What fools we were. 

Though Generation X were the last of the analogue humans, we had grown up with computers. But the internet was vast, exponentially so, and would impact every aspect of life. It was, to my young mind, an ecumenopolis, a colossal world city, incandescent with possibility. My first visit to an internet café was mind-blowing, as jerry-built as it was in retrospect. Long-used to relatives heading off to Boston and beyond and vanishing, it was astonishing to communicate with complete strangers in real-time, with ease and at little expense, on the other side of Earth. 

It was an intoxicating force. But the rapturous delirium could not last.

The internet was to cause a rupture even deeper than the printing press, manned flight or mass electrification. And yet my feeling is that the real divide was not before and after the internet; but rather before and after its transformation from an ever-expanding cosmos of potential and its contraction into the global village where we’re now trapped. An expansionist universe collapsing into neo-feudalism. This is the story of how the market eats everything including our wildest dreams — and it does so because of a language trick that we cannot resist. 

In pre-modern times, charlatans preyed upon superstitions, reading portents in comets or flogging bones. With the emergence of modern science came alchemists promising elixirs of youth or the transmutation of lead into gold. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to all manner of swindlers boasting mechanical and medical cure-alls. Oscilloclasts would cure any malady through radiowaves. Daffy’s Elixir could ease everything from the Vapours to King’s Evil. Coca-Cola was enough to dispel morphine addiction. Some innovators believed in their products, even when the costs were severe — the quietening syrups that sent Victorian babies into permanent sleep or revitalising Radium cures that caused jaws to crumble. Medicine shows are seen as the high-water mark of this tendency: travelling fairs of confidence tricksters who would alleviate locals of their money and naivety. Then they disappeared, absorbed into the unholy pan-global entity of 21st-century advertising.   

It is difficult to accept, gazing down from the lofty heights of progress on the sinners and dupes of the past, that we reside in the Golden Age of charlatanism. We like to think we’ve developed a thick skin towards commerce — but objects are the least of our worries. It’s no longer a question of being sold dubious products. 

Today’s corporations now deal in intangibles: lifestyles, philosophies, diets, self-image and ambition have all become marketable assets. They are promising us shortcuts to status, vital in an age of precarious hustling, as well as quick fixes to our innumerable economic, political and spiritual deficits. They’re selling the grift — or rather the prospect of escape from it. They’re delivered to us not by the outdatedly gauche media of billboards and television, but directly injected into social media, attuned via algorithms to our tastes and inadequacies. 

I open Instagram stories and am instantly bombarded with snake-oil salespeople hawking life-changing tonics, none of which come in a bottle. I’m told my life is unfulfilled, and I believe it, as life inevitably is, and they’ve the solitary answer. And so, they arrive, following earlier errant clicks, the desire lines of my own self-betrayals. One pitch tells me I need to manifest my desires. Another to embrace moderation. A third that I need to protect my child from mobile phones. Another that I should confront my toxic masculinity. Magnesium will save me. Masturbation will steal my life-force. Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter “M”. Each is a rabbit hole of TED talks “Smart Thinking” replicants, Faustian apps and Kafkaesque subscriptions, which will relieve me of my time and debit card details. 

More from this author

Britain is haunted by Dickensian ghosts

By Darran Anderson

Every good liar knows the best lies are wrapped around a nugget of truth. If we combined and enacted all the advice of social media, then perhaps physical excellence, sound mental health, enlightenment, happiness, even, might well await. Yet professional liars know the greatest lure is the unattainable and immeasurable. It’s these seductive delusions, cascading on the infinite scroll of social media, that have collapsed the internet. How did this happen?

The answer lies in the constants of the medieval village, which our global village now mimics. Festivities are periodic. Tyrants come and go. The function of the town square is to sell, regardless. Post-Reformation, the market is all. The new faith. There are many fallacies in terms of sales (cost bias, appeal to closure, sales puff, Dunning–Kruger effect etc). These might be seen as positive, at least for the hucksters, but the real profit and damage is to be made in the shadow-side. Consider what constitutes the medieval village and our own version of it.

We still have the feudal lords — CEOs, politicians etc — along with the town criers and priests of the chattering class, in thrall to the establishment while feigning to critique it. Crucially, ambitions and dreams are not the only exploited fare. All our natural fears, neurosis, envy and malice, exacerbated by living in a time when everything feels like it’s in (mis)managed decline, can be directed not to their source or solution but to the promise of temporary catharsis. This is exacted upon whoever happens to be languishing in the stocks of the global village square at any given moment, for anything from a semantic to a sexual infraction. Whatever justice, retribution or cleansing this does or does not bring, it changes nothing in the larger scheme of things. It is designed to change nothing, other than venting very real pressures through successive social media moral panics and individualised punishments.

How could we be so sophisticated and yet so susceptible? Leon Trotsky wrote of Germany mutating into the Third Reich: “Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the 20th century the 13th.” I know this quote not directly but from its inclusion in one of the great overlooked prophetic texts of our time — Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995).

The book is a jeremiad for science and against ignorance. According to Sagan, rigorous enquiry is the best way to begin to understand existence and gain a foothold in our own destiny. Science, he argues, is too important to be left to scientists and that a population which abandons it will be doomed. Though he’s most scathing towards monetised pseudoscience and organised religion (“We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every 12 hours”), he also warns that science is never absolutely certain or settled, and to suggest so is unscientific. It’s not a series of sacred precepts but rather a constantly developing and self-critical way of seeing the world. Even Isaac Newton, sacrosanct for centuries, was proved inaccurate by Albert Einstein. 

When scientists believe, dogmatically or egotistically, they become priests. But science is, or should be, a “built in error-correcting machine” requiring constant maintenance and good faith. The rust that devours and endangers the machine is the same plague that has made the internet feel, paradoxically, smaller than it was; it is the plague of fallacies.

Suggested reading

The Portal has revealed the best of mankind

By Sam Leith

The fallacies of the internet are legion. Sagan makes it through around a dozen, but all are rife now. Ad hominem. No True Scotsman. Arguments from authority. Sunken cost. Straw men. Whataboutery. Scapegoat. The law of the excluded middle. Motte-and-bailey. Like most evils, they’re exceptionally tempting, somewhere between a language game and a mind-hack to deceive and distract your opponent. Victory ensues but at the cost of an accruing deficit with reality. It’s the refuge of every debating scoundrel and it is an epidemic online. 

Today, the market encourages weaponised fallacies in their most pernicious and dangerous forms, aided by the architecture of social media: deliberate brevity that prevents nuance, complexity or contextualisation; biased, monetised algorithms; the deliberate stirring of controversy for the metrics; the reliance on dopamine surges and adrenaline rushes; the manufacture of hyper-partisan echo-chambers; the raising of discourse to a hysterical pitch. In a neoliberal age when substantive political change seems unachievable, the battlefields are almost entirely in the realm of linguistics and signifiers. The more ineffectual in actual life, the more heated, brutal, righteous and unforgiving online. 

The problem might be an inability to adapt to a mercantile age. Though Sagan alludes to the source of our animus, he has a blind spot regarding the influence of the market. He realises that “spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available”, while “scepticism does not sell well”. And he argues against the “dumbing down of America” through “the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media”. He laments the world of “30-second sound bites”. And yet he fails to see that the market is not only the primary beneficiary of “entrepreneurial” panaceas but also the pillories and gallows of the global village, as distraction, catharsis and deterrent. 

It was this that made the online world claustrophobic, this that betrayed the initial spirit of what the internet could have been. While we tear each apart in false dichotomies, purity spirals, cosplay, and the narcissism of small differences, a deeper tectonic division goes overlooked. The meaningful chasm is between those who use the internet (and are in turn used by it in data harvesting, social engineering, surveillance), and those who profit from and stir the “culture wars” for our engagement and their profit. The Forbes’ list of billionaires is one place to begin. 

How, then, to escape? The answer lies not in answers but the antithesis. For we’re drowning in answers, and almost all of them are merely adverts. Freedom begins instead in endless questioning, uncertainty, beginning again with the scepticism and wonder of children. We must remember that there’s an entire universe out there, even if the stars are hidden by the jaundiced skyglow of the village.

Both conflicts are being shaped by new economic realities, principally a largely sluggish world economy that is, particularly in Western democracies, further hamstrung by a growing push for “Net Zero”. The adoption of green “de-growth” philosophy impacts both on the youth of the West, who face a consciously scaled-down quality of life, as well as a new generation in developing countries desperate for growth.

In high-income countries, the youngest generations already face fewer opportunities than their parents and grandparents. Slow growth and lack of opportunity mean they can look forward to a future characterised by a greater economic insecurity, poorer living conditions, less chance of owning a home or car, or even eating well. Such attitudes are exacerbated by the relentless hysteria poured out by the green movement and its media minions. Indeed, according to one recent survey, a majority of young people around the world see the planet as essentially doomed by climate change.

Perhaps as a result, when it comes to politics, many new voters seem comfortable rallying around polarising and extreme figures. In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders amassed more votes from people under 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. In France, meanwhile, Le Monde described this “political de-socialisation” as having fuelled support for the likes of both the Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon and far-Rightist Marine Le Pen.

Further reading

Why we need the Generation Wars

By Jenny Bristow

But alienation, rather than radicalisation, is a more fitting description of the emerging Western generation. The biggest problem lies not in lack of jobs or even skills, but a population that is increasingly “unengaged”.

Nor is this merely confined to the West. Evidence of a “great resignation” is also emerging in East Asia. In Japan, young adults, according to David Pilling, are “pioneering a new sort of high-quality, low-energy, low-growth existence”. In China, meanwhile, the children of largely upwardly mobile parents face an increasingly fraught economic future. Xi Jinping may hope for a generation that will follow the path of devoted Stalinist Stakhonovites or Maoist Red Guards, but confronts a generation more concerned with 20% unemployment and limited options than ideological fervour. As in Japan and the West, China now sees a generation — including an increasingly underemployed surplus of educated people — who eschew their parents’ work ethic, embracing instead a desire to “lay flat” as they essentially avoid the congestion and stresses of urban life. 

Combined with rapid demographic decline in East Asia, Europe and the United States, the mass disengagement of the young will make building a stronger world economy an even greater challenge. The remarkable economic boom of the past century sparked a population explosion — 75% of the world’s population growth was born in the last century. Yet, birth rates are now dropping, especially in more developed nations. Globally, last year’s population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see declines.

