If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be watching Netflix and ordering UberEats

For the past few weeks, users on Instagram (the platform of choice for those of us born between 1981 and 1996) have been encouraged to share throwback pictures of themselves aged 21.

The “Let’s see you at 21!” feature has transformed my social media feed into a heartwarming trip down memory lane, an endless carousel of beautiful faces exactly as I remember them. We were all so young, so enthusiastic, so naturally full of collagen!

Encouraging this kind of navel-gazing has proved predictably popular among Millennials, a generation famously obsessed with ourselves (especially our hot 21-year-old selves). But the more “Oh My God, look how lame I was!” posts I came across, the more I began to suspect the appeal extended well beyond nostalgia or vanity.

In a cruel twist of fate, the internet has turned on the very generation that made it cool in the first place: Millenials are (avocado on) toast. Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Millennials desperately needed to remember what it was like back in the day because elsewhere on the internet, our demise was being widely trumpeted. No matter where you looked, the downfall was making news, a different headline for each part of the decay.

From Why Midlife Is Going to Be Especially Hard On Millennials to Millennials Don’t Know What To Wear, and this incredibly specific-yet-alarming one, Colon Cancer Becoming More Common Among Millennials, Doctors Warn, the future was grim and the truth hard to ignore.

Millennials have grown up, grown old and grown out of fashion.

Then came the final blow when Josephine Bernstein of The New York Times posed the question we’ve been too afraid to ask ourselves: Are Millennials Obsolete? Bernstein argued that Millennials have “hit middle age, started to show signs of ageing – even of ageing out of the internet.”

It was a bitter pill to swallow, and my gut instinct was to drum up the outrage. Millennials ageing out of the internet? We ARE the Internet. Back when it was all AOL and MSN, we migrated online and made it a cool place to hang out.

We embarrassingly overshared on MySpace, turned Facebook albums into forensic documents of our nights out (a move that has since become synonymous with Millennial cringe) and created an entire culture where once there was just a chasm.

Expecting a similar reaction from my peers, I shared The New York Times link in a WhatsApp group and waited for the indignation to roll in. Instead, I was met with a few thumbs-down reactions and a single response: “Happy to be obsolete, but can anyone tell me why I am so tired?” Talk then turned to how tired we all were (“Me too!” “I am tired in my bones”) before we moved on entirely.

When you can’t even muster up the effort to push back, then it’s clear the fight is over. We may have been known as the entitled generation, who grew up believing the world owed us something, but not even Millennials are owed the gift of more time.

So as we prepare to make way for what comes next – Gen Z, the “Digital Natives,” even more insufferable than us – let us take a moment to remember the Millennial legacy.

We joke about the internet but without us the Boomers would still be stuck on dial-up, yelling at their desktops and spending thousands of dollars on useless Norton AntiVirus software.

As a way of saying thanks, the Boomers kept us trapped in a vicious rent cycle, largely locked out of the property market while their investment portfolio swelled. Rather than kick up a stink, we just kept on soldiering on, committing to working smarter, not harder. Yes, you may snipe that we are lazy, but Millennials’ desire for convenience has given rise to the rental, share and delivery economies.

We created a gap for startups to disrupt the market. The era of cheap, on-demand services is over (farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy!), but without us, there would be no Netflix bingeing, no Ubering and no Airbnb-ing.

Because we were the first generation to grow up under the harsh glare of social media, we are painfully in touch with our sense of self and, by extension, our emotional and mental health. Millennials may be more likely to struggle with mental health, but we’re also more likely to ask for help and talk openly about what we’re going through.

We may be the face of slacktivism, but it was Millennials who mobilised for gay marriage (although we’re getting married less), proving that we still love a fun party, even if we bail at 10 pm.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we reminded everyone that no matter how bleak things seem, you will always feel better after spending $22 on toast with avocado.

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [e-mail] or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.

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