I, Millennial

After 30 years of his entitled Millennial life, one world-changing pandemic and a seismic shift in Australian politics, 'comedian' Tom Ballard has had enough of the smashed avocado jokes. He’s furious at the raw deal his generation and those to come have been given, and he’s pretty sure things can’t be this crappy because of brunch. In his first book, through the power of swearing and funny pictures, he shows us how we got here, and why the need for a radical change is no joke.

The world is in chaos. It’s time for a revolution, goddammit, and Ballard is ready to serve as its glorious leader. (Or at least to tweet about it to #raiseawareness.)

It’s not your imagination: Millennials really have inherited the bill for our current ‘prosperity’, and it sucks. Millions of Baby Boomers got beach houses, free education, jobs for life and a franking credit-fed retirement; Millennials have been handed a housing crisis, crippling student debt, the gig economy, a cooked planet, a truly broken political system and now a global pandemic, as a treat. For a moment it looked like COVID-19 might radically change things – like housing the homeless and lifting the unemployed out of poverty – but it ended up just making rich ghouls like Gerry Harvey even richer.

In I, Millennial: One Snowflake’s Screed Against Boomers, Billionaires & Everything Else, Ballard unpicks how we got here and why. Through the power of jokes, history, interviews and sass, he decodes the state of Australian society today, and lets his fellow Millennials in on just how outraged they should be. Fact-filled and furiously funny, this sprawling book reveals shows that the real joke is how much the ruling class has been getting away with at our expense, and why a flaccid Labor government isn't going to be enough to get us out of the poo.

It will be a must-read not just for Millennials wondering whether they’re alone in thinking things are weird and bad and massively unfair, but for anyone with an interest in how we’re making our future impossible.