations. She was an avid journaler, doodler, gel-pen collector, and member of Shel's Angels, a group of superfans of Shel Silverstein's poetry. Her poems remain a core part of her brain, and she tries to make a case for people to care less about being liked and let their corniness have a place.

The author believes that most people have a more complex inner-girl world than they let on, and that many people are confused by their multitudes. They felt like they existed within endless contradictions, obsessed over their appearance, but also wrote poetry about people judging books by their covers. They wanted to be an intellectual and read more books, but felt happiest reading Seventeen and YM cover to cover, only to have to cover their ass when finishing a book for class.

The author has had many women around her age echo the same default setting of self-consciousness that is hard to snap out of, and she tries to pinpoint why they cared so much. Pop culture was her sport, and the times were very different. Many millennials waited so long to be taken seriously, hoping to grow up and come into their own.

In her first corporate job in 2009, she learned that people didn't like millennials, and they were often misunderstood. She is uniquely aware of millennial stereotypes because she spent her career in market research, aka professional stereotyping, trying to understand millennials. Their generation's consumer-behavior patterns were a significant departure from generations past, making them harder to target and sell to.

The author, a millennial woman, shares her experiences as a millennial, highlighting the challenges of navigating life's delayed milestones and the disconnect between her experiences and outsiders' perceptions. She cites the quote From the outside looking in, you can't understand it. From the inside looking out, you can't explain it and how the term millennial often represents a generational plight that has been ruined or disrupted. The media narrative has been unfavorable towards millennials, with headlines often blaming them for destroying industries like movie theaters, department stores, beer, vacations, company loyalty, bar soap, low-fat yogurt, and the American Dream.

The author acknowledges that every generation has its unfair stereotypes and weaponizing of differences, but she believes that the label millennial is hard to frame as a badge of honor when it feels more like a criminally adhesive HomeGoods sticker. The term originally meant to represent a group of people coming of age around the start of the new millennium. Millennials are people born between 1981 and 1996, though generational definitions vary and aren't an exact science. Born in 1987, the author initially couldn't decide if these generalizations were a self-fulfilling means to Myers-Briggs their birthdays or a genuinely helpful way to examine the complexities of how a life stage intersects with a particular social, political, and cultural climate. Over time, the author has started to understand how it can be a little bit of both.

The millennial generation has faced significant economic and technological shifts during their formative years, leading to higher levels of student-loan debt, unemployment, poverty, and lower personal wealth and income than previous generations. This is not due to being lazy or entitled but rather because they are a product of their time, having faced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and