And as workforces shrink, growth will suffer, as has been the case throughout modern history. In the United States, workforce growth has slowed to around a third of the level in 1970, and seems destined to fall even more. Nearly 70% of US counties have seen declines in their under-25 populations, a trend particularly marked in big coastal metropolitan regions.

China faces a similar dilemma, with its senior population expected to have more than tripled by 2050, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. The transition will be made particularly tough by a welfare state that is underdeveloped, and whose ranks of retirees are soaring: the Chinese retirement age is 60 for men, and just 50 for women.

Further reading

Boomer Europe is dying

By Aris Roussinos

All this sets up what may be the biggest generational conflict of all — between the still-youthful developing world and the ageing high-income countries. Demographic decline and slow growth in high-income economies threaten to undermine the future of developing countries, notably in Africa. By 2050, UN projections suggest that nearly 55% of world population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain relatively high. However, during the following 50 years, that share is projected to account for all growth as populations plummet elsewhere. With workforces shrinking in China, East Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase by upwards of 700 million. And with this “youth bulge” across the developing world not expected to peak until later this decade, Africa could well be, as the Brookings Institution suggests, “our last hope” in the West to forestall demographic and economic decline.

Essentially, high-income countries face a choice. They will feel enormous pressure to restrain imports from places such as sub-Saharan Africa to keep their own economies running and the pension system solvent. In the US, more than 40% of boomers have no significant retirement savings and the successor generations appear even more bereft. Without an East Asia-style boom, the only option for the developing world’s youth will be more migration to the West, both legal and illegal, which is expected to average 2.2 million annually through 2050.

This would represent such a surge that Europe, in particular, would be ill-equipped to prevent, let alone assimilate. Indeed, often despite promises to the contrary, immigration, legal and illegal, is at record levels in Britain and Germany, and remains at historically high levels in France. In response, despite crushing labour shortages, many countries — including the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, and Germany itself — have tightened their immigration controls. The resulting migrant populations of unemployed and underemployed people have created social unrest in Europe’s cities, much as we have seen in America.

Some, such as Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, consider such demographic shifts to be “no bad thing”: “We need a breather. A stable, sagacious society that has lost its adolescent restlessness and settled into middle age sounds appealing.” Yet this view ignores the ramifications of a generational conflict that seems certain to intensify as both young people in high-income countries as well as those in the developing world face a potentially frustrating future. Like the generational conflicts both within societies and between them, the global demographic crisis is just beginning. And in the meantime, the West’s adolescent restlessness can’t simply be wished away.

Jacob Furedi: Bret, you’ve spoken before about the struggle you had writing this book. You first tried in 1981, and then again a number of times in the decades since. What changed that meant you could write it now?

Bret Easton Ellis: I’m old. That’s really why I ended up writing this book. I was 16 or 17 when I started writing Less Than Zero. I was in high school at Buckley, Los Angeles, and something happened in my senior year. The writer in me suddenly got a little out of control. I started to embellish a lot. I started to make up things. I was a fabulist. I believed things were happening that really weren’t happening.

I had a girlfriend, one of the most popular girls in our senior class at Buckley, but I was gay, and only pretending to be a boyfriend. I was having a secret affair with a closeted football player, and that was a whole other drama. (Unfortunately, I told a good friend of mine about it, and he confronted the football player.) I made up stories about an English teacher. I was making up stories about my family. And everything kind of collapsed. Becoming a writer had spilled over into my real life. And it was like an origin story: how do you control this superpower? How do you make it work, and not wreck your life and wreck the lives of others?

This was in my senior year, in 1981 and 1982, and I realised I had to pull back. And that was the moment when I moved from being a teenager to being a man, when the corruption of adulthood happened and moved me into the world of adults.

I interrupted Less than Zero and I tried to write The Shards, but it was just too big, too complicated. There were too many characters, too many things that happened to me that I wanted to dramatise. So I forgot about The Shards, and went back to writing Less Than Zero, which was a vibe novel: parties, the beach, nightclubs. It wasn’t heavily plotted, there was very little characterisation. It seemed like the easier book to write. Decade after decade, I would go back to The Shards and try to figure out how to write it, but I never could.

Then the pandemic hit. And the Hollywood dream I had chased for 14 years — of directing the scripts that I had written — died with lockdown. We were all stuck in our apartments. And I found myself doing something that I never did, which was going on Facebook, thinking about classmates from that senior year — a lot of classmates that I had perhaps betrayed.

Jacob: What do you mean by “betrayed”?

Bret: Well, certainly, my girlfriend. And certainly the boy who was closeted. I had certainly made up stories about things I felt bad about. I started looking at these people who I hadn’t spoken to in decades. Some I couldn’t find. They didn’t have any social media presence. And that began to haunt me.

As with every book I’ve written, it starts with a feeling. I was confused about not finding those people. I was feeling nostalgic. I began to look for all the places that we hung out, the coffee shops, the malls, the movie theatres, the restaurants, the nightclubs — they were gone. All of them are gone. I started listening to the music from 1981 and 1982 — Icehouse, Kim Wilde, Blondie — and things began to swirl around me.

The novel just poured out of me, in a way that none of the fiction that I’ve ever written has, and it upsets me now to realise, at the age of 58, that I wasted those key, great years, your forties and your fifties, when a lot of American writers produce their masterpiece. They’re really at the height of their powers. And I had been in Hollywood chasing a mini-series, and trying to get movies made that had just died. This book should have been written 10 or 15 years earlier, and then I could have gone on a book tour and at least been appealing to groupies!

Jacob: So you think you’ve missed your opportunity to write a “masterpiece”?

Bret: I’m not immune to the idea of how people perceive me. I do read my reviews: I know there are a lot of five-star and one-star reviews on Amazon. Some even say DNF — Did not finish!

But at the same time, I’m not a career writer. Books are a hobby. I’m not that writer who works with an editor at a publishing house and says, “OK, I’m gonna have this book in 18 months, and you’re going to publish it.” I don’t really write for an audience. I dedicated my new novel, The Shards, to no one. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for myself. And it was a very emotional thing to write. That’s how every single novel I’ve written works.

Someone once asked me why I haven’t written a memoir, a proper memoir. But I have written my memoir, over nine volumes of them — my novels. All have a narrator of the same sort of age as I was, and they are all a reflection of whatever pain, confusion, distress I was going through at the time. And writing each novel helped me move through those problems.

Jacob: What was that catharsis in American Psycho? What did Bret Easton Ellis reveal about himself in that novel?

Bret: The catharsis was that I had moved into a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. I didn’t want to be a man, and I was becoming a man. I was out of college. I was living on my own in Manhattan. I was making money from my books and I wanted to fit into the world of adults. But I just hated the world that was being presented to me.

It was the end of the Reagan era: yuppies, Manhattan, Wall Street. What it meant to be a man, how masculinity was defined, was very different from what I aspired to be. And yet… I wanted to fit in.

I felt, in a lot of ways, like Patrick Bateman, because I don’t think Patrick Bateman is necessarily as insane as people perceive him… He wasn’t wrong about a lot of things that he noticed! There’s a truth to his criticism of the society that he was a part of, which comes out every now and then in the novel.

I was also interested in creating fiction, which is what Patrick Bateman does. Is Patrick Bateman fantasising about all of this? Is it real? Is it not? Is he creating these narratives because he’s so angry, so crazy, so upset about stuff? The only way he can feel anything is to have these insane violent fantasies.

I was also deeply impacted by growing up in California, in the late Seventies and into the Eighties, when it was home base for serial killers. They were everywhere: two or three operating at once. Cults, too — it was just part of the wallpaper. I was five or six when the Manson murders happened. I was talking to Quentin Tarantino about this as well. Because he grew up in California at the same time. And he said: “Man! The Manson murders just really freaked everyone out.” And it traumatised me too.

Jacob: Now you’re 58, do you feel more comfortable than you were when you wrote American Psycho?

Bret: I do feel somewhat embarrassed exhibiting myself now, in a way that I didn’t at 28 or 38. When I started doing book tours, I was the youngest person in the room. Now I’m the oldest. I do feel at 58 that it is kind of unbecoming: you’ve aged out of that notion of having fun on book tours, staying up all night, then doing interviews on Oprah the next day.

I did not do a book tour for The Shards in the United States. I refused to do one, although it was very problematic for my publisher there. But the media in the United States is insane. There’s no reason to try to deal with a fake media that’s really out to get you — and is far snarkier than in England.

But in England, I am also publishing my new novel in a very different way. I have left Picador, which had been my publisher since I was 21. They didn’t want The Shards, so I am publishing it with Swift instead.

I didn’t know anybody at Picador’s new regime. I don’t know why they didn’t want the novel. Maybe it’s because I am a white privileged male, writing a novel with no diversity or inclusivity. I think they wanted me to write more about the Nicaraguan maid that Bret [the character in The Shards] was with. I’m not really joking! I do think that there is something about the tenor of the times, and this book itself, that they didn’t want.

Jacob: While we’re on the subject of publishing, you must have heard about sensitivity readers. Can you imagine The Shards in the hands of a sensitivity reader? Or American Psycho?

Bret: Well, The Shards did get through my publishing house in America, which does employ sensitivity readers. And look, I know they exist. I heard a horrible story about sensitivity readers, and a novel written by a middle-aged woman about middle-aged women. The women want to meet and talk about their problems with their husbands. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant. One of them says: we probably shouldn’t go there, because of the MSG. And someone flagged that as racist — you can’t have that. So they made the writer move the scene to a coffee shop. I really don’t want to be a part of that.

Maybe part of the reason The Shards got through is just because I’m old — I was grandfathered in. But still I heard the view that there was way too much sex in the novel, and that it was not a “positive” portrayal of homosexuality. I mean, what is a positive portrayal of homosexuality?

Jacob: Ok, but at the same time, if you look at Amazon UK, The Shards is currently sitting at number one… in the section for Gay Biography.

Bret: Did you have to tell me that? It’s not Gay Biography at all.

Jacob: There is a biographical element to it, though. And that seems to be quite common these days. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans — a lot of fantastic creators are going back to their pasts. By writing The Shards, were you trying to escape the present?

