I’m A Member Of “The Lost Generation”

Looking back at an obvious reality

It’s now been over a month since Jacob Savage published “The Lost Generation.” For those who are offline enough to not know what I’m talking about, this was an essay in Compact Magazine alleging that straight, white, Millennial men had been systematically shut out of prestige institutions like journalism, academia, and entertainment over the last ten to fifteen years. It kicked up a hornet’s nest within the online right, for obvious reasons. It also received a lot of pushback among the online left, although I’m getting that information secondhand as I don’t have a Bluesky account. Vice President Vance even tweeted about it, calling the essay “an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.”

If it’s been that long since “The Lost Generation” came out, why am I writing about it now? Well, first, I spent the last few weeks of December sleep-training a baby and didn’t have the time to write about it then, so cut me some slack. Second, there are still a lot of conversations happening downstream from this piece and its impact. Third, and maybe most importantly, I am exactly the type of person it was written about.

I started performing stand-up comedy in December of 2008 and kept at it all throughout the 2010s, eventually stopping at the end of 2023. I tried as hard as I could to build a fruitful career, but wasn’t able to make it happen. After years of spinning my wheels, I eventually hung up the microphone feeling burnt out and beaten down.

I’m also a straight white guy. I was born in 1986, which means I grew up watching 90s Nickelodeon, experienced a childhood free from the internet, and graduated college during a once-in-a-lifetime global financial crisis. That qualifies me as a certified, purebred Millennial.

One might think that these demographic factors have nothing to do with my failed comedy career, but according to Savage’s essay, they’re inextricably linked.

It’s hard to write about this stuff for a general audience because you’re always at risk of upsetting somebody. If you believe this happened and acknowledge it in any sort of forthright way, the left calls you a bigot and a fascist. If you acknowledge it but don’t express the proper amount of outrage, the right deems you a coward and a cuck.

I’m going to attempt to do both.

I really am of two minds about this entire situation. My thoughts seem diametrically opposed to each other, but I hope I can convince you they’re not.

My response to Savage’s piece is as follows:

1. This absolutely happened, and anyone who argues otherwise is deluding themselves.

2. On a personal level, I don’t really care.

The stats Savage lists in his piece are staggering. In 2013, Vox Media was 82% male and 88% white, which befits a startup made in Ezra Klein’s image. By 2022, the company was 37% male and 59% white, with 73% female leadership in 2025. Tenure track positions at Harvard from 2014-2024 went from 49% white male to 27%, while in the humanities they went from 39% to 21%. In 2011, white men were approximately 60% of TV writers. In 2025, they were less than 12% of lower level staff writers, while women of color made up over 34%.

Shifts this dramatic don’t happen by accident. They’re the result of intentional policy, animated by the progressive worldview that dominated American culture throughout the last decade.

Others have argued that white men still make up a large percentage at many of these institutions, but that’s not exactly Savage’s point. The real story lies not in the organizations in totality, but who in the Millennial cohort was brought in and who was excluded. Savage is focused on the younger people who were just starting out in their careers and attempting to get their big break. They were the ones that bore the brunt of these new policies.

When zeroing in on Millennials, the bleak nature of these numbers comes into focus. One prime example is The Disney Writing Program, a major stepping stone to a career in Hollywood for young creatives. Over the last decade the program has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships, none of which went to white men. Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, only 10% of the 220 year-long fellowships awarded since 2018 have gone to white men.

There’s also the anecdotal evidence provided by Savage’s interview subjects. Said one newspaper hiring editor: “For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys. It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person…It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”

Or this, from a former assistant to a white male Gen X showrunner:

“You could read a white guy’s script, but there was no way in hell that person was going to get staffed on the show. Showrunners only had a couple of spots for white people, and they kept those for the 40- or 50-year-old white guys they’d known for years.”

Savage provides plenty of other examples like these two, but I won’t belabor the point and list them all here.

