Proof that millennials do not live in the real world

It seems the millennial generation lives its most vivid – its most polite – life online. According to a new survey, virtual manners are now more important than real ones; and this is convenient. For instance, 42 per cent of millennials say they would not give up their seat on public transport for the elderly or pregnant, which is repellent, but more than a third think that ignoring someone on social media, which is not the real world, is rude.

Similarly, 28 per cent would jump a queue, but only slightly fewer (22 per cent) think that even sharing the ending to a television show or film – compressed into a noun called “spoiler” – is also very rude. How can talking about TV on Twitter be almost as rude as pushing past people?

I wonder if the technology is seducing us. (Stupid question. Obvious answer. Of course, it has.) It seems we identify so much with the technology, we think the technology has feelings that must be protected. That is, we are doing to smartphones what we do to babies and puppies and food. I have projected similarly while stroking my puppy or baby and eating: I must not upset the puppy by not stroking it, the baby by not loving it, or the doughnut by not eating it. All of which is mad when you apply it to a small computer with a picture of an apple on it.

Some things remain the same though, which is comforting. Men are still the ruder sex by double. It is possible, then, that women will soon get less respect – than smartphones.

The unwillingness to get up for the frail, I put down to fashionable victimhood, too; when everyone is disabled, no one is. It’s a mad kind of equality. I once had a friend who, on exiting a disabled lavatory to find an angry man in a wheelchair, shouted: “I’m disabled, too.” And he was, if you think narcissism is a disability, which it isn’t. I am aware I sound about 3,000 years old, but the right to believe that not getting up for the elderly is more than twice as rude as sharing the ending to Succession (there is no succession, ha!) is a hill I might as well die on. It’s as good as any.