Can we put an end to millennial versus boomer?

I’d love nothing more than to see young people regain respect for their seniors

At some point this decade, I started keeping a list of all the things that my generation has been blamed for “killing off ”.

Potatoes (unhealthy and inconvenient to cook), doorbells (scary and weird), Fray Bentos tinned pies (we can’t get the lids off), the oil industry (fossil fuels are pure evil). It goes on: cinemas, marmalade, face-toface conversation, fabric softener. Honestly, I think if the world could have pinned the extinction of the dinosaurs on us, it would have.

Plus, and indulge me this pity party for a moment longer, we have been lazily stereotyped. Millennials – those of us born between 1981 and 1996 – are apparently self-interested “snowflakes”. Generation Me. Shallow pools who would rather spend their money on avocado toast than save for a house deposit. Blah blah blah.

All this vitriol hasn’t travelled in one direction, of course. Baby boomers – our parents’ generation – have been designated our arch enemies: pampered spendthrifts who’ve indulged their every whim with no thought for the consequences, thereby leaving their children in the proverbial when it comes to politics, the environment and the economy. Thanks to our parents, we’re told, we’ll all have to work until 70, never own our own houses and drown in a sea of single-use plastic. Right?

It’s exhausting. And I can’t be the only one tired of this intergenerational warfare. Why must we be constantly pitted against one another?

’Twas ever thus, I know, with every generation suspicious of the one snapping at its heels. But our obsession with millennials versus boomers, in particular, has gone beyond the usual hand-wringing.

Take the “OK boomer” meme

– a phrase used by youngsters to dismiss the outdated opinions of their elders and shut down any chance of conversation – which recently went viral. So convinced are many of my peers that they can never find common ground, they no longer want to bother talking at all.

Even Westminster has been stirring the pot. Earlier this year, the House of Lords recommended that pensioners in Britain have some of their perks removed – scrapping free TV licences for over-75s and raising age for free bus passes – with the money saved to be spent on… you guessed it… the young. When constantly placed in opposition to one another like this, it is little wonder that fighting has become second nature.

It’s why some politicians have felt perfectly entitled to slag off eco-campaigner Greta Thunberg, not thinking for a second that an older man publicly picking on a teenage girl isn’t a good look. We’re now immune to such things.

I’d love nothing more than to see young people regain some of the respect they once had for their seniors – I genuinely think we’d all have happier lives for it. But it has to work both ways.

It’s not as though we don’t have plenty of other things to be divided over. Left vs Right. Brexit vs Remain. Men vs women. We are all young and then we all grow old. So why split ourselves even more by arguing generationally?

But, already, I can see signs of the same thing happening between millennials and Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2010). According to one recent study, my lot are useless at DIY compared with the youngsters below us. We drink and smoke more. No doubt in the decade to come, they will hold us responsible for their poorly wired plugs, wonky shelves and hogging NHS resources with our pickled livers.

Maybe we could knock this on the head now and agree to all get along? Most of us will have just spent a few days in the company of our family and friends over Christmas – different generations together all behaving ourselves, by and large, and seeing one another’s good sides. We should hold on to that feeling as we enter the new decade and use it to build bridges across the gulf between us, not hurl insults over it.

The Queen gets it. In her Christmas message this year, she praised the younger generations, saying that she had been “struck” by their “sense of purpose” in tackling issues such as climate change. She urged people to abandon their differences and “come together in the spirit of friendship and reconciliation”.

Many have interpreted her words as an appeal for unity over Brexit, but I think she was addressing the split between the generations, which, let’s face it, has been pretty apparent in the Royal family this year, too (and some of them have to work far beyond 70). She was telling us all to grow up.

As a member of a dwindling generation, Her Majesty understands that we really are stronger together, especially as we go through a national process of breaking away. That the old can learn from the young and vice versa.

I can only hope we listen. Oh, and if she’s got any advice on how to get the lid off a Fray Bentos pie, I’m all ears.