Bret: I think you hit an age where you want to go back into the past, and you want either to romanticise it, or to understand the shadow history of which you weren’t aware at the time. A lot of great film directors have done that. At a certain age, Federico Fellini made Amarcord about his childhood; Alfonso Cuarón made Roma; Woody Allen made Radio Days; Ingmar Bergman made Fanny and Alexander. I’m writing fiction that took place in 1981. I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it.

Jacob: But you still keep an eye on the present. Your last book, White (2019), was rooted in contemporary politics — on the state of liberalism and Trump.

Bret: It wasn’t about any of those things. It was about Generation X — a cultural examination of Gen X and their attitudes. It wasn’t a defence of Trump (which is what the crazy moment of 2019 thought the book was); it was about the reactions to Trump.

And as a member of Gen X, I was interested in why we had gotten into such a hysterical divide. I think part of the reason why Gen X is the most conservative of the generations — much more than boomers, much more than millennials — is that we had the most freedom. We looked to be shocked. We wanted to be offended. We loved dirty jokes. We loved music.

But today, the world has to be childproof. And you have to think like the better people. I didn’t experience that. So I think part of the reason why Gen X is 10 to 12 points more conservative in the polls in the US is precisely because of this reaction against this kind of authoritarian language. That’s what White was about. It was not a defence of Trump or an attack on liberalism. I was a liberal — what are you talking about? It just so happened that the culture had moved so far over to this other side that I guess I wasn’t anymore. So that’s what that was about and why it was written in a very heated moment in 2019.

I would never write that book now. I was asked recently whether I would write that last chapter again, where I was talking about working with Kanye West for five years on projects that never happened. Kanye is a bit crazy. But the Kanye now is really no different from the Kanye I met in 2013. He is the same person. He is outrageous. He is a provocateur. He is going way too far on the platform he is on now…

Jacob: Is he an antisemite?

Bret: I don’t believe he’s an antisemite. No, I do not believe that at all. I believe that he’s a destroying artist. And I believe that he’s at a point in his career, because I’ve been I’ve been there too…

Jacob: But you’ve never said anything that could be as construed as antisemitic as he as.

Bret: … I’ve had a lot of a Jewish boyfriends. But look, my Jewish boyfriend and I make antisemitic jokes all the time. What’s wrong with an antisemitic joke? But the problem is that with Kanye, he wants to live in a world that is completely free and… To not be able to say that you liked voting for someone or that you like this… And that there’s this entire industry that is trying to shut down free speech and label a lot of stuff hate speech… I think that’s what Kanye is reacting to. I don’t really know why he wants to die on this particular hill, but I kind of get it, knowing Kanye the way that I did. He just wants to say “fuck you” to everybody. “I can say whatever the fuck I want. If I want to say that I like fucking Adolf Hitler, what are you going to do about it?”

My boyfriend’s Jewish. And my stepfather is a Jew who lost his family in the Holocaust… I know, I know. Saying that is so stupid… And he fought in the Israeli war and everything. And he just shrugged and said “Kanye is a moron”. He didn’t turn it into some gigantic tornado of hysteria that the American press liked to do — and that corporate culture likes to now punish. But I would not rewrite that chapter about Kanye or add that into it because that took place in 2018. That chapter was a reflection of that moment, and where we were, and I thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of who Kanye was overall.

Jacob: I want to pick up on something you said earlier. You talked about that freedom that you and Gen X had, but also how conservative that generation has become. How did that happen? And does that mean you’ve become a conservative?

Bret: I don’t know how to answer that. That is such a millennial question! I don’t even know how to start answering that question.

Jacob: Try and answer it?

Bret: What was the first part of it again?

Jacob: I’ll rephrase it. Are you a conservative or a liberal?

Bret: I’m nothing. I’m not a conservative or a liberal. At least in the US, I can’t agree with either of them. I think they’re both completely bonkers. I don’t watch the news anymore. We have the Food Network on all of our TV screens, or video games. I’m done.

It’s very hard to follow it when it all seems like a simulacrum, a preordained narrative that is being fed to you. The mainstream press in the United States right now just seems so fucking fake.

Jacob: That seems the perfect place to go to the audience for questions.

*

Is anyone going to write the great millennial novel?

Bret: No. Last time I was here, everyone was telling me that Sally Rooney has written the great millennial novel. And I think: she’s fine. Whatever. But I just don’t know whether the novel is vital to millennials as a way of expression. There’s nothing bad or wrong about that — they just won’t write it.

I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel.

I’m not saying that’s indicative of everyone, but it was telling in terms of what the novel meant to them. Thirty years ago, everyone had read the Pulitzer Prize winner of that year, even if you were not a writer. People then had a different relationship to novels from what they do now.

So how can there then be the great millennial novel? I hope I’m wrong. I’ve read novels by millennials, and some are good. But I just don’t think novels mean as much to their generation as they did to Gen X or Boomers.

*

America’s culture of violence has clearly influenced your novels. What do you see its role being?

Bret: Violence is tense, it’s gripping, it’s dramatic, it’s emotional. Tarantino once said that he uses violence in the way that people use the musical numbers in movies. They’re just there. They’re fun, they’re exciting. They lift the movie up into another tier and they’re integral to his vision of the world.

I feel the same way about my books. I don’t think that the violence is gratuitous, as people would argue about American Psycho. It’s not only part of my sensibility, but also part of the subjects that I write about. It would be inauthentic to write about a serial killer without certain details about the murders.

I never forgot when Jean-Luc Godard was taken to task for having bloody scenes in his movies. And he said: “That’s not violence, that’s red.” Violence is just part of my aesthetic, but then again, I can’t over-intellectualise it. It just seems like an authentic part of some of the books that I’ve written.

*

Sorry to bring this back to politics, but how are we going to get ourselves out of this mess?

Bret: I don’t know how we’re going to do it. In the last two American elections, there were tens of millions of people who thought they were fraudulent. They don’t believe in the process. There is a huge divide in that country. You would be shocked at the percentage of people who said 2020 was an illegitimate election. And then the other side said that Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016, or that the Russians aided him or whatever.

I don’t want to blame the media because, when you look at TV ratings and newspaper circulation, you wonder: where are people getting their information? If CNN has, like, 300,000 people watching it, is CNN really the devil as the Right likes to say? The distrust of elections is out of control. I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I’m not the right person to ask this because I’ve veered away from politics. You can’t really have that kind of debate, or help people see things in a different light. Talking about America is now like talking into a mirror.

Will I vote? I guess it depends on who’s running. But I am in the majority of Americans who don’t vote. The majority of Americans don’t trust the political system, and they don’t like the people running. And so why would you vote, if you feel that way?

*

When I was in my mid-teens, I wanted to be a writer, and showed my dad something I’d written. He didn’t like it very much, and I’ve struggled to write since. You started at a very young age — did you ever have a moment like that? 

Bret: I’ve noticed that millennials have a huge sense of shame, which my generation simply didn’t have. I did not care what my parents thought about my books. I do know that my parents were not happy with some of my books. I found out after my father died that he described Less Than Zero to my mother as “that dirty little book that our son wrote”. My mother is proud of me, but I don’t think I write the kind of books that my mother particularly likes. That’s fine. They weren’t written for her.

Wanting to be liked was not part of Gen X. But I do think it’s a major — and crushing — part of my boyfriend [musician Todd Michael Schultz]’s millennial generation. He wants to be liked. He wants to be followed. He wants likes on Instagram, a lot of views on his YouTube video. He is exhibiting himself. He’s not a typical millennial — he is very critical of his generation, which might be one of the reasons why we’ve gotten along, and been together for as long as we have. But he wants to be accepted in ways that I just never did, and my generation never did.

A teacher reading something I wrote and slamming it made no difference to me. At college, my professor read one of the first stories I had turned in, and said, why all the brand names? Why are you mentioning the songs people are listening to, or what’s playing on TV? And my reaction was, well, this is part of the wallpaper, the background noise of their lives. That’s life. And he took me to task and said: “You’re going to end up on the ash heap of literature. If you keep writing books like this, you’re going to date yourself.” And I really didn’t care.

*

What are you reading at the moment?

Bret: A collection of essays by David Mamet, the playwright. He’s a big free speech advocate and these essays are a very interesting take: short, to the point. I’m also reading a collection of non-fiction pieces by Michel Houellebecq, which are just absolutely terrific. Mamet and Houellebecq understand our moment better than anybody; they see through the hypocrisy, what they call the “authoritarian liberalism” that has been infecting Europe as well as the United States. They locate it, they decimate it, and it’s pretty great. I’m also reading Great Expectations.

The last great book I read was The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, which I’d never read before, and it is absolutely amazing — with a spectacular ending, so terrifying. It’s just wonderful. I was also blown away by Lost Illusions by Balzac. I’m disappointed with a lot of contemporary fiction.

*

What would you have been if you had failed as a writer?

Jacob: That’s a great question. Because, Bret, when you were asked this before, you once answered that you would have been a porn star. Were you serious?

Bret: Well, I hope I would have been a successful porn star! But seriously… I don’t know. There are days when I think I am a failure.

As a writer, I’ve had a really strange career in terms of being equally liked and equally hated, never nominated for a prize. The American mainstream literary press thinks I’m a bit of a joke — they don’t really take me seriously. So I don’t wake up in my bed, clutching my Pulitzer Prize, my National Book Award, my framed great reviews in The New Yorker, whatever. I never had that kind of adulation. And I didn’t really care about any of that.

What I do care about are the tactile, tangible, pragmatic things that you have to deal with in your everyday life. You know, I have ageing parents. I have a boyfriend who went through major addiction issues two years ago. I’m really worried that this is the first time I’ve left him alone for two weeks… I’ve had major plumbing issues in my apartment for fucking ages. It’s been a Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to get the plumbing sorted and it’s so expensive. And I’ve been thinking about these things much more than I have about The Shards. That stuff really is the main part of my life and so… Failure? Success? I don’t know. I’m just a human being, with other concerns.

The Shards is published by Swift Press.

But now the kids are back in the public domain, in the form of Greta Thunberg and her ageing entourage. The future is back on the table. Our 95-year-old monarch has urged world leaders at COP26 to make sacrifices “not for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps”. The wrinklies gluing themselves to roads for Insulate Britain claim they want to “protect future generations everywhere”, while their nihilistic godparent Extinction Rebellion says its goal is “creating a world that is fit for generations to come”.

