So we millennials are growing up more slowly – but not all neoteny is voluntary

shouldn’t we start life later, too? When resources are scarce and manual labour ubiquitous, humans follow a “fast-life strategy”, raising as many children as possible as quickly as they can. But in abundance, we switch to a “slow-life strategy”: fewer children, more intensively raised. Society today is more credentialised, so it’s natural that we should spend more time in education before we pay our own way. And, speaking personally, I have no desire to die in a fireball over Holland.

But not all neoteny is voluntary. Millennials came of age during the financial crisis, and we bear the scars. We earn £8,000 less in our twenties than our parents did, yet spend more of our income on housing. The average 60-year-old has 17 times more property wealth than the average 30-year-old. Analysts once thought we millennials were fundamentally different: we wanted to rent in big cities rather than own in suburbs, valued experiences over possessions and weren’t fussed about children. Yet recently data suggest we have begun to fall back into line – only later than expected. Most of my friends are just as interested in the bourgeois dream as their parents were. They simply can’t afford it yet.

This creates two problems. First, our late blooming may mean some of us who want to settle down never will. Second, we can already see how some people hate being infantilised. On the Left, the average age of Labour voters has shot upwards; on the Right, young men flock to the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, who promises structure and direction with his motto: “sort yourself out, bucko”. The axolotls are revolting, and it would be a dire mistake to assume we are all happy with our condition.