Meet Generation Avo
Usually found on Tinder, they splurge on flat whites but have given up any hope of actually owning
WHEN you arrive in London as two fresh-faced graduates excited to get on with life but realise over time you’re just two twentysomething nothings living in a brunch-crazed world, you know it’s time to shake things up. For us two yupsters, Dave and Max, quitting our jobs in head-hunting and branding and going to theatre school seemed like the most sensible thing to do #PlotTwist.
Ahead of our Edinburgh Festival Fringe comedy show this August, we’re here to give you a taste of what it’s been like growing up (but mainly screwing up) in the “Avocado Generation”.
How to spend it
When it comes to consumption, we have a unique attitude to spending and put our hard-earned cash towards sensible things like almond milk, noise-cancelling headphones and tickets to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone live at the Royal Albert Hall (exciting!). Even at the most creatively vacuous corporate day prisons, we feel the urge to invest in the most enviable lunches.
Where Dave should buy the £3.29 Boots meal deal he instead has to head to Whole Foods for ingredients that would be more familiar to a 13th-century Peruvian peasant, not a recruitment agent from Hammersmith. “Here’s to never being able to afford a deposit for a flat,” he says on an extra-legroom seat on a flight to Barcelona. For we are the flat white-downing, quinoa-munching, triathlon-running Avo-Gens who don’t see the point. Pay now, think later.
Game of homes
The chances of us two chaps buying a house or flat are as likely as Theresa May skinny-dipping in the Serpentine. We are told to save but the only way we know how is to nestle into bed on Friday night instead of going out and smashing through unwatched episodes of Love Island while eating boiled rice.
There’s no doubt the main hope for anyone in our generation looking to buy is our parents, who are getting left behind in this age of technology yet still hold all the power. Maybe we could both bump off our parents quietly, but we’d probably end up inheriting their mortgage. “If we can’t live in London, fear not! We can always snap up that canal boat in Staffordshire we’ve been looking at,” Max reassures himself.
Love me Tinder
We both think we’re able to disconnect from the digital world. But then Max arrives at Devon’s remotest Airbnb to find the wi-fi doesn’t work and spends hours rocking back and forth in a cold shower, praying that the pub across the valley will let him see if Lucy from Tinder has replied to his pathetic winky face.
Both of us are compelled to connect with love interests digitally and this affects our real-life behaviour. Dave was once on a train and saw a girl he fancied. He had to act. What is more likely to have happened? A) He approached her like the Matthew McConaughey you’ve seen in myriad rom-coms to deliver the line “You are the most beautiful woman I ever seen, have dinner with me.” B) He immediately went on Happn and prayed for a match. — I think you know the answer.
We’re wondering what men did back in the day? Maybe all the chaps of the baby boomer generation approached women on their commute with the swashbuckling confidence of Justin Bieber after a few beers. Maybe even our dads had such swag. Surely not?
Dating’s a joy when you manage to get one in the diary. But you will inevitably be deemed a cheapskate or a sexist depending on what happens with the bill. To split or not to split, that is the question. Ultimately Dave concludes, that you just can’t win. But after thumbing through Facebook posts and seeing another engagement