Another "Lost Generation?"
Are white male millennials being cast out of professional America?
The term “Lost Generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein to describe the disorientation of young people shaped by World War I and was later popularized by Ernest Hemingway as a label for American expatriate writers living in Paris in the 1920s. The phrase emerged not as a manifesto but as an offhand remark Stein reportedly heard from a French garage owner scolding a young mechanic who had botched a repair: “Vous êtes tous une génération perdue.” Stein immediately recognized that the phrase named something larger than incompetence. It captured a generation that had inherited broken structures and no longer trusted the old ones. Jacob Savage, who describes himself as an “ordinary talent,” recently borrowed the term for the title of an extensive article published in Compact, where it gained viral traction and, like most things now, became a Rorschach test for political leanings.
Savage uses a range of statistics to support his argument across journalism, academia, and film and television. He cites six examples of white male millennials to illustrate how exclusion was not isolated but widespread, and he identifies 2014–2016 as the hinge period when institutional priorities shifted. In television, he claims that white men made up 48 percent of lower-level writers in 2011, but by 2024 that figure had fallen to just 11.9 percent. In journalism, editorial staffs shifted sharply: in 2013, they were 53 percent male and 89 percent white; by 2024, they were 36 percent male and 66 percent white. In academia, white men accounted for 39 percent of tenure-track humanities faculty in 2014, a share that declined to 18 percent by 2023.
On the left, the People’s Policy Project claimed that “Savage appears wrong,” citing its own litany of graphs and data. “Overall, this data does not really support Savage’s material thesis. Ambitious white men in their thirties have not seen much, if any, decline over this period. Their overall employment is up.” Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson posted on X, “Turns out the whole ‘white men are falling behind’ narrative is nonsense.” Though he did not name Savage in the post, the publication had previously published a direct ideological rebuttal arguing that “white male writers haven’t really vanished at all.” What Savage interprets as discrimination is, in their view, the normalization of competition. The rebuttal further contends that the essay selectively interprets statistics while failing to account for class, wealth, and institutional inertia.
On the right, the Washington Examiner took Savage’s essay and did what it does best. It widened the blast radius. Extending the argument into law and science, the magazine claimed that elite law schools and clerkships now fixate on demographic optics at the entry level while senior leadership remains safely unchanged. The result, according to the Examiner, is a tidy cohort bottleneck. Younger white men face steeper barriers. Older ones keep their seats. DEI, in this telling, dismantles meritocracy, delays family formation, and generally breaks the social order. Savage’s essay becomes less a lament than an exhibit. Proof, they argue, that the fix was worse than the disease. Savage was also interviewed by Fox News host Will Cain.
Like so many debates now, the extreme fringes take over and the original idea gets warped until it loses whatever nuance it once had. When I read the section of Savage’s essay describing screenwriters in Hollywood, it felt uncomfortably familiar. I was a millennial white male living in Los Angeles from 2010 to 2022, trying to become a professional screenwriter. The difference is that I did get a job. Not a career, since I have yet to land a second full-time gig, but I did write for four seasons on a network show. So, in a sense, I understand what Savage is trying to say.
From the beginning, television writers’ rooms were dominated by white men, and the 21st century brought a long-overdue pendulum shift. That imbalance lasted so long that any correction was bound to be disruptive. It was wrong in the 80s and 90s to exclude women and minority groups, and it is wrong to exclude anyone now on the basis of identity alone. For culture and audiences to thrive, we all need to see ourselves represented on screen, but the path there matters. Representation achieved through opaque rules and quiet mandates risks replacing one unfair system with another, rather than building something stronger.
Because of the statistical research and the physical evidence, Savage’s argument is compelling, but the question remains: who will care?
White male screenwriters, probably. And as one, I find myself split. It feels like Savage is articulating a smaller truth inside a much larger one. Opportunities across the board seem to be diminishing. When I brought this article up to a white male screenwriter friend of mine who still lives in Los Angeles, he flatly disagreed with Savage. He argued that Netflix and other Big Tech streaming platforms bear most of the responsibility because they brutally reduced the size of writers’ rooms in an effort to increase profits. “Where there used to be one hundred writers, there are now two,” he said. When I asked whether those two remaining writers were white or male, he agreed that they probably were not. “In a world where there are only two jobs, and considering the old guard is predominantly white dudes, yeah, those two slots SHOULD go to someone else.”
Ema Katrovas, my life partner (such a clunky title), often helps me navigate cultural landscapes. As my intellectual sherpa, she sent me The Lost Generation and, during our discussion, brought up David Graeber’s idea of “scriptlessness,” the condition of being expected to navigate complex moral and social terrain without shared rules, while still being judged as if those rules were obvious. To me, it was clear that the rules for getting a writing job in Hollywood had shifted toward diversity hires, and I chose to stay in the game anyway. Savage, by contrast, seems to feel he was hoodwinked mid-game. “I should have believed them when they said they didn’t want me,” he writes. What Savage is articulating is the realization that there was a new script, and that he felt he was never part of the intended cast.
It’s hard to pinpoint what Savage’s motivations were in publishing the article. While I don’t have statistical evidence to support this, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the people in positions to hire television writers lean left politically, and if his goal was to write something that might help him reenter that world, the article likely works against him. Savage is a father and says he works as an online ticket scalper. From his appearance on Fox News in December 2025, he appears healthy and has found some success writing opinion pieces. That’s not nothing. As Cormac McCarthy writes in No Country for Old Men, “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” A career as a television writer offers no guarantee of steady income, nor does it necessarily leave room for family life.
It’s difficult to disentangle what belongs to systemic failure and what falls under personal responsibility. Savage suggests he should have found a viable path toward a television writing career after only five years. To think of the arts as if they operate like becoming a doctor or a lawyer is absurd. Still, I appreciate the essay for giving shape to a cloudy feeling I carried for years. Where I part ways with Savage is in how he understands artistic work itself. He doesn’t seem to have the heart of an artist. “The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.” Call me romantic, but an artist isn’t defined by what they aren’t; they’re defined by what they produce. I choose to write because of a deeper calling, not because it ever seemed like a sensible career path.
Maybe I am part of a lost generation. Only time will tell. But I’m not interested in perpetuating that narrative. I’m interested only in bearing witness and writing honestly; the rest is out of my control. When Ema first mentioned scriptlessness, I misunderstood her. I thought she meant the lack of narrative framing at certain moments in life, where meaning only emerges once a story takes form. In that sense, Savage has found a script. He understands structure and knows how to wield it. Now I hope he puts down the statistics, uses his skills to pen a brilliant screenplay, and gets a damn movie made.
Martha Graham said it best:
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others”
― Martha Graham