It’s tough to be teenage when the world grounds you

There are two ways of looking at youth. One is that you’re never more alive, with all those hormones coursing through you, doing everything for the first time, and that your subsequent life is a whittling away until you end up shedding bitter tears looking at photographs of your childhood sweetheart on Facebook.

The other is that you’re just a shadow of your future self, running with the crowd and scared to stand out and that, as David Bowie said: “Ageing is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.”

One thing’s for sure; in Western culture, we see “teenage” as a time when, as the song says, we should be young, be foolish but be happy. Even the Amish insist that young people leave their communities for a few years between the ages of 16 and 20 for “Rumspringa”, which translates as “running around”.

But what happens when the best years of your life are played out against a global pandemic and the world decides to ground you – counter-intuitive to everything you feel inclined to do, from making out with perfect strangers to making your way in the big wide world?

A recent survey by the Royal Society for Public Health claimed that three quarters of 18- to 24-yearolds are anxious about the future, compared with only 47 per cent of the over-75s. With the recent fiasco over exam results, you could forgive the nation’s youth for being terrified that the grown-ups in charge are winging it in a way we simply don’t expect from our leaders.

In turn, sometimes it’s hard not to feel impatient with the youth – “Now you’ve got something to boo-boo about!” – not because we old people are morally outraged by their wildness, as is the natural way, but because even before the pandemic they seemed to be carping fussbudgets, timid beyond their years.

With their allergies and anxieties and safe spaces and trigger warnings, forever being driven to climate change protests in their helicopter parents 4x4s, when they weren’t crouched over their computers looking up new reasons to worry, they were eschewing booze and sex and refusing to move out in order to police their pleasure-seeking parents behaviour.

Yes, these are clichés – but no more so than their equally dismissive “OK Boomer” attitude towards my generation of baby-eating Brexiteers.

Mind you, looking back, we’re fine ones to talk; how my cohort loved to stomp around snarling “No future!” before going on to have an excellent time transforming ourselves into sexy-greedy Eighties go-getters. We were the last lucky generation, no doubt about it, with the Wild West End of London still affordable to live in (I bought a three-bedroomed flat in Bloomsbury in my early twenties on the strength of my job as a journalist – imagine that now!) and the media expanding at such a dizzying rate that one could be reviewing records for the pop press on a Monday and ensconced with a proper newspaper column on one of Fleet Street’s finest by Friday.

I’m not at all a pessimistic person, but I feel that the idea of being a teenager may revert to how it was before they were officially created in the Fifties – going straight from children to adults as soon as they can find work to support their poor old locked-down parents in the unimaginable wasteland of our devastated economy. Life certainly won’t be full of hope and adventure as my generation’s was – so much of the ambitious teenager’s life is about escaping to the big city, but who’s going to want to run away to London now there’s no there there?

But let’s look on the bright side. Maybe growing up on a diet of dystopian novels and Billie Eilish fugues and dire warnings from Greta Thunberg will have tempered our young to be stronger than they seem. And if not, they can always comfort themselves with the fact that happiness declines from youth through middle age, hitting a low at 50 and rising to a peak at 70.

By then, a vaccine will surely have been found and the young – their clean-living ways finally paying off – can do all the things they haven’t had the chance to do, as we did when we lived in modern times.