One day, millennials will end up becoming just like us
Iblame the internet. I know, I know. I’m always blaming the internet. I blame it for everything. The decline of the high street, the spread of fake news, threats to national security. You name it. Today’s complaint, though, is at least slightly less reactionary.
I blame the internet for our unkind and unfair perceptions of millennials.
Those of us in our mid-30s and above are forever boring on about millennials and their endless shortcomings. About how they’re sanctimonious, entitled, gullible, over-sensitive, naively Left-wing little “snowflakes”. All of that. Of course, when we say “millennials”, we don’t mean everyone of that particular cohort (born, roughly, between the mid-eighties and 2000). After all, we surely can’t think that today’s young soldiers or firemen or builders, say, are soft and mollycoddled. In reality, we’re talking about a small subset of millennials. We’re talking about students: middle-class students.
Now, I have no doubt that, among today’s middle-class students, there are countless hordes who are indeed sanctimonious, entitled, gullible and all the rest of it. The new university year is just beginning, so now there will be a fresh intake, swarming indignantly from seminar to protest march.
But what we need to remember is: they’re no worse than we were. My generation of middle-class students – and the generation before us, and the generation before them – were just the same. The only difference was this. Unlike millennials, we didn’t have social media. In other words, we had no means of inflicting our opinions on the wider world. So the wider world remained blissfully unaware of how awful we were.
And we were awful: awful in the way that middle-class students have always been. That is: we thought we were original. We swanned around as if we were the first, the very first people on Earth, to discover sex, alcohol, drugs, music, philosophy and socialism. Especially socialism.
Like generations before us and generations to follow us, we carried on as if socialism were new and untried. As if it were this dazzling, unprecedented, infallible brainwave that had never even occurred to our selfish, slow-witted elders. What fools they would feel when we showed them the error of their ways. We would blow their tiny minds. If only they could be bold, creative and compassionate like us.
As the autumn term gets into full swing, the papers will once again teem with stories of student selfrighteousness. But let’s try to give its perpetrators a break – and bear in mind that, just a few years from now, the millennials will be huffing and snorting in their turn about the generation below them. “Sanctimonious, entitled, gullible, over-sensitive, naively Left-wing little snowflakes. Now, in our day…”
When other men his age yearn to recapture the intoxicating thrill of youth, they buy a convertible, or trade in their wife for a younger model. So credit to Paul Mason for not being a cliché. Or at least, not a cliché in that sense. Only a few years ago, Mr Mason, 57, was a leading TV journalist. He was economics editor at Newsnight and later held the same post at Channel 4 News.
Since the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, however, Mr Mason has been reborn as a hot young Left-wing radical, swaggering around in leather jacket and pointy boots, addressing rallies, hailing the new red dawn, and imparting his wisdom to the aspiring revolutionaries of Momentum.
He has also been advising John Mcdonnell, Mr Corbyn’s pick for chancellor. And last week, during Momentum’s autumn conference in Brighton, Mr Mason prepared his audience of rapt twentysomethings for the next Labour government’s early months in power.
Yes, it would be a struggle. Yes, there would be setbacks. And yes, the Establishment would plot to thwart them at every turn. But have no fear, comrades, because in the end the pain would be worth it.
“We need everybody mobilised, in crisis mode,” he cried, eyes ablaze with zeal. “We might have to retreat the equivalent of 2,000km and, like in Stalingrad, be in a siege for six months. You might see the [Corbyn] government make compromises and retreats. That’s how you get victory. It’s not very easy. But when you get it, my goodness, we will change the world!”
How excited he was. Stalingrad. Retreat. Siege. Mobilise. Victory.
A lot of older men do get into historical re-enactment. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. As any GP will tell you, it’s important to find a hobby that keeps the mind occupied.
I’m only 36 years old. My memory shouldn’t be doing this to me yet. But it is.
Recently, while writing my restaurant column for the Telegraph Magazine, I was trying in vain to think of a way to describe a scotch egg. Then suddenly, with a lightning bolt of inspiration, a phrase flashed into my mind.
It was: “A burp coated in breadcrumbs.”
Yes. A burp coated in breadcrumbs. That was exactly it. That was what a scotch egg was.
But then I paused. Something about that line felt naggingly familiar. Oh dear. Now that I thought about it, I’d definitely read it somewhere before.
I screwed up my eyes and tried to remember whose line it was. Giles Coren’s? AA Gill’s? Jay Rayner’s? Will Self ’s?
No, none of them. It wasn’t quite of their standard. Still, someone roughly of that type. Someone snooty. Snooty and sarcastic, with a weakness for schoolboy vulgarity. But who? I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
So I googled it. And, sure enough, I found that that precise phrase had, almost exactly a year earlier, been used by a broadsheet restaurant critic.
It was me.
I suppose this is middle age.