How the characters from Girlswould react to January 2025
There’s nothing like a heavy dollop of existential dread and millennial ennui to incept the idea of a Girls rewatch. Gen z will never understand the catharsis of coming of age at the same time as those insufferable white women back in the 2010s when recession pop reigned supreme and little twee Pinocchio shoes were all the rage. Let me show my whole millennial ass when I say: take me back. In the first month of 2025 alone, we’ve experienced devastating wildfires, a mass migration to Rednote, a temporary TikTok ban, and the inauguration of a rapist/felon on MLK Day, giving the incels every reason to smugly smirk like Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network as he fucks over the Winklevoss Twins.
All that said, I’d like to dedicate this week’s newsletter to how I think my favorite crew of problematic millennials from HBO’s 2012 series Girls (which makes up a solid 30% of my personality) would react to all of the above.
1. Hannah Horvath
Hannah Horvath would cozy up in her bed (complete with weeks-old sheets) and take to Substack and Bluesky to let her micro-following of nepo babies, edgy podcasters and pseudo-intellectuals know that she will “NOT? go quietly into the night?” and post lots of performative photos of herself sans makeup with her baby Grover looking sad. She would definitely create and share a lot of Bernie memes all while drawing these truly devastating world events back to her own wildly privileged experience as a white woman from Michigan. To escape the mental weight of the LA wildfires (she lives in upstate New York), she would rent a cabin in Vermont with Elijah because she “Has A LOT on her MIND right now!” Her parents wouldn’t be thrilled about her financial recklessness, but her mom Loreen would travel in to tend to Grover and advise Hannah to call her fully unnecessary cabin trip a “writer’s retreat” so she could write if off as a business expense on her taxes (which her parents still pretty much do for her). Hannah would beg Elijah not to post about their mental reset retreat so Marnie wouldn’t be mad for not being invited (“Her energy is just way too much for me right now. Some of us are mothers and this is all hitting us entirely differently! It’s not about you, Marnie, we’re in crisis. Hey can you just like...make all of that bacon?”). She would constantly refresh her IG story to see who watched, hoping Adam and at least one other guy she fucked would be in her viewers doing a wellness check to make sure she’s okay given the state of the world. When that doesn’t happen, she’d walk around the woods topless to ground herself back in nature, and shriek in horror when she inevitably runs into a nice, normal family trying to go for a tranquil hike.
2. Marnie Michaels
Marnie would take to TikTok to show the power and healing of creativity in times of tragedy. She would shamelessly take this opportunity to promote herself by posting constantly, reciting her mediocre poetry and copy paste folk songs to offer her community “a soft place to land as the collective goes through all of this”. She’d never miss an opportunity to plug where to follow her, and has mastered the art of faux humbly stating “so, that’s just a little something I’ve been working on”. She’s also added the Tarte freckle stamp to her makeup routine to bamboozle her following into thinking she doesn’t have a makeup routine. On Instagram, she would post really pretty, curated, artsy photos of herself to her grid and stories while linking to organizations. Her IG story font is obviously “Elegant” which she would never admit was inspired by Ariana Grande. When she’s not creating on TikTok, she’s rewatching Wicked while doing pilates and eating next to nothing to “stay clearheaded” and prepare herself for the eventual apocalypse, still bitter that her TikTok rendition of “No One Mourns the Wicked” didn’t get more views.
3. Jessa
Jessa would flee to London and party in the English countryside with only her chicest, artsiest friends after realizing Adam was slipping into a harrowing depression. “Darling”, she’d say to Adam, eyerolling in her $500 kimono with a nipple purposely peeking out, “you get so boooooring when you’re depressed. There’s nothing we can do, anyway. May as well have fun as we watch the world burn.” With that, she would book her flight, leaving Adam to rot in their small, borderline hoarder but expensive enough to be called maximalist apartment in NYC. She would use the existential dread as an excuse to drink martinis, chain smoke, and engage in wildly affected conversations in the chilly English air under the stars wrapped in a fur coat, proudly harping on the fact hat she was “never on bloody TikTok”, and insisting that both political sides “are so humiliatingly bad”. Rather than try to be part of the solution, Jessa would shirk all emotional responsibility by making her Britishness her entire personality, doing yoga while rewatching Ab Fab between events in her ever-packed social calendar.
