The Bear: A gourmet serving of millennial angst

But what is the millennial angst? People argue that it is our obsession with nostalgia. (This article contains spoilers for season 3 of The Bear.)

In over a month from now, The Bear — Christopher Storer's masterpiece which concluded its third season this June — will likely win its second round of accolades at the Emmy's. The Bear is the story about a tormented, 30-something, award-winning chef, who returns to his hometown in Chicago to overhaul his dead brother's sandwich kitchen, open a fine-dining restaurant and slog towards getting a Michelin star. Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto (played by an unmatched Jeremy Allen White), is a difficult protagonist.

Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in a still from The Bear Season 3.

Even when one scrapes through the layers of anxiety in Carmy's character — his nagging need for perfection, the inability to emote anything other than frustration, his aversion to any tangible feeling of love (or care) — Carmy is hard not to sympathise with, because he is a millennial.

The millennials were born anywhere between 1980 and 1997. We were the first generation to reach adulthood in the new millennium, hence the name, and were also "digital natives" — meaning we were inducted into technology at some point after birth. We are often compared to the Lost Generation, a term that represents the cohort that attained early adulthood during World War 1. The Lost Generation was full of angst, and despair owing to the death, greed and destruction it witnessed.

But what is the millennial angst? People argue that it is our obsession with nostalgia. Growing up, the internet was a ritual intervention for us. But the advent of technology, which was supposed to resolve life's mysteries and land us our dream jobs, became an unremitting vortex. This, marked by events like globalisation, 9/11, the Great Recession, trenchant cultural shifts, a pandemic, and subsequent conversations around mental health, made it arduous for us to register anything. It made us an inherently existential generation.

The world reneged on the millennial promise and in this glacial mesh, we find ourselves holding on to memories that slipped into the crevasse. No other generation remembers so intensely.

At the core of Carmy are memories that trigger angst and regret. His hands are calloused from years of working in the best kitchens, his eyes baggy due to panic attacks and his shoulders droopy because he is a millennial, as are his siblings Natalie "Sugar" Berzatto and Michael "Mikey" Berzatto.

Millennials have buried themselves in skilled work because finding true purpose, whatever that means, is a distant dream. Instead, for most of us, the skill has become a mirage of "I love what I do", shrouded by economic needs.

In the finale of season 1, the opening night of The Bear, Carmy gets stuck in the walk-in refrigerator and is unable to participate in the chaos outside, which he so carefully constructed. He is forced to sit and think inside a cold room. But instead of breathing, he blames himself for being distracted and not paying attention to the broken door handle of the fridge.

The scene is a grim reminder of the conflict between the search for purpose and the costs of commitment. We find it offensive when a 70-hour workweek is recommended, but we understand its source. It is a discomforting but familiar feeling because to steer away from work, and to think of life as something that is lived outside of it, is an alien thought. It comes with the admittance that while such a life is unhealthy for the soul, it is nevertheless a distraction from the wreckage of the world. This is the communal philosophy that stomps on individual utopias.

Carmy has turned his passion for cooking into a programmed activity. He strips the chefdom of its embellishments and Storer brilliantly uses the metaphor of the food to explain his human condition.

"Fishes" from season 2, which has grabbed a whopping seven nominations in terms of acting, writing, and direction, must be mentioned in any conversation about the series. This episode sheds light on the burden of a dysfunctional family on the shoulders of its children.

The chaotic episode, which should win all awards for its execution, has Sugar (played by Abby Elliott) asking her mother Donna (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) time and again if "things are okay". She portrays the millennial daughter perennially trying to fix things in the family. Her agony is palpable in a later episode in season 3, wherein she is pregnant and apprehensive about bringing a child into the world she has lived in, which extends beyond simple apprehensions of selfhood and motherhood.

The parents of millennials did things differently. They made us believe in the domesticity of life without accounting for paradigm shifts, for no fault of theirs. Yes, every parent is a new parent, but not every generation is as coarse as the millennial. The Bear does not use its chaos, and fixtures, to use therapy as a module. In fact, the word finds no mention. Instead, it allows mental health to be a stage to unfurl its characters, without therapising their conversations. The series is a millennial's nightmare but also a love letter we could never write to ourselves.

The views expressed are personal