Yet none of this talk about future generations is really about children, or the future. Rather, it is better understood as a highfalutin form of presentism; the projection of a state of emergency into the years ahead, to provide moral cover for political and economic decisions made by global elites above the heads of their citizens. Forget the present day, and the choices of the current demos. All that matters is action — and the only people who can act are those with the power to do so. Otherwise, as Greta says, it’s all just “blah blah blah”.

Such rhetoric might be widespread. But it cannot mask the fact that questions such as what to do about climate change are ripe for democratic decision-making — particularly because they involve weighing up the costs and benefits of policy measures in the context of our lives today and our children’s tomorrow. Indeed, rather than engaging electorates in a long-term debate, we see a global elite hell-bent on wrapping up international commitments in a two-week conference, egged on by protesters demanding that they “talk less and do more”.

Unfortunately, this call to bypass citizens in the project of ‘the future’ has some appeal — not least among young people, who have been socialised into the idea that that democratic power counts for little, and that if they want change to happen, they need to look to those with the power to bring it about. “We can’t be the ones that will make that change, we can just show that it needs to happen,” a participant in the COP26 ‘school strike’ protests told the BBC, speaking to the infantilised assumption that meaningful solutions can only come from the top down.

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Implicit within this, climate activists express the sentiment of living in a ‘risk society’, in which human experience is framed by a magnified sense of threat and uncertainty, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The concept of risk society was theorised by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the late 20^th century, to capture an ‘end of history’ situation in which globalised modern threats render human agency obsolete. From this perspective, the problems confronting our society are insurmountable. When confronted with the threat of a climate emergency, to which the only possible solutions presented are swift, global, and significant measures, democratic decision-making by citizens in separate nation states seems ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.

And yet our current state of crisis has exposed a contradiction in this denial of human agency. During the Covid pandemic, and now with the climate emergency, a fatalistic accommodation to the survivalist mentality of the risk society has accompanied a fantastically hubristic narrative offered by world leaders in politics, science, Big Tech and other globalised entities. An insistence on the unprecedented, super-infectious deadliness of Covid ran alongside proclamations that humanity could eradicate this virus; that, as in a war, we can win. With the climate emergency, however, overwrought claims of standing on the brink at “a minute to midnight” are offered as excuses for the idea that we can, in a few short years, stop the warming and turn the whole thing around.

What is offered, in this vision, is a ‘new normal’ starting from actions made today, designed to undo the damage caused by actions of the past and start again. It is a form of techno-survivalism that can only be achieved by citizens, acknowledging their powerlessness and demanding that elites use their power to make a change.

This situation was elegantly anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, in his 2011 book Collateral Damage. Discussing the “divorce between power and politics”, Bauman noted that “the discrepancy between available means and postulated objectives of action takes the form of a perpetual confrontation between politics afflicted by a chronic deficit of power, and power freed from politically imposed limitations”.

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Bauman suggests that in our perpetual state of global emergency, the nation state is written off as insignificant, with national democracies either unfit, or incapable, of enacting the change that needs to happen. Voters are consigned, by their chronic deficit of power, to shouting at each other on the sidelines, while global elites enjoy the freedom to do whatever serves their interests according to the mandate of saving tomorrow. While consent is marshalled, or manufactured, through the spectacle of campaigners demanding that political elites do whatever it takes, techno-survivalism offers an enormous opportunity for the powerful to exercise their interests.

And yet it also creates significant problems for the elites themselves. Take the interminable sleaze scandal dogging our Tory government. With a majority of 80, Boris Johnson’s lack of opposition, both in terms of its size and its ideas, combined with its extraordinary power grab over the course of the pandemic, has handed the Executive huge latitude to do whatever it likes — something for which it is now being punished with unflattering newspaper front pages every day.

If Bauman is right, and politics has ceased to count for anything meaningful, what does that mean in practice? Ultimately, in detaching themselves from the demos, our political elite has detached themselves from the means of working out what they should be doing. And this could ultimately be their downfall. As Christopher Lasch noted in The Revolt of the Elites, by isolating themselves from their societies, elites undermine the foundation of their legitimacy.

As much as they benefit from wielding their power, an untethered elite also finds itself buying into the fantasy that the world will keep turning without human agency — of any sort. But it clearly won’t. During the pandemic, initial ‘work from home’ orders were swiftly counteracted by a swathe of exceptions, as governments were forced to acknowledge that ‘essential’ jobs required people to do them; while later attempts to cajole the WFH crowd back to the office was met with a sullen resistance. Likewise, the ‘green revolution’ planned by COP26 can be imposed from above, but will require a buy-in, with people choosing to replace their cars and boilers while calculating what this means for the quality of their lives.

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As trust in politics declines, people find other means to exercise their interests; and these are less susceptible to mediation and control. For elites, legitimacy is the thing that enables them to retain authority. And that requires building a relationship with the past and present, rather than annihilating it in the name of ‘the future’.

Edmund Burke — hailed as an inspiration by the ‘intergenerational equity’ crusade — explained this rather well in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Society, he argued, should be understood as a “contract” to be looked upon with reverence, because it was not only about the needs of the present day. It is a “a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection”, which transcended the contribution of any particular generation, thus becoming “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

Yet today’s modern conservatives are guilty of a spectacular misreading. For them, the intergenerational contract can only be honoured by ripping up the past and legislating on behalf of the future. This free-wheeling power-grab might yield some short-term gains; but at some point, the wheels will come off. It won’t just be the future generations of the apocalyptic imagination that will bear the consequences, but those of us who are living with them right now.

The modern world’s cultural divide dates to the Sixties, a sort of second Reformation that was to start with a generational conflict between a cohort raised in sacrifice and patriotism, and one that wanted to change the world with peace and love. And shagging, obviously.

As it transpired, only the Who’s drummer Keith Moon died before reaching middle age, while lead singer Roger Daltrey would go onto become a prominent supporter of Brexit, the biggest generation-dividing issue in British political history.

It’s fitting, for an age cohort which first popularised generational warfare has gone onto become its biggest punchbags. Today the “Boomers” are the subject of intense rage among their impoverished descendants; although just as Henry Kissinger famously said that the Battle of the Sexes can never be won because there is too much fraternisation, so too with generational jihad.

Still, Britain’s twenty-somethings have just spent a year under house arrest, losing money and, even worse, one of their best quality of life years (it doesn’t get better, I’m afraid). This was ostensibly in order to protect that most beloved of baby boomers, the NHS, but in reality the generation most vulnerable to Covid and who account for the majority of NHS spending — those born before 1960. Now they are being asked to put their hands in their pocket once again to help pay for the elderly care of the luckiest generation in history.

Britain might not have leaders as old as America’s but it’s arguably more of a gerontocracy. When in 2017 Theresa May suggested that people’s assets might be needed to fund their increasingly expensive care needs, the proposal, dubbed the “dementia tax”, helped destroy her electoral prospects. Her successor Boris Johnson will not make the same mistake, and so the money to pay for care will instead come from a new, additional form of National Insurance, paid by taxpayers across all age ranges — including the 89% of young people who have no housing assets.

The Tories seemingly have no choice. While British politics has gone through a great realignment since 2016, with political loyalties now based on values rather than economic views, it’s also about home ownership, car use, rural v urban — but most of all age. This latter divide is not only unprecedented in British political history, but is far more pronounced than the age divide among our neighbours; indeed, in France and Italy the young vote more for radical Right parties than the old.

It is most of all in Britain where there has grown a great divide between the Sixties generation and their descendants. It is here where the governing party serves the interest of older voters so devotedly, without any real consideration about what happens next. But then it’s fitting for a generation which never thought about posterity.

“Baby boomer” is an Americanism, first used to denote the enormous rise in fertility that took place in that country from 1945-1960, a result of the unprecedented prosperity of post-war America, and the sexual conservatism that followed the conflict. Britain had a slightly different experience, with a relatively small baby-boom in the late 40s and a later surge that peaked in 1965, five years later than the States (the latter cohort, sometimes referred to as Britpoppers, also have outsize generational weight).

Whatever we call them, those born in the late 1940s or 50s have been blessed with a freakish level of good fortune, something that my generation could never hope to enjoy. As for the group younger than me — doomed to perpetual exclusion from the London housing market, a Black Mirror-style dystopia where everything they do remains on record, and a brutally unequal dating market that resembles the world of Steppes warlords — the idea of paying more tax to ensure that the luckiest generation in history has a smoother exit must be infuriating.

The blessed generation didn’t have it easy to start with. Around 3 in 100 children born in 1950 died before their fifth birthday, compared to about 1 in 100 when I first appeared in 1978 and around 1 in 250 today. (But for the baby-boomers’ parents, 1 in 10 didn’t make it.) Absolute poverty would have been by today’s standards dreadful, with half of all household’s lacking even a bath. Today’s lucky “Zoomers” can of course expect to have a shower in their first flat-share, even if it might be en suite in the kitchen.

Growing up in the 1950s, things like flu and pneumonia would still have been a serious threat, and I imagine that a great deal of generational attitudes towards Covid risk were informed by this relative life experience; the Asian Flu of that decade was far more dangerous to teenagers than Covid, but no restrictions were ever really considered.

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But if you survived those early years, you were officially part of the luckiest generation in history – especially since we tend to compare our lives with our parents, and their mums and dads had a terrible time.

Assuming you were born after May 1946 at the latest, you would have avoided losing a father in the war. You would have dodged National Service, abolished in 1960, and so unlike your American counterparts had no fear of being sent to Vietnam.

Your childhood would have coincided with the least violent years in British history, and crime would not reach its catastrophic modern levels until you were out of adolescence (and so most at risk of street violence). Muggings, a ubiquitous misery for the next generation raised in London, would have been unknown to you; indeed, this Americanism was not even popularised until you were already grown-up.

You would have been the last free-range children, able to walk a huge amount on your own, partly because there was far less fear of crime, although much of our urban fabric had already been surrendered to cars and your chance of being killed by one was high.

You might have gone on an extended hippy trail, visiting Iran, Afghanistan and a wider Islamic world that has become increasingly dangerous for subsequent generations (although eastern Europe was largely out of bounds). You would have enjoyed the great satire boom, and the decline of cultural restrictions, before the arrival of their newer — and in many ways more intolerant — replacements.

