It makes perfect sense that the library would be a haven for millennials. As opposed to home ownership, marriage and vacations, it is one of the only places that doesn’t directly ask for your money.

For all of the institutions that Millennials have apparently ruined, there is one for which they’ve shown an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm. A recent blog post from the Pew Research Center pointed to a study that found that 53 per cent of Millennials had used a library in the last year. To put this into generational context, the same study reported 45 per cent of Gen Xers and 43 per cent of Baby Boomers were able to make the same claim.

As a long-time social establishment, the library seems to be the only place not in demise at the behest of the younger generation. And it makes perfect sense that the library would be a haven for Millennials. As opposed to home ownership, marriage and vacations, libraries are inexpensive. All the other industries that Millennials are supposedly destroying are simply too expensive for a swath of people mostly concerned with basic survival under the unrelenting pressure of weak job security and a corresponding anxiety.

As a result, the library is ideal for the modern person, even while the modern world is decidedly not. A person today goes anywhere and there’s a high price to be paid. Everywhere he or she turns, there’s an industry waiting to take whatever is left from a bank account already reduced by housing, transportation and groceries.

The library is at odds with the modern life; one of the only places in existence that doesn’t directly ask for your money. A library is a space that provides a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge while seeking nothing in return other than patronage. While, yes, it is supported by tax dollars, its primary focus isn’t extracting funds from its users, bur rather serving those who would come to use it.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about how libraries were a small way of bridging the gap between the privileged and the poor: “Plunging into the ocean of words, roaming in the broad fields of the mind, climbing the mountains of the imagination. That was my freedom, that was my joy. And it still is. That joy must not be sold. It must not be ‘privatized,’ made into another privilege for the privileged. A public library is a public trust.”

In this, the library captures a Millennial ideal – and proves that the generation’s angst with public institutions isn’t a rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but rather to do with the frustration that comes from being born into a system already broken.