While reading this essay, I was shocked but not surprised. The scope of the situation was astounding, but I didn’t need data or stories to be convinced of its truthfulness. I lived this reality on the ground for over a decade.

Savage doesn’t include any demographic breakdowns of New York City comedy shows between 2012 and 2023 - the years I was active in the city - but if he did I’m certain it would look a lot like his other stats. As the decade wore on, there were fewer and fewer white guys on those lineups, especially when it came to the hip independent shows of Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan. Usually there was just one straight white dude going up on stage. A lot of times there were none. The same could be said of comedy festivals, late night TV spots, and other markers of industry success.

I’ve written at length about why I didn’t make it in comedy, with the primary reason being that I wasn’t funny enough. But having fewer opportunities to get on stage and grow certainly didn’t help matters. I don’t think it’s out of line for me to say that these changing norms had at least some negative impact on the trajectory of my comedy career.

This all might sound like sour grapes, but I’m simply attempting to tell you what happened during my time as a comedian in New York City. I also want you to know that, even though I could be angry about my experience, I’m not. As I stated earlier, I don’t really care.

More accurately, I can’t allow myself to care. The moment I start pointing outwards and blaming nebulous, uncontrollable forces for my failure is the moment where I begin to lose my sense of personal agency. Even if I were correct in blaming the shift away from white guys in comedy for my lack of success, what does that ultimately change? What redress does it allow? None. It only permits me to stew in bitterness without forcing me to confront what I could have done differently. It lets me get away with ignoring my own faults.

And my faults were legion. Beyond simply not being funny enough, I also didn’t trust myself to the degree I needed to. I was too reliant on institutions to help advance my career, all during a time when institutions were simultaneously shutting out guys like me and losing their influence.

When I started stand-up in 2008, the conventional career advice was to get on stage as much as possible, write as much as possible, be around as much as possible, and eventually something will click. You’ll get an opportunity to be accepted at a comedy club, which could lead to landing an agent or manager, which could lead to industry heat followed by a development deal with a network, and then it was on to TV and movies and life as a successful touring comic. All you had to do was work on your act and these major institutions would take care of the rest. They were the only ones with the tools necessary to put you in front of bigger and better audiences.

How did that hold up over the 2010s? Not well, to say the least. When was the last time a spot on late night TV supercharged someone’s career? Has Comedy Central even released a stand-up special over the last five years? What unknown comedian has recently broken out by getting their own sitcom on NBC, ABC, Fox or CBS?

Everything moved online, both in terms of how people consumed content and in how talent promoted themselves and built their careers. While all of this was happening, I stayed stuck in that old world way of thinking, hoping some gatekeeper with the power to change my life would deem me worthy of their largesse. I was waiting for permission from someone else to be successful.

To call myself a late adopter in the new media landscape would be an understatement. I never posted anything on YouTube as it was becoming the largest entertainment hub on the planet. My Twitter account was practically dormant and never grew above 1,000 followers. I used Instagram for mostly personal stuff. I refused to start a TikTok account during COVID, telling myself “I don’t need another app to scroll.” I let every single opportunity to build my own organic fanbase pass me by. When I decided to finally get on board towards the end of my career, it was already too late and most of the market share was taken up. It would have been so much easier to grow an audience in the early days of a given app, but I snobbishly considered that sort of thing beneath me and not “real art.” My definition of “real art,” apparently, was telling jokes to ten disinterested people in the back of a Brooklyn dive bar for the better part of ten years.

So yeah, the major institutions of the world were shutting out straight white guys during my prime growth years, but I shouldn’t have let that affect me to the degree that it did. Plenty of straight white guys became wildly successful during this time period, and they did it by building their own thing outside of the major institutions. I’m thinking of guys like Andrew Schulz, Chris Distefano, Nick Mullen, Stavros Halkias, Adam Friedland, and Shane Gillis. Some might point to Shane being publicly fired from SNL as the launching point for his career, but that’s not totally accurate. How many people who have been fired from SNL are on sold-out arena tours within five years? Shane owes the majority of his massive success to his podcast and his self-produced stand-up special Live in Austin, currently sitting at 50 million views on YouTube.

