I’ve had a gutful of Generation Z’s rage against middle age
You know how age is just a number? And that staying youthful is all about mindset, updating your eye liner and ditching the skinny jeans? Well, according to a new survey, I’m technically a lot younger than my 18-year-old daughter.
Sure, it’s a bold claim, but one based on an extravagantly unscientific straw poll. Plus, it’s my truth and anyone who disagrees will be cancelled faster than you can say JK Rowling.
This week, a load of Generation Z-ers (those between their early teens and 25) were asked about the telltale signs of being “past it”, and they came up with a peculiarly specific list of all that is cringeworthy, uncool and excruciatingly middle-aged.
This damning rap sheet included but was not confined to: ordering a cappuccino (moist!), turning down the music to park the car (cray cray!), buying M&S underwear (epic fail!) and “being obsessed” about bin day. (Wow, does that really become A Thing?)
Not wishing to boast, but I aced them all, apart from “Has never posted a video on social media” and “Doesn’t understand how to use the remote control”, which made me smile – because who watches terrestrial TV any more, Nana?
My daughter, on the other hand, may look like a walking Instagram thirst trap but is actually a closet fuddy-duddy who once “asked for a ‘Rachel’ cut at the hairdresser”, “still has a DVD collection” and “wears comfortable shoes”. Ha! Loser!
Me? I drink cortados, listen to ear-bleedingly loud rap in the family Skoda estate, and after my 12-year-old gravely informed me she would have me killed if I ever wore Skechers, I bought overpriced Nike Airmax instead.
Because nobody wants to be old, right? Wrong. At the risk of coming across all antediluvian and judgy, I am increasingly less amused and more affronted by the wave of entitlement sweeping away all respect for elders, betters (oops, trigger warning) and, most saliently, them that pays the smartphone bills and the streaming platform subscriptions.
There’s a certain logic to controversial statues being torn down and university buildings being “denamed” because of their perceived glorification of practices we now consider to be abhorrent.
But I have a creeping disquiet that my generation is being written off for being, at best, feeble-minded and out-of-touch and, at worst, a bunch of craven quislings propping up institutional racism and the deliberate oppression of the transgender and non-binary.
He/she/they who controls the past, controls the future, as the saying goes. The future, of course, belongs to the young – even if we’re not entirely certain that their confidence will be matched by competence – and twas ever thus.
But, hand on heart, the shouty militancy of Gen Z feels all the more unnerving because their older siblings, millennials, have gained such a reputation as snowflakes: too passive to make a stand about anything much, apart from brunch.
Yes, I hold my hands up and admit I wanted to shake them out of their solipsism and force them to engage with the wider world. Now I’ve got a couple of confrontational Gen Z-ers at home, it’s more a case of being careful what I’d wished for.
I could dig out that passage from Aristotle lamenting the behaviour of the young, who are so “high minded because they have not yet been humbled by life” as proof there’s nothing new about any of this.
But the vogue for rage against the establishment feels uncomfortably personal rather than political. I mean, I don’t buy my underpinnings in Marks & Sparks, but would it be so terrible if I did? I don’t do Facebook, but for an awful lot of grandparents, it’s the best – and in lockdown only – way to share in their grandchildren’s lives.
Back in the day, we would gently mock the foibles of our parents to our friends. Here in the hyper-connectivity of the 21st century, social media platforms allow hundreds of thousands of youngsters to pile in and pile on the derision.
The virtual hall of mirrors has an enormously distorting, damaging effect. It’s why older authors are self-censoring their writing, crippled with the fear they will be “cancelled”.
Clare Alexander, a leading literary agent, this week told a Lords committee on freedom of expression: “This is getting quite inflammatory. I think the people who are having to self-censor are older.
“People over 40, and certainly over 60, are very worried about how they’re going to fit into current culture, and they’re very anxious about what sort of subjects they can write about.”
Members of the National Trust have started a rebellion against the findings of the charity’s recent slavery and anti-colonialism report, which detailed links between 93 of the properties in its care and historical slavery and colonialism. The “Restore Trust” (get it?) campaign aims to reverse the oversimplistic vilification of history.
Or to put it another way, they’d like to visit the nice houses with coffered ceilings that their annual membership pays to maintain without feeling horribly anguished.
Reasonable or unreasonable? Sadly in our age of New Puritanism, there is no bandwidth given over to measured discussion and compromise. There is nothing that can’t be weaponised in the war of the woke. Not even Jacobean staircases.
Closer to home, my offspring usually decline (refuse) to enter into any sort of debate, constructive or otherwise, about burning issues because my antediluvian opinions are irrelevant and wrong.
Somewhere in the mists of long ago, I dimly recall the same stand-offs with my own mother over the miners’ strike when I was 18. But the key difference was that I didn’t demonise her online as a Conservative and Unionist Party patsy, or demand she be silenced.
I am a parent in a very different landscape. I want my daughters to have views and to speak out. But I’d also like them to listen – and no matter how old they are, to always wear comfortable shoes.
‘Apparently, midlifers have a cringeworthy and uncool obsession with bin day’