You would have come of age at the most perfect time in history to be young; although the sexual revolution in reality started a fair bit earlier than the 1960s, it certainly accelerated with the use of birth control and more permissive attitudes. This coincided with a uniquely creative period in music, led by the greatest band of all time.

Penicillin had become widely available during the Second World War, and the first cases of HIV would not be noticed until the late 1970s, so you would have enjoyed a unique period with no real fear of sexually transmitted disease. When I was growing up in the 1980s the Government was busy bombarding us with terrifying adverts featuring tombstones, warning us that if we so much as unzipped our trousers we’d end up with an incurable wasting disease. As it turned out, the risk to heterosexuals from HIV was low, but the same was not true of chlamydia, and today one in 20 young people in some parts of London have the illness.

But then, inevitably, the downsides of the sexual revolution weren’t going to affect those directly involved in it, but rather their children and grandchildren. It was a Ponzi scheme as much as the welfare system serving the baby boomers is a Ponzi scheme, with later generations being left with the bill; already Generation X and Millennials have worse health than their parents, partly due to far greater drug and alcohol use that came about following the Sixties. Similarly, the decline of marriage and the nuclear family only hit Britain in the 1980s, the actual 1960s generation largely unaffected.

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As a young baby boomer you probably didn’t go to university, but then you would have lived in cheap, central accommodation surrounded by lots of other young people with opportunities for fun, and complete independence; effectively the sort of setting universities try to recreate today, because it is otherwise unavailable.

A modern-day time traveller visiting Austin Power’s Swinging Sixties, as seen in the 2017 documentary My Generation, would have been startled by how young it felt. Not only was London youthful, but so were its desirable areas. Today the most noticeable thing about high-end London districts like Chelsea or Highgate is the ancientness; few young families can live there, let alone people in their 20s. This is, of course, relates to the real issue at the heart of the generational divide: the catastrophe of housing costs, which means even far less salubrious parts of London are unaffordable.

It was long assumed that rising house prices were a healthy sign, the tabloid obsession with the subject being a running joke. Not enough people cared that it was a bubble, and that with all bubbles it would eventually become too expensive for new players to join. Few pointed out that we should have been saving instead. No one observed that during that remarkable period of growth, late 19^th–century Britain, house prices actually declined. Victorians wouldn’t have tolerated runaway housing costs because they cared about posterity.

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Housing inflation is one reason that the percentage of millionaire-pensioners has risen from from 7% in 2008 to 25% in 2018. It’s why, when the baby boomers were young, the average pensioner was much, much poorer than the population while today there are more pensioners in the top fifth than bottom. They have enjoyed immense asset wealth, never to be repeated.

It is not their fault as individuals that the housing bubble coincided with the lifetime of the generation that had everything. But it’s unfortunate for those that follow, and unfortunate for the Tory Party which, being dependent on the support of homeowners, has therefore increasingly come to rely on older voters as a voting block.

I wouldn’t say those born around the millennium are the unluckiest of people – 1895 would have been a bummer. But, growing up after the financial crisis and austerity, and with house prices still increasing 10% per year, it must seem hopeless at times. It is especially frustrating for younger voters who align with the Tories on cultural or economic issues and dread a Labour government, yet see a party entirely devoted towards serving the luckiest generation.

Boomers, the group that got to enjoy the Beatles and the Stones, Hair, the Isle of Wight Festival and the hippy trail, have grown old to become synonymous with an aimless and short-term vision of conservatism, locked in a deathly embrace with the Tory Party, the last chapter in the incredible story of a truly lucky group of people.

The only problem is, as Bobby Duffy argues in his new book, it’s simply not true. Duffy’s research shows that on key social issues such as climate change, the attitudes of younger and older people in the UK are fairly well-aligned. When you analyse the data, as he has, it turns out that people don’t fit the generational stereotypes that have been assigned to them.

For example, when it comes to ideas about gender roles, attitudes have changed across every generation. Back in 1983, the view that a woman’s place was in the home was shared by four in ten British people; by 2018, fewer than one in ten held this view. It is not generational identity that determines such attitudes, but changes in the wider social and cultural context that frame them.

This will not surprise researchers who have spent years investigating the existence of generational conflict in the UK and US, only to find the evidence elusive. Policies designed to promote “intergenerational equity” in public spending are largely top-down constructions designed to justify the rationing of welfare resources. Meanwhile, even studies of generational differences, with regard to attitudes or behaviours, tend to be far more nuanced than newspaper headlines about “Millennials” or “Gen Z” imply.

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With all the nonsense talked about generations, it’s tempting to dismiss the “tired stereotypes” that Duffy rightly criticises. But that would ignore why they retain both an appeal and some value in making sense of the times we live in.

Generations have long operated as “concepts of existence” that help us to understand ourselves in relation to the world. Laura L. Nash, writing in 1978, traced generational thought back to its Greek origins, where it was as a relative concept marking “allegiance, time of life, span of years, sameness with one group and otherness from the rest”.

From around the late 18th century, economic and political modernisation encouraged Europeans to regard themselves as part of history; both as a product of the times in which they were born and having a role to play in shaping their historical moment. Being part of the “younger” or “older” generation became symbolically attached to wider ideas about progress, the future and the past — with conflict between the “old” and “new” sometimes expressed in generational terms. By the mid-19th century, Ivan Turgenev used Fathers and Sons to depict the social changes sweeping across Russia as a clash between the conventions of the past and aspirations for the future, personified in members of the older and younger generations.

Generations, then, have a strongly cultural dimension — and, as a result, can influence the way we think about the world around us. This was the central argument presented by the sociologist Karl Mannheim in the Twenties, whose influential essay The Problem of Generations drew on philosophical, historical and sociological thought to understand the impact of wider social events on the development of consciousness.

Mannheim’s theory of “social generations” was based on the understanding that periods of accelerated social change could provoke a distinct kind of consciousness within those coming of age during that time, born out of their “fresh contact” with the “accumulated cultural heritage”. Following this approach, we can see how some of the “generation labels” used today capture a shift between old and new worlds, precipitated by significant historical events.

From the “Generation of 1914”, symbolically associated with the trauma of the First World War, to the “Baby Boomers”, apparently embodying the cultural upheavals of the Sixties, a certain section of youth came to symbolise the Zeitgeist. This didn’t mean, of course, that they represented their entire birth cohort, whose experience was more profoundly framed by class, ethnicity, and where they grew up. War poets and hippies spoke to a moment in time, not a personality type.

Over the past decade, however, wild stereotyping about “selfish” Boomers and “entitled” Millennials abounds, alongside a crude determinism that casts the so-called “Covid generation” as forever victimised by the pandemic. Imagined in this way, generations become mere ciphers for wider cultural attitudes and prejudices that our society is grappling with. This is a problem, both for our understanding of generations as “concepts of existence”, and our perception of the people forced into such boxes by their birthdate.

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Mannheim would have been horrified by the crass way in which “social generations” have become weaponised. While he theorised a relationship between wider social events and generational consciousness, he rejected the idea that generations were mere products of their time. Generational consciousness is a dynamic process, whereby “new participants” encounter the cultural heritage and shape it in their own way. The transmission of the past, through older generations embodying that heritage, was crucial for the development and renewal of society.

For generations aren’t only abstract concepts — they are embodied in people. These people are our parents, children, teachers, colleagues and fellow citizens; people upon whom we rely for understanding our world and making our own place in it, and depend for love, care, and solidarity. Research such as Duffy’s is a valuable reminder of why evidence of generational conflict is hard to find: people don’t see themselves as representatives of a particular perspective, but as individuals with their own views and experiences; they don’t regard their elders or youngers as a threat but as a relationship to be nurtured, with clashes of opinion forming part of that human experience.

Mannheim understood this when he spoke of the importance of social renewal through the “continuous emergence of new participants in the cultural process”. The continuity of generational transmission — that one dies, and is born, every minute — reduces the level of friction that might otherwise result from having to induct a whole group of people into the cultural process all at once.

The dynamic nature of this interaction, in which young and old continually learn from each other, allows society, as a whole, to retain the “elasticity of mind” that would ossify if we weren’t continually having to engage in a process of “social remembering”. Although times of accelerated change do provoke tensions, it is the conversation between the generations that allows us to weather the storm; retaining our historical memory while adapting to new events and understandings.

The upheaval provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic has made this conversation more important than ever. As we emerge from the shock, we may well see a particular kind of generational consciousness emerge, as young people begin to process and express the meaning of the “new normal” in a way that is quite different from those of us who came of age in different times.

The experience of being able to take nothing for granted — from being able to see your friends to sitting the career-defining exams you have spent years working towards — has occurred at a formative phase of life for them. What many of us may have experienced as just a few weeks or months of boredom, before resuming the pattern of our lives, meant something quite different to children for whom established rites of passage were simply stripped away, and cannot be revisited.

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Perhaps most significant, the effective collapse of educational assessment has brought pre-existing anxieties about the value of knowledge starkly to the fore. Put bluntly: if a cohort that has received less education than a previous one gains better grades as a result, what value do we attach to the accumulated cultural heritage in the first place? If the rules of life can so swiftly be rewritten because of an “unprecedented” situation, what do we expect our children to learn from history?

These are uncomfortable questions, to which there are no easy answers. Nobody can predict the form that a new generational consciousness may take. But we can at least take seriously our role in social remembering: ensuring that the younger generation have more to work with than a blank slate. That means, first and foremost, reckoning with our responsibility to educate young people about the past, and entering into a genuinely open discussion about what we have learned from the hiatus of the past couple of years.

Most of the discussion about the problem of education during the pandemic has focused on the failure of schools and universities to take responsibility for keeping the lessons going. But there is a far deeper issue, to do with our defensiveness, as adults, about the norms and values that we grew up with ourselves, and what we want to transmit to our children. The risk is that, in attempting to move on from the pandemic, we will deceive ourselves that we have little of worth to say to youngsters whose experience has been so novel and distinct.

But like every generation before them, today’s young need to understand the world as it was, before they can make it into the world they want it to be. They cannot do that on their own. That is why the conceit that generations exist in separate, polarised boxes is such a problem. It denies young people access to the tools used by those before them to made sense of their lives, and the resulting sense of mutual incomprehension makes conflict more likely.

It is fashionable to argue that our responsibility to the young requires greater thinking about the future — but it requires an equal commitment to the knowledge we have gained from the past.

