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# Millenials: Don't Ask Us to Fix This
- URL: https://www.dreamingaftercollapse.com/millenials-dont-ask-us-to-fix-this/
- Published: 2026-08-27T19:27:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-27T21:09:26.000Z
- Author: Alvin Schexnider

Millennials don't trust institutions. And yet, we're now a generation increasingly responsible for leading them.  
  
This distrust has become a stereotype, often explained away as perpetual cynicism, online-ness, or an extension of Gen X's anti-authority tinge.  
  
American institutional trust is low across the board, but it's especially acute for Millennials. We were the generation told to do everything "right": go to school, work hard, follow the rules, buy a home, save for retirement, stay informed.  
  
Instead, many of us are under- or unemployed. Our resumes disappear into hiring algorithms. We can't afford homes. Those lucky enough to have retirement savings have already dipped into them. News is more decentralized than ever, creating diversity of information but making it harder to know what to trust.  
  
There are other dynamics behind this distrust at a moment where systems leadership is critical to rebuilding society.  
  
First - \*institutional failure\*.   
  
As organizer Zedé writes in her substack post, "Your critique of structure is a trauma response", generations of people carry damage from compliance-driven families, inconsistent school discipline, religious / community misconduct, and unethical local leadership.   
  
Pair that with the experience of living through repeated public failures: endless wars, the 2008 mortgage-backed crisis, police shootings, political scandals, school shootings, and the 2020 federal response to COVID. Millennials have lived with the dissonance of growing up during the supposed prosperity of the 90s and 00s while watching institutions repeatedly fail to live up to their stated values. "Everything is precarious" is a shared instinct and then is paired with the belief that we have to build something better.   
  
Another dynamic at play has been the \*distrust of structure\* itself. In response to those failures, we've become skeptical of hierarchy and formal leadership. As such, we've had multiple public movements that have shown the power of decentralized organizing. Distributed leadership understandably makes movements harder to dismantle and surfaces important questions about power.  
  
But as Zedé also notes, we've also misread our movement predecessors. Ella Baker is someone I continually cite as a brilliant organization builder alongside her movement work.   
  
Unfortunately, we've conflated institutional failure with the idea that structure itself is bad. But:  
\- Anti-leadership isn't a leadership philosophy. Someone still has to be accountable  
\- Not all hierarchy is harmful, and flatness doesn't eliminate power—it just makes power harder to see (also not good)  
\- Institutions aren't always the problem. If we want public services and durable change at scale, we have to build institutions capable of delivering both.  
  
What we need isn't less structure. We need collective vision and values AND we need brand new forms of organization design and management structure so we can reforge our systems & institutions to meet this new moment.