I pursued a career in stand-up comedy during a peak era of exclusion for guys like me. But I also pursued a career in stand-up comedy during a peak era for making your own way. I could have been an early adopter of this new technology and figured things out on my own. Maybe I would have developed an audience, and a voice that was worth listening to, along the way. Instead, I chose to rely on the institutions that were shunning me for my identity. That choice, and my subsequent failures, lie with me and me alone. That is ultimately why I don’t get too worked up over my “Lost Generation” status.

Look, I understand some might feel I’m being flippant about the systematic exclusion of a certain group of people based on their race, gender, and sexuality - all of which was done in the name of “equality.” When I say this stuff doesn’t bother me on a personal level, I just mean related to my own experience. I still find it infuriating on a macro level that so many people had doors shut in their face due to identity and grievance politics. We can’t allow this type of ideology to come back into power and gain mainstream acceptance ever again. It’s corrosive and cheapens everything it touches.

But think about what was actually lost during this time period. Were these institutions offering anything that was really all that special?

Substacker Librarian of Celaeno clarified things for me with his recent piece on the subject. Here he chronicles his unrealized dream of becoming a college professor. But he doesn’t despair over this loss, because he understands what his dream was truly signaling.

I wanted to teach bright young people about all the wonderful things I’d studied; that’s what I do now as a [private high school] teacher. I wanted to write about the things that moved me - I have my Substack. I can provide for my family and be real, without having to add pronouns to my bio to do it. And best of all, I get to help others with the same vision I have.

Say he had gone after that professor job like he initially intended. He would have eventually been ground down and discarded, similar to Savage and his thwarted aspirations as a screenwriter. Even if he was lucky enough to make inroads and establish himself, he’d still be forced to signal constant ideological alignment or risk alienation and probable termination.

Instead, LoC enjoys the freedom of doing what his heart calls him to do without any outside interference. The only thing that’s missing is the prestige that comes with teaching at a high-end university. But prestige is always dependent on others. It’s a reputational Ponzi scheme that relies on people, most of whom are strangers, to validate your actions and decisions. The whims of the crowd are fickle, and you need to constantly contort yourself to stay in their good graces. Is that freedom? Is that success? When viewed through this particular lens, it certainly doesn’t sound like it. This is why I’m glad my plans for institutional success in comedy never came to fruition.

I’m not totally delusional here. I know that being a popular, touring stand-up comedian is almost certainly preferable to working a normal office job five days a week like I currently do. But I do feel as if I’m better off in some way. I can say with absolute certainty that my relationship to my creative drive is so much healthier than it was a few years ago. I write what I feel like writing, when I feel like writing it. Sometimes it does well and gains a bit of traction, sometimes it’s forgotten the next day. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The burden of expectation and the hope of advancement have been removed. All that’s left is the creative act, and that act only needs approval from one person in order to take place - me. If I had achieved the kind of success I was looking for, the kind that is owed to gatekeepers and large institutions, I’d always have to worry about keeping them happy.

Savage’s piece ends on a somber note as he reflects on how to share his failures and frustrations with his two young sons. “What do I say when my boys ask about my old hopes and dreams? What do I tell them when they ask about theirs?” he laments.

Savage doesn’t provide an answer, but I know what I’m going to tell my son. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t ever, ever surrender your sense of self and willingness to determine your own future to an outside source. Institutions come and go, their power and influence fades, what they value changes. If you keep your destiny in your own hands, you’ll outlast them. You’ll find the type of success that they can’t provide for you. That success might not look like what you initially imagined. It might not be as grand or important, but it will be more real than anything they can offer. And who knows, maybe you’ll be one of the lucky few that far surpasses your peers and builds something stellar and lucrative on your own. But no matter the size of your success, as long as it comes from your individual spirit and efforts, you’ll know that it was truly earned.