Millennials Tried Being Angry. It Didn't Work.

Project Hail Mary (the movie, not the novel, which I haven’t read) is a movie about people trying to save planet Earth from a nefarious interstellar substance. That substance is neither human-created nor alien-made. There’s not a whiff in the film that human beings may be responsible for it. There is no “enemy” in the story at all; there’s only a problem, and the question of whether courage, smarts, and friendship can solve it.

This is why, I think, Project Hail Mary seems like one of the most strikingly non-angry films I’ve seen lately. Paul Anleitner argues that PHM succeeds with audiences today who want earnestness instead of cynical detachment (Brett McCracken agrees). I think there’s definitely something to that. But I also think it’s not just earnestness. It’s a turn away from the anger and existential frustration of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth era. There’s reason to suspect that Gen-Z audiences in particular are tired of the guilt, fury, and exhaustion of nonstop activism. Project Hail Mary is a movie for people who care about saving the world but don’t care about assigning blame before they do it.

My millennial generation turned activism into a way of life. Anger at religion, climate villains, police, Lehman Bros., the patriarchy, and insufficiently progressive colleges intersected with the social media age in a way that transformed millions of people into keyboard prophets. Some kinds of this online activism were more real and rooted than others (more body cams on officers was a huge win compared to the cancellation of Aziz Ansari). But would anyone claim that millennial activism of the late 2000s and early 2010s has built anything of real substance? I doubt it. And it’s not just that Donald Trump won two elections and foisted his politics on America. Look more carefully than that, and you’ll see the truth: Younger Americans are tired of being mad.

In a 2023 Pew Poll considering the ten year anniversary of Black Lives Matter, more than 75% of respondents gave a low view of social media activism, with 82% saying it distracted from more important things, and 76% saying it fooled people into thinking they were making a difference when they weren’t. Two trends in the last few years indicate that the activism of the early 2010s really is dead: Gender-based polarization, and the growing backlash against the tech industry, epitomized in the success of writers like Jonathan Haidt. Men and women in 2026 are unlikely to be using the web to protest Big Oil or hashtag their way to an influencer gig. Instead, they’re huddled into respective silos, frustrated with each other.

Meanwhile, some of pop culture’s biggest hits are decidedly non-activist. There’s Project Hail Mary, but also the Michael Jackson biopic, which evades entirely the many allegations against its subject—a move that would almost certainly have doomed such a movie back in 2018. The year’s biggest novel is Theo of Golden, an almost implausibly gentle book about a world in which personal stories are far more real than political ones. America’s most famous comedian is Nate Bargatze. Clean cut and positive is the flavor of the month. Ten years ago, to turn on any connected device was to immediately plunge into any number of social campaigns or viral outrages. Today, you can still be offended if you want to, but that’s more likely to require effort on your part.

Project Hail Mary is a “feel good” movie — the kind that well compensated columnists in the 2000s said betrayed the vulnerable with their “toxic positivity.” That kind of critique almost can’t be made with a straight face now. Culturally, we gave constant anger and activism a sincere try, but it failed to do anything but burn us out and make us alienated from each other. It seems like we’re seeing a rebalancing now. Rather than political obsession and a “planet of cops,” what people seem to want right now is a sense of beauty and meaning to their lives.

Project Hail Mary is an insightful meta text on the cultural mood. Ryland Grace feels like a failure, insufficient for the work of saving the world (he seems like the kind of Gen-Zer who probably doesn’t even want to drive). Grace does not exemplify confidence or even determination. He goes methodically from one task to the next, often hitting the wrong button or making the wrong move. His chief virtue is that he has no choice but to keep moving forward. What pushes him hardest toward sacrificing everything is his friendship with the alien “Rocky.” Rocky sparks in Grace what scientism, guilt trips, and altruism could not. The point is made clear by another character: “You just have to find someone to be brave for.”

At the risk of over-allegorizing, I can’t help but wonder if the image of Ryland Grace finding the dead bodies of his fellow astronauts, and tenderly jettisoning them out in the darkness of space, bears some kind of resemblance to how American adults find themselves in the post-Great Awokening. The professionals, the ones trained to save the world, have failed. Their work is dead. The only thing that remains is to let it float away into the darkness, and realize that the angry activism of yesteryear will not actually save us.

A decade after our phones and hashtags felt like a revolution in our pocket, many of us just feel alone. The world is not better, but we’re worse. Trying to make meaningful connection feels for many like trying to communicate with an alien. Right now, the stories we gravitate toward are not stories about overcoming the regime, but somehow finding one another.

Christianity has its own dilemmas in the digital age, but it sure is an appealing story in a world like ours. A tale of a perfectly loving husband who wins the trust and fidelity of his bride suggests that true love is possible even in the world of gender war. The story of a king who destroys all evil and wipes every tear from his people’s eyes feels like relief from the burden of bringing Utopia to earth. Even the image of a shepherd who leaves the 99 to find the wayward one seems like a welcome message of being seen and pursued, even as an indifferent world is fine with watching us choke on what it gave us to eat.

I’m not sure whether there’s a Christian “vibe shift” afoot. I hope there is. But even if not, or even if a real shift eventually gives way to lifestyles of anger and digital atomization once again, the stories above will stay true and real. By the end of Project Hail Mary, we aren’t impressed with Ryland Grace. We’re just moved by the drama of a persistent love, and we feel something like hope that our story, too, could end, not starving in the blackness of space, but somewhere like home. Millennials learned that we can’t force this world to change. Can they begin to look for the world that never needed to?