Is Youth Wasted On Millennials?

In a word: Hell, yeah! Never has there been a group of people so committed to eating healthier, working out harder, or looking better. MOLLY YOUNG asks her generation: What’s so wrong with ordering that second margarita?

- Molly Young

Tuesday, 8pm, at a bar on a warm summer day. I had plans to meet a colleague for drinks after work. After-work drinks, in my experience, are a circumscribed ritual: Each person orders one cocktail over the course of a polite hour, or maybe two glasses of wine—just enough alcohol to make conversation slightly more fun but not enough for either party to say or do anything remotely compromising. The colleague, whom I’ll call Emma, arrived already sipping from a bottle of moss-coloured celerykale juice.

“Are you on a cleanse?” I asked, because the whole point of toting around a bottle of green juice is for people to ask whether you are on a cleanse and then for you to grimace and say, “Yes, and I’m dying.”

“No,” she said. “I’m just trying to inject myself with as many nutrients as possible. I was thinking I’d just ask the bartender to pour a shot in here,” she said, jiggling the bottle.

“Really?”

“God, no,” Emma said, laughing. "I’m not drinking.”

Of course. Emma is 29 and wears sunscreen every day. She is not gluten intolerant but avoids it anyway, just to be safe. She cycles through a wardrobe of luxury athleisure gear that I would value at a really high price on the basis of the Instagram photos in which she wears these items to branded fitness classes. I’m certain she’s had preventive Botox. I’m pretty sure she’s had subtle lip injections. The idea that she would drink on a weeknight was, to her, literally laughable.