Gen Z, Let the Millennials Have Milk Bar

I hate to wade into the generation wars on a Friday during the holiday season when we should all be enjoying Cher’s Christmas album, but Gen Z refuses to let millennials have one single day of peace. I bit my tongue during the skinny jean discourse, I kept my head down when we were ordered to hide our side parts or die, and I’ve done my best to limit my emoji use, lest a 22-year-old in a baby tee pulls a knife out of their baguette bag to chop my fingers off.

But the latest attack is too much for any debt-saddled millennial, who can’t get a good night’s sleep without three white noise machines, an ergonomic pillow, mouth tape, and a playlist of soft-spoken affirmations whispering that we’ll be OK, to bear. In addition to our looks and general existence, it’s (apparently) now a distinctly millennial trait to enjoy cake. Specifically, birthday cake from Milk Bar—arguably the best birthday cake???

On Thursday, one social media user tweeted, “When Taylor Swift tells you she loves being a millennial…BELIEVE HER…she had a milk bar cake at her birthday party…in the year 20203.” Gen Z, I love you, I really do, I think you’re all smart and funny and will do great, important things but, like, what the fuck do you want from us???!? A birthday cake made of Twinkies and fruit roll-ups because that’d be 90s nOsTaLgIa or whatever. We already lived through the 90s, and it was a great decade so I’m sorry you weren’t there, but I had a Twinkie in my lunchbox once a week when I was in third grade in 1998. I don’t want any more Twinkies. I want a fucking slice of Christina Tosi’s delicious, sugar-soaked birthday cake with rainbow sprinkles that is definitely going to give me heartburn but if there’s anything I’m willing to risk heartburn for, it’s Milk Bar! Please??!!?!?

“Our message [to Gen Z] is that you are not nice. Not nice to millennials and we have fucking had it,” Iliza Schlesinger joked in a recent rant about millennials’ precarious position sandwiched between Boomers who hate us and Gen Z’ers who both hate us and think we’re cringe. (Sorry Gen X, I know you guys always get ignored, but if I were you, I’d cherish it.) “You need to know a little bit about the history of my generation and that is that we have taken it up the fucking ass our whole existence.” We really have 😭

Luckily, a lot of replies to the tweet agreed that Milk Bar was great and questioned why millennials couldn’t enjoy dessert “in the year 2023.” And Jezebel’s own Gen Z writer reassured me that she loves Milk Bar. So, more birthday cake for the rest of us, I guess!