4. Shoshanna
Shoshanna and her husband Byron would be boots on the ground in fundraising efforts for California all the way from their NYC high-rise. They “literally have like, so many friends impacted by the literal hellscape that is this country right now”, and would leverage their financial stability for good, unafraid to post about causes they care about on their social media accounts, which are mostly followed by their also wealthy, affluent friends. When she’s not enjoying a crisp glass of Sauvignon blanc with her like-minded liberal gal pals while they discuss how Hilary was robbed in 2016, Shoshanna proudly serves on the board of various charities, including but not limited to a charity called “Camp Confidence”, which sends underprivileged girls to overnight camps, and another called “Pawsitive Days Ahead” that raises funds for low-income families to put their pets down from the comfort of their home. She would dissociate by convincing her favorite Soul Cycle instructor Rachael to host a Wicked-themed spin class and promote it heavily on her IG story (which Marnie wouldn’t know about because Shoshanna blocked her on Instagram years ago). In her downtime, she would unwind by flipping between CNN and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City on Youtube TV, which she prefers to streaming apps because the commercials force her to have “like, some semblance of an attention span”.
5. Adam
Adam would fight his ever-looming depression by taking this time to write his next great American play, fancying himself a Tracy Letts, Sam Shepard, Neil Labute hybrid. To concentrate, he would resort to a flip phone and make his apartment into a bunker, stocked with water, Soylent protein shakes, and steaks. He would get rid of his TV, buy a typewriter so the government couldn’t spy on him, and use his time away from Jessa to learn how to walk like Charlie Chaplin for the maybe-happening-not-greenlit biopic his agent flippantly mentioned over lunch 6 months ago. He would work out from the comfort of his bunker to prepare for the inevitable purge, gaining a whopping 30 pounds of sheer muscle to fight off zombies and incels. He would make his entire personality telling people how he could crack “Mark Zuckernuts’” head between his thighs, and have “Elon Pussk” crying like a “little ya know, a little bitch” by breathing on him. Adam fell deep into conspiracy-tok back in 2020 and never fully recovered. At this point, he believes that both sides suck, governments are bad, but Tr*mp is a loser. He absolutely believes that Britney Spears died and is actually a deep fake, which he’s way more sad about than he would ever admit out loud.
6. Ray
Ray never stopped being a Bernie bro, and truly believes if we had just elected Bernie way back when, everything from climate change to racism to homophobia would be fixed by now. He enjoys getting into heated debates with customers at Grumpy’s over the state of our nation (yes, he still works there), which allows him to maintain the liberal, hipster clientele he enjoys. Rather than channel this energy anywhere truly useful, he prefers to rant into the void on X, thinking that by staying on this platform, he’s bravely doing his part and using his white male privilege to speak out against the atrocities that marginalized American people face. He HATES TikTok (“It—it’s frying the youths. How in the hell are we supposed to rise I mean like, really rise as a force, as a collective in true resistance if the youths can’t even pay attention for more than 10 seconds?”) and was thrilled for the ban, not because of national security, but because he believes we should all touch grass.
7. Elijah
Elijah would unfortunately be relegated to being Hannah’s emotional support human throughout all of this. However, after years of cognitive behavioral therapy, he’s gotten a lot better at boundaries. He would also use his 1M+ TikTok platform to spread wisdom about his experience as a queer content creator and engage his highly devoted following through the art of shit talking, fit checks, and effortlessly mastering the Dancing Through Life choreography. He figures if he’s going to suffer at the hands of this dumbass country, he may as well be rich and hot, and TikTok helps him do both of those things. As the type-A king he is, he had already been building his Youtube Channel for 2 years in preparation for a potential TikTok ban, building a solid audience of 400k subscribers. He didn’t know about the LA wildfires for far longer than appropriate given that he’s chronically online and frenemies with Benny Drama, but he’d never admit it. In mentally low times, Elijah would dissociate to Brat and pretend he’s still at the Sweat Tour. When that doesn’t work, he’d put his phone on dnd and rewatch The Comeback.