Oh well, whatever, never mind. The video did the job. Nirvana’s record label DGC chose “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as an introduction to their Nevermind album, believing that the more straightforwardly catchy “Lithium” and “In Bloom” had bigger hit potential, but they miscalculated. When the band were on tour that autumn, they would return to their hotel rooms after a show, turn on MTV and invariably find their own faces staring back at them. Radio stations that deemed it too harsh for daytime airplay were bombarded by requests and ended up rotating it so heavily that it was six months before DGC could release a follow-up single. Nirvana’s talking-point performances on Top of the Pops (passive-aggressive) and The Word (aggressive-aggressive) helped make the song a UK sensation, too.

For all Nevermind’s front-to-back brilliance, it wouldn’t have been a multi-platinum, industry-changing phenomenon if not for that one song. Soon, it was being covered by Tori Amos, parodied by Weird Al Yankovic and sampled by rappers and dance producers. Cobain said two years later that “it’s almost an embarrassment to play it… Everyone has focussed on that song so much.”

Smart observers intuited that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was more than just a popular song. Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times called Nevermind “the awakening voice of a new generation”. Cobain himself suggest in the album’s press release: “Maybe what we need is a new generation gap.” Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X preceded Nevermind by six months but the most popular term at the time was “baby busters”: bust follows boom. A year later, The Atlantic dedicated 11,000 words to selling the doomed concept of “Thirteeners,” i.e. the thirteenth generation of Americans since 1776. The writers dismissed this generation’s music as “a rock-and-roll endgame of harsh sounds, goin’-nowhere melodies, and clumsy poetry”.

Whatever they were called, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” spoke to them loud and clear, specifically the countercultural wing that could be seen in films like Slacker and Singles. “These three individuals represent their generation,” said Jonathan Poneman from Nirvana’s first label Sub Pop. “This band not only delivers the goods, they manage to capture the time.” In the video’s surly, murky rebuke to the mega-budget gloss of early 90s MTV, the fans aren’t just an audience; they’re a tribe. Dressed much the same as the three performers, they eliminate the gap, physically and metaphorically, with the climactic stage invasion. Kim Thayil of Nirvana’s Seattle contemporaries Soundgarden identified the video’s implicit message: “There you guys are, here we are, and we’re you.”

But what was the song actually saying to them? Cobain liked explaining his lyrics even less than he enjoyed writing them. He would scrawl multiple drafts in notebooks and piece them together at the last minute. “A lot of the time I write a song and when someone asks me about it I’ll make up an explanation on the spot because… I have no idea what I’m talking about half the time,” he told the NME. In the case of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, only a few lines of chorus from the demo and live debut in April 1991 remained in the studio version a few weeks later.

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Another abandoned line never made it out of his notebook: “Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?” Cobain might have been thinking of himself and his girlfriend between May and November 1990. Tobi Vail was a fiercely bright 21-year-old whose feminist zines and band, Bikini Kill, were at the helm of the Riot Grrrl movement. She’s most likely the woman who’s “over-bored and self-assured” in Teen Spirit’s first verse. They both lived in Olympia, Washington, a college town which epitomised the first wave of political correctness, for good and ill.

Later, Cobain’s wife Courtney Love railed against its groupthink in Hole’s song Olympia: “We look the same, we talk the same, we even fuck the same.” One night, Cobain, Vail and her future Bikini Kill bandmate Kathleen Hanna got drunk and defaced an anti-abortion centre. When they got home, Hanna wrote on the wall: “KURT SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT.” Not realising that it was a teasing joke (Teen Spirit was Vail’s favourite deodorant brand), Cobain asked Hanna if he could use it in a song.

Cobain said of the song that he was “disgusted” by his generation, and himself, “for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.” Vail made a feminist out of Cobain but he couldn’t sign up to all of the Olympia orthodoxies, especially the proscription against major labels. In one interview in October 1991, he made “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sound like a blunt rallying cry: “The generation’s apathy is getting out of hand. I’m pleading to the kids, Wake up!” But in another, he claimed he was “also making fun of being anally politically correct.”

The lyric itself is too cryptic to confirm or deny either meaning. It’s unclear who is singing, who he’s addressing and how sincere he is. And there’s no call to arms equivalent to the one on Nevermind’s “Territorial Pissings”: “Gotta find a way, a better way!” But it’s the tortured ambivalence that makes it so dynamic. In the final 90 seconds, Cobain goes from a passive demotic shrug (I guess, oh well, whatever) to a vomiting howl (“A denial!”). The singer re-edited the video himself to make it end on a shot of his screaming face. The song ricochets between resignation and rebellion, pride and self-loathing, conviction and doubt. “Every other line is either a disclaimer or a contradiction,” Cobain told Siren magazine.

“That ambiguity or confusion, that’s the whole thing,” producer Butch Vig told Rolling Stone. “What the kids are attracted to in the music is that he’s not necessarily a spokesman for a generation… he doesn’t necessarily know what he wants but he’s pissed… I don’t know exactly what ‘Teen Spirit’ means, but you know it means something and it’s intense as hell.”

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Who were the people who saw themselves in that song and video? At the time, Cobain’s generation numbered 88.5 million Americans. When Time profiled that cohort in July 1990, the magazine didn’t even have a name for it but the characteristics were already established. Scarred by divorce, haunted by AIDS and lack of opportunities, alienated by leaders and movements, and burdened by a knapsack of seemingly insoluble inherited problems, they were cynical, disaffected, unfocussed and agonisingly self-aware. Time’s poll found that 53% were anxious about the future. “I envision ourselves as a lurking generation, waiting in the shadows, quietly figuring out our plan,” said one 19-year-old interviewee. “Maybe that’s why nobody notices us.”

Generational stereotypes and the people who promote them should be taken with a pinch of salt — not everybody born between 1965 and 1980 was working a McJob and listening to grunge — but you can see why “Smells Like Teen Spirit” struck a chord. Other Gen X anthems like Radiohead’s “Creep” (“I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo”) and Beck’s “Loser” (“I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”) tipped the balance towards self-disgust, while Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” (“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”) had the angry energy but not the self-doubt. Only Nirvana had the whole messy package.

A song that hits one generation’s bullseye does not necessarily live to delight another. “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, however, has long been one of the most streamed songs of the 1990s, passing the one-billion mark on YouTube in 2019 and Spotify this summer. A dramatic orchestral cover version by Malia J opens the new Marvel movie Black Widow. There are visceral reasons for the song’s longevity — the riff, the beat, the voice — but clearly the message, such as it is, is not padlocked to a single era.

So what makes a song a generational anthem? There is no clear definition but it must involve some combination of enormous popularity and a sense that the singer is speaking for their audience and peers, not just themselves. They tend to emerge when the oldest members of the cohort are in their teens or twenties. Broadly speaking, there are two modes. One is defiantly empowering, like the Who’s “My Generation” (1965), Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (1967), the New Radicals’” You Get What You Give” (1998) or Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” (2015). Problems are identified alongside the promise that they can be overcome with communal self-belief.

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The other mode is acutely ambiguous, even when the power of the music occludes that ambiguity. Pulp’s “Common People” (1995), MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” (2007) and Lorde’s “Royals” (2013) are about restricted options and conflicting desires. Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (1966), Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” (1971) and the 1975’s “Love It If We Made It” (2018) pose questions without answers.

The continuity is striking. From boomers to Generation Z, there is always a sense, as in “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, that the generation knows it has been dealt a bad hand but doesn’t yet know how to play it. In this year’s “Brutal”, Olivia Rodrigo, the teenage pop star du jour, snaps: “And I’m so sick of 17 / Where’s my fucking teenage dream? / If someone tells me one more time / ‘Enjoy your youth,’ I’m gonna cry.” Here we are now, entertain us.

Generational discourse is driven by caricatures of difference — Gen X don’t care, millennials care too much, boomers used to care but got rich and smug, and so on — but these songs suggest that the mentality of youth is rather more consistent. The keen awareness of inherited problems yet no confidence in finding solutions. The contradictory impulses. The pinballing between anger and ennui. The anxiety and confusion of trying to establish an identity. Something must be done with this rotten, disappointing world but what? In 1991, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” made those feelings synonymous with Generation X. Thirty years later, it is clear that they are evergreen.

The latest study to show this, drawing upon literally thousands of surveys and distilled into a report from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, makes for a troubling read, just as Americans prepare to vote in their 59th presidential election.

Not only do we see satisfaction with democracy falling over the period covered by the dataset (1973 to 2020), it’s also the case that each generation is less satisfied than its predecessor. Thus the oldest group surveyed — people born between 1918 and 1944 (like Joe Biden) — are the happiest, while right at the bottom of the scale are the miserable Millennials (1981-1996).

While the scale of the decline doesn’t look too precipitous, in some parts of the world it is much steeper, and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking countries. There, in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, satisfaction levels plunge down through the generations from almost 80% to a shade over 50%.

There’s no denying the depth of this crisis, and degree of youth dissatisfaction with democracy is something we need to take very seriously indeed. But perhaps the problem isn’t with democracy — it’s with the youth.

I’m not saying they’ve got nothing to complain about. They’ve been saddled with student debt, the housing crisis and a rapidly warming planet. (Then again, 40 years ago there was the prospect of nuclear war to worry about, plus 3 million on the dole and university was for the few not the many.)

So it may be that the word “democracy” is being read as a shorthand for politics in general, the government of the day or the capitalist system. That would be a less alarming interpretation — but if you dig deeper into these surveys it becomes clear that the disenchantment isn’t just with the state of the world, it’s with the principle of democracy itself.

For instance, a 2018 report from the the Onward think tank found that significantly more young people than old thought that “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament” is a “good way to run the country”. At the time, I wrote that this finding should be interpreted in the context of Theresa May’s failing premiership and the Brexit logjam. That said, the same survey found that 35% of under-35s thought that having the army rule the country is a good idea compared to only 15% of over-65s. That looks pretty authoritarian to me.

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The political scientist Yascha Mounk has documented similar trends in several countries, including significantly higher levels of younger voters who thought that having a democratic system was “bad” or “very bad”. It should be said that we’re still talking about a minority — just over 15% in the UK (for people born in the 1980s). However, this compares to much small percentages for earlier generations.

