December, 2025
It is the 21st century and we read anything but books: Instagram feeds, marketing promotions, package shipment confirmations, dating app profiles, text autocomplete suggestions, TikTok captions… The world is more literate than ever, but hardly literary. We passively consume content like mussels in a tide pool. The scroll has superseded the page. Whereas books are finite, measurable, and inalterable (imbued with a sense of totality and structure), the internet scroll is limitless and amorphous with no sense of place and no path towards a conclusion. Refresh the page and the feed will change.
Internet scrolling is an ambient activity that curdles into listlessness and disinterest: a friend’s engagement photo borders school shooting footage and a sponsored post for hair implants. The algorithms’ absurd curation is like Pop Rocks on the tongue, all sensation, no sustenance, dissolving into nothing. There is a new genre of writing that mimics this experience of the internet. This is a strain of “Sad Girl Literature” that I define as Millennial Ennui. These books follow women adrift: underemployed MFA’s and English Majors scrolling through their late twenties and early thirties. You will find these books with a fluorescent dustjacket, or a cover image of a woman, her face obscured. These books line the entrance of bookstores, their popularity a form of navel-gazing as the target reader is both the author and narrator. Who reads more than childless, college-educated women? Certainly not college-educated men. They might manage three books a year, pop psychology or self-improvement manifestos derivative of Marcus Aurelius. Books condensable into a single LinkedIn post.
Millennial Ennui is emblematic of today’s post-COVID, post-DEI era. Readers no longer care for the multigenerational, ‘ethnic’ family sagas like Pachinko (Min Jin Lee), Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi), or the Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett) characteristic of the George Floyd protests and the first Trump presidency. America traded Chief Diversity Officers for Sydney Sweeney. Post-COVID we manage crippling social anxiety and blurred relationships between work and home.
Millennial Ennui’s protagonists have a tenuous relationship with employment. The unnamed narrator from Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts picks up sporadic baby-sitting jobs in Berlin. In Alexandra Tanner’s Worry, Jules collects paychecks from absurd technology companies, a SparkNotes knockoff and a snarky astrology startup, while doing as little work as possible. She gets laid off eventually. The protagonist of Mariam Rahmani’s Liquid: A Love Story is an adjunct professor in Los Angeles. Summer means no teaching, no structure, and eventually no position to return to. None of these characters are desperate. These women claim poverty but have Boomer parents waiting with a checkbook.
With their ample free time, courtesy of underemployment, these protagonists scroll online, whether it’s Christian mommy social media content or dating profiles. The experience reading these novels is similar to surfing the internet. The prose is wry and addictive. Oyler describes a mattress "as thick as a copy of Infinite Jest." Tanner names a three-legged dog Amy Klobuchar. Fidgety, with meager plot and character development, these novels read like tabs you forgot to close.
Particularly jarring is that these narrators contradict the women we see in visual culture: the glossy Girlboss CEOs, Tradwives, or Instagram models who contain more macroplastic than micro. Millennial Ennui’s protagonists do not contribute much to the economy. They don’t offer up their wombs. They don’t cook for men or clean their homes. The sex scenes are awkward and uncomfortable. These characters passively boycott the roles that women are typically prescribed. And yet they are hardly role models. These women weaponize political correctness while benefiting from their proximity to whiteness. They critique gender norms, yet search for a wealthy husband to sustain their lifestyle. In Worry, Jules semi-ironically writes in her dating bio that she won’t date “anyone who makes less than three hundred thousand dollars a year.” The narrator of Liquid sets the goal of one hundred dates to find a wealthy suitor. Early on, she rejects a kind, but insufficiently wealthy date: “When it came to marriage, either he was still operating in a naïve economy, ready to marry for love, or we were direct competitors in the same market, each desperate for some capitalist to invest.” These protagonists are aspirational trophy wives with leg hair.
Passive and internally focused, Millennial Ennui protagonists act as a foil to the manosphere. Both groups cope with late-stage capitalism, but men externalize their despair. Men jump into ice baths, pop Zyns, and storm the Capitol Building. They obsess over physical self-improvement, hence creatine sales and testosterone clinics. This manic energy verges on the homoerotic: the ubiquitous advertisements for testicle trimmers in UFC octagons, the sweaty embrace of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Men are accustomed to being heard. They broadcast their dissent on podcasts; Millennial Ennui protagonists merely scroll.
Ironically, these novels represent the success their protagonists never achieved. Tanner, Oyler, and Rahmani are all accomplished writers: incisive and deliberate, poignant and hilarious. Rahmani’s line on the “punctuality of a Shinkansen to hell” is a comedic triumph. While the protagonists at the end of these novels remain unemployed, unpublished, and adrift, the authors themselves have written critically acclaimed novels. Perhaps these novels are the product of years lost to Millennial Ennui as much as they are its depiction.