The same research shows growing radicalisation among young people, with increasing numbers identifying with the extreme Left or radical Right. This isn’t only a symptom of their disenchantment with democracy, it might also indicate where they’re getting their anti-democratic ideas from.

The radical Left has never liked the democracy we’ve got. It is, they claim, a sham system manipulated by the interests of capital (or some other favourite bugbear like “whiteness” or the “patriarchy”). Hence slogans like “don’t vote, it only encourages them” and “use your cross, crucify a politician”.

Various alternatives have been proposed. The dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t quite so fashionable these days — and certainly not since the proles were cancelled for voting Leave; but there are alternatives to this alternative. For instance, the participatory anarchism of the Occupy movement. Then there was whatever Russell Brand was going on about before he decided that voting wasn’t such a bad thing after all. 

Last year, one of the “demands” made by Extinction Rebellion (XR) is that “Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.” A Citizens’ Assembly, by the way, is an overgrown focus group — only with the power to bypass elected parliaments. The “electoral system”, says XR, is “incapable of making the long-term decisions needed to deal with the climate and ecological emergency”.

The city of Seattle played host to another radical experiment this year, as part of the BLM protests. Back in June, the police withdrew from several blocks allowing protestors to establish the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. This territory was governed through consensus decision-making and bottom-up initiatives like the construction of a community vegetable garden. A number of shootings later, the police moved back in and the CHAZ was dismantled.

There is plenty of anti-democratic posturing on the radical Right, too — and not just from the outright fascists. Other flavours include neo-feudalism, various kinds of theocracy and ultra-libertarian set-ups where there’s no voting because there’s no government.

These are fringe movements, and their ideas irrelevant to mainstream politics — or at least, they were. What’s changed is that the democratic West now faces serious competition from authoritarian regimes around the world. Gone are the days when the superiority of the free world could be demonstrated in terms of its material achievements. Just look at China with its awe-inspiring hi-tech infrastructure! Gaze in wonder as dazzling cities emerge from the deserts of the Gulf! Cower in fear as Vladimir Putin rebuilds the Russian empire! The autocracies are on the front foot; the West is in retreat.

Covid has only encouraged this dangerous inferiority complex, so that while Europe and America are still struggling, China crushed its outbreak with ruthless efficiency.

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Yet China is not the only country to have crushed the curve, and some of the most effective responses were mounted by democratic nations like Taiwan, Germany and New Zealand. Alternatively, it may be that the Swedish approach is ultimately proven to be the correct one. It’s too early to tell, but the truth will out — thanks to the accountability and transparency of the democratic system. Democracies get things wrong all the time, but they have the capacity to learn from their mistakes and change accordingly.

And China’s achievements may not be all they seem. Back in the days of the (first) Cold War it often looked like the Soviets were pulling ahead — for instance in the space race — and there were plenty of useful idiots in the West willing to take their propaganda at face value, while ignoring the essential rottenness of the system. Today’s useful idiots are doing exactly the same in regard to China and the other glittering dictatorships, and while it may take decades for the rot to finally bring down the system, it will happen because, in the absence of timely reform, it always does.

The case for democracy is as compelling as it ever was, but it has to be made afresh. We cannot assume that each new generation will simply absorb the lessons of history. Furthermore, democrats must confront the Left’s utopian fantasies and Right’s worship of power and wealth for its own sake.

Yet while this is a fight that should be led from the centre, I wonder if our liberals and moderates are up to the job. Indeed, I worry that it is the centrists, from unreconstructed free marketeers to progressive enthusiasts for a European superstate, who are a bigger threat to democracy than the radicals are.

To advance their vision of technocratic governance and a borderless world, centrists are quite happy to constrain the democracy they claim to be in favour of. Hence the unquestioned support for independent central banks so that “politics” (i.e. democracy) can be kept out of monetary policy; or the binding provisions of free trade agreements so that “politics” (i.e. democracy) doesn’t disrupt big business; or the “four freedoms” of the Single Market, that subordinates “national politics” (i.e. democracy) so that goods, services, capital and people can cross borders unimpeded.

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In 2016, the British people decided they’d had enough. They voted to take back control, which was when the “moderates” showed us their true colours. It wasn’t just the all-out attempt to overturn the result of the referendum, but also the condescension directed at those who’d dared to defy the establishment.

Richard Dawkins was typical of his class in declaring that the “general public” were “not qualified” to take the decision they did. He also appeared to suggest that a test of “reasoning ability or knowledge” should be applied to the franchise. If that’s what he meant, then it’s a challenge to the principle of one person, one vote. But then that’s not such a controversial position these days.

The idea of an epistocracy — i.e. rule by the knowledgeable — goes all the way back to Plato. More recently, the idea that we need a more “rational” alternative to democracy as we know it has come back into vogue thanks to books such as The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) by Bryan Caplan and Against Democracy (2016) by Jason Brennan. These are not fringe authors; both books were published by Princeton University Press and were extensively and respectfully reviewed.

So democracy is losing the battle of ideas, but more importantly it is also losing the battle of attitudes.

If the process of disenchantment has gone furthest among younger people in Anglo-Saxon countries, then that’s surely no coincidence. Here we have the most individualistic of generations in the most individualistic part of the world. And that gets us to the heart of the matter. The anti-democratic spirit of the age doesn’t come from some desire for self-abasement, rather it’s an expression of colossal self-regard.

This takes many forms, but for the “knowledge class” it’s the fallacy that their kind of knowledge is superior to all others — thus entitling a tenured professor to a bigger say than a shopkeeper or a bus driver. For the central bankers and other assorted technocrats it’s the delusion that only they can steer the ship of state — despite their record of running it aground on multiple occasions. For ideologues of Left, Right and Centre it’s all about purity. If they and their comrades are in sole possession of the truth, then why should they be impeded by the wrongthink of the enemy?

We know this, because every few days there’s a story about how they are too overprotected to be police officers (they have been “wrapped in cotton wool”, are routinely shocked that police are expected to work nights and weekends and “do not like confrontation”, apparently). They’re “entitled, spoilt and molly-coddled snowflakes”, they’re “flaky”, “self-centred”, “narcissistic” and “oversensitive”.

But as far as I can tell, it’s all nonsense. For a start: millennials aren’t that young any more. The usual cut-off point, where Generation X becomes millennial, is 1981. (I miss out by less than six weeks; I’m gutted.) The oldest millennials are now 37 years old; some of them are grandparents; many of them will be taking their own children to university this September. Even the youngest (born 1996) are now approaching their mid-20s and have probably been in the workforce for a while now. Professors and medical consultants are millennials; quite a lot of those millennials who are too mollycoddled to be police officers will be detective chief superintendents by now, which must have come as a shock.

For another: all this dividing people up into generations (boomers, Gen X, millennials, iGen/Gen Z) is at best arbitrary and at worst meaningless. I’m apparently Gen X, but I obviously have more in common with a millennial born two months after me than I do with someone born in 1965.

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The sociologist Philip Cohen argues that the categories are essentially valueless and do not line up with any useful distinctions; they’re just “irregular categories without justification”, “marketing names that promote stereotyping and confirmation bias”. Most people, when asked to give their own “generation”, get it wrong.

That’s not to say that people haven’t changed: obviously they have. Younger people are more liberal on most issues, for instance, and they are less likely to smoke, drink and take drugs. But they don’t line up neatly with the generations: actual changes in social attitudes, such as attitudes towards divorce, are unconnected to these arbitrary categories.

Here are some of the differences. Younger people are more liberal on LGBT issues – about 80% of under-34s have “no objection” to same-sex marriage, compared to 62% of 55- to 75-year-olds – and race; young people are much more likely to think that it’s racist to dislike hearing UK residents speak other languages than English or to make jokes involving racial stereotypes. They’re less likely to be religious, although slightly more likely to be of a non-Christian faith, a change presumably driven by immigration. They’re more likely to identify as LGBT themselves.

And they’re more likely to be worried about climate change – although it’s not as dramatic a difference, at least in the UK, as I’d have expected, given the constant moaning by baby-boomer columnists about Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, 94% of 18- to 34-year-olds think climate change is definitely/probably happening, 46% think it’s definitely/probably caused by human activity, and 32% are extremely/very worried about it. For over-65s, those numbers are 90, 35 and 20 respectively. It’s not huge. In fact, since Britain saw its hottest ever recorded temperature last week, I would have been entirely happy if it were greater. If the younger generation is willing to make those sacrifices that we older ones are not, then perhaps the consequences might not be quite so severe.

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What I find strange is the older generation complaining about this. Young people have always been more liberal than their parents; it’s as though the boomers have forgotten the Sixties. And being more open on sex and gender issues is hardly new either; about half of British teenagers in the Sixties and Nineties decided they were gay because David Bowie and him out of Suede were for a while. (I have this theory that most of the young men doing it are doing it to be more interesting to girls, just as lots of my contemporaries did back then, and that a large percentage of the male-bodied people who describe themselves as genderfluid now will be married to a woman and living in St Albans with two kids and a miniature schnauzer by the time they’re 40. But I have nothing to back that hypothesis up.)

And, of course, “young people are lazy and entitled” is a tale as old as — well, perhaps not the hills, but certainly as old as the United States of America. The younger generation was marvellously described as “a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles”, lacking the “manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers” in a letter to Town and Country magazine back in 1771. Their morals are “corrupted” by plays and romances (1790); their elocution is “wretched” (1780).

Incidentally, I put “millennials workplace meta-analysis” into Google Scholar, to see if there was any actual support for the idea that millennials are any more lazy and/or entitled than previous generations were when they were in their 20s. The short answer is: no.

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The first relevant result I found, which is a meta-analysis from 2012 and claims to be the first systematic review of generational differences in the workplace, looked at job satisfaction, how committed to their employers they were, and how likely they were to stick around. It found that “the relationships between generational membership and work-related outcomes are moderate to small, essentially zero in many cases”.

Another review article, from 2018, found that there is “little solid empirical evidence supporting the existence of generationally based differences, almost no theory supporting any reason behind such differences, and plenty of viable alternate explanations for any differences that are observed”.

As far as I can tell, all this “millennial snowflakes” stuff is just the same “kids today are being damaged by social media and Fortnite, and this is different from how my parents thought I was being damaged by heavy metal and teen magazines for reasons I cannot fully articulate” wine in different bottles.

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But, of course, there are some real differences between the younger generation and the older one. One is that very few of them can afford to buy their own homes; just 35% of 25- to 34-year-olds did in 2013/14, compared to more than 60% in 1981. Millennials and Gen-Zers look like they will be the first generation to have less disposable income than their parents (partly because of the increase in house prices, but partly because of stagnating incomes).

Those middle-era and younger millennials who graduated after the financial crisis will probably earn less for much of their careers than those of us who graduate before. None of this is their fault; this is the fault of governments voted in by Boomers and Gen-Xers who refused to build housing stock, who stripped back government spending and stalled the economy, and who failed to keep a grip on financial markets.

I’m pretty sceptical of stories about how the younger generations are crippled by mental health problems or how we have a suicidal generation. Generally the evidence doesn’t stack up and it’s just an excuse for someone to whine about social media or smartphones. But, actually, younger generations really do face problems that the older ones didn’t; on some really crucial issues, it is harder to be 25 now than it was 25 years ago. And yet as far as I can tell, they aren’t any lazier, any more entitled or whiny, or significantly more depressed than their parents were at the same age. To be honest, since we’re the ones who’ve screwed it all up for them, we should be more grateful that they’re not rising up to overthrow us.

In the 2000s, they were a common sight in English towns and cities. To this day, there’s no consensus as to where the word came from – but it was gleefully adopted as a pejorative term for working class young people, especially those assumed to be ill-educated, welfare-dependent and criminally-inclined. It also referred to a distinctive youth sub-culture – with a dress code heavy on tracksuit bottoms, baseball caps and gold chains.

Though not that different from other street fashions of the decade (or indeed this one), the particular details marked out the wearer as a chav. In some ways, it was an anti-fashion, capable of absorbing upmarket brands (most infamously the Burberry check) and taking them all the way down.

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The style was also a statement, in this case from a group that knew it wasn’t wanted, but which refused to be invisible – or to be excluded from the debt-fuelled ‘good times’ prior to the financial crisis.

Perhaps seeing an unvarnished image of itself, the cultural elite kicked down. Social satirists were merciless in their mockery. By the time the backlash to the backlash set in – for instance, with the publication of Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, in 2011 – it was too late. Chavdom was on its way out.

It’s not that marginalised youngsters have disappeared from our streets, but the distinct sub-culture is dead – swept away not just by the tide of contempt, but also by a generational shift.

*

The 2000s were when the Millennials took over – and that was always going to bring about changes. The mimetic nature of a smartphone-centred youth culture leaves less room for the distinct (and, at times, mutually hostile) youth sub-cultures of previous decades. No equivalent of Mods versus Rockers for this lot – or even Oasis versus Blur.

Though class distinctions are far from being absent or unnoticed among today’s young, there’s little appetite to make them more visible than they have to be. Nor does the rebellious impulse to immitate the outsider – and thereby scandalise the olds – express itself along class lines anymore. Indeed, the working class and especially the white working class, has never been less fashionable – whether culturally or politically.

Millennials strike me as being untroubled by middle-class guilt. It’s not that they use the actual words ‘middle class’ with any more enthusiasm than older generations of Brits, but, then, that’s not necessary when you’ve got euphemisms like ‘knowledge worker’, ‘creative industries’ and ‘working with people.’ Being career-orientated is not uncool if it’s a cool career. Ambitious Millennials don’t just want material success, they want it served with a generous topping of personal fulfilment (and don’t forget the peer recognition sprinkles).

In pursuing their goals, ambitious Millennials carry two bits of deeply implanted programming. The first is that this is what you deserve because you’re special – a wizard in a world of Muggles. The second is that, in spite of the above, the competition is fierce, so you’re going to have to work hard to get it.

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But what if you don’t get it? Or what if you do, but the price is just too high? That is the question – one which brings me to Anne Helen Petersen and her remarkable and much-debated Buzzfeed essay ‘How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation’.

*

Petersen asks “why am I burned out?” and offers the following answer:

“Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.”

Let’s deal with the obvious objection to this thesis – i.e. in what way is “working all the time” specific to the Millennial generation? A lot of middle-aged people, especially women, would say ‘wait until you’ve got children or ageing relatives or both; wait until you’re combining the responsibilities of home with the duties of middle or senior management – then you’ll know what hard work is!’

Except this would be to miss Petersen’s point, which is that today’s young people are under pressures that the GenXers and Baby Boomers did not face at the same stage in life:

“Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. “

The hollowing out of middle income occupations, the decline in home ownership and differentials in family breakdown mean that there is a ‘coming apart’ of western societies – an ever-widening divide between the upper end and lower end of the income scale, with an ever more uncertain and insecure buffer zone between them. The ‘room at the top’ assumptions of the easy years of capitalism have been replaced with what appears to be a zero-sum game.

To some extent, that’s a delusion, because for all the dysfunctions of ‘late capitalism’ (as it’s optimistically called), living standards now are higher, and personal freedoms greater, than in the post-war golden age. But at the same time the stakes have been raised: comfortable mediocrity, even if attainable, isn’t good enough anymore – your work, and the lifestyle you buy with it, has to be meaningful (or, at least, look that way through a social media lens). Those sort of jobs, though probably more plentiful than at any time in history, are concentrated in fewer places (the global cities in particular) and demand exceeds supply.

Petersen describes an never ending process of “optimisation” that Millennials must go through in order to make it in a hyper-competive economy. This, she says, began in their earliest years:

“Running around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined.”

It’s interesting how many of the coming-of-age dramas of the Millennial era are about young people testing themselves – both in competition against one another and against hostile powers in the outside world. Prime examples include Harry Potter, of course, but also the Hunger Games and Divergent series. I don’t know to what extent, if any, these were created as allegories of the present, but it’s no surprise that themes of specialness, preparation and selection resonate with a Millennial audience. Certainly, there’s a generational gulf between the larking-about of St Trinian’s and Grange Hill and the serious, self-discovery of Hogwarts.

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Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

And it doesn’t end with school. The process of optimisation goes on to higher education (which has been deemed more necessary and made more expensive for Millennials than previous generations). Increasingly, this includes various levels of post-graduate qualification – yet another extractive opportunity for ‘big diploma’. Petersen describes her own progress (and exploitation) through the lower echelons of academia:

“As I continued through grad school, I accumulated more and more debt — debt that I rationalized, like so many of my generation, as the only means to achieve the end goal of 1) a “good” job that would 2) be or sound cool and 3) allow me to follow my ‘passion.’”

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The post-graduate treadmill is still a minority track for Millennials, but not so the social media treadmill:

“Posting on social media… is a means of narrativizing our own lives… when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s ‘fulfilling,’ balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.”

She says it also about a perceived need for constant self-promotion to potential employers. I’m sure that’s right, but what comes next contains a crucial misunderstanding:

“Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life… to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”

It’s certainly a performance, but, with some exceptions, it isn’t “labor” (or “work” as Petersen also describes it). Yes, for certain vocations – writer, artist etc – there is a case for putting examples of what you can do online. But as for putting “every component of your life” online, no one demanded you do that – and most people aren’t interested. If you want to share your experiences with friends and family or a particular interest with likeminded enthusiasts, then that’s great; but if you think of such interactions as “work”, then do something more enjoyable with your time.

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When communities take on the tech lords and win

By Peter Franklin

If you think that a laboriously curated online presence makes you stand out to potential employers then you may be underestimating the capacity of social media to make everyone look and sound the same. In all likelihood, you are advertising your conformity, not your individuality. That you may have ‘travelled in’ (i.e. gone on holiday to) south east Asia, or wherever, is of zero fascination to someone sorting through a stack of CVs. There may be some youthful achievements that do catch a recruiter’s eye – musical proficiencies etc – but savvy employers are realising that what these most clearly signify is having pushy parents with money to spare. Ditto academic qualifications not relevant to the job.

What is relevant to the job, however, is how well you perform it. Which is why I was troubled by Petersen’s explanation for the less impressive side of the Millennial work ethic:

“They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that they’re bad at work because of just how much work they do — especially when it’s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness.”

If the overwork comes from the job itself, then that is the employer’s fault. But if the distraction is coming from outside the job – and especially the ‘demands’ of maintaining one’s image on social media, then it is the employee and his or her screwed-up sense of priorities that is most immediately to blame. You should never be so focused on “performing the self” that you fail to see where you fit in to the needs of others – especially those to whom you owe an honest day’s work.

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The world's most successful* people get enough sleep

By Peter Franklin

Even in those cases where online activity does contribute to a positive professional reputation, it is highly unlikely to be more important than the reputation you establish by making a decent fist of what you’re actually paid to do. That the gateways to entry-level employment, and thus the chance to prove yourself, are often exploited (through unpaid internships and other abuses) is disgusting, but it doesn’t change the fact that diligence matters.

So, forget Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – the social network that really matters to your career is the one that forms organically whenever people of the same trade meet together to gossip about their colleagues. If you can feel your ears burning, it’s probably because they’re sharing their own direct experience of your performance and treatment of others in the workplace. If your social media self-performance comes up at all, it’ll only be to note the distance between image and reality.

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In reading Petersen’s account of the Millennial culture of optimisation – “as children, in college, online” – I was struck by the thought that it wasn’t optimisation at all. The dictionary definition of the word is “making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource”. But if it’s true that the process “culminates in the dominant millennial condition” of “burnout” then quite clearly it is not optimal. In fact, I’d describe it as a process of maximisation: helicopter parents filling-up their children’s schedules with organised activity; eternal students racking up academic qualifications; consumers compulsively acquiring ‘experiences’ and regurgitating them online. This is life as a form filling exercise.

Petersen argues that “many of the tasks Millennials find paralysing are one that are impossible to optimise for efficiency”, possibly because “they remain stubbornly analog”. I suspect the real problem is that, unlike the digital interactions that tech companies make so addictive, there’s no electronically-mediated reward, no equivalent to ‘inbox zero’ or the affirming recognition of a ‘like’ or ‘follow’.

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How gamification makes losers of us all

By Peter Franklin

To the Millennial maximiser, the more quantifiable the achievement the better. From course credits to retweets, it’s all about the points – and what do points mean? Prizes! Except that real life, real work, real achievement remains profoundly qualitative. Points do not necessarily translate into prizes. Petersen says that Millennials have internalised the idea that they should be working all the time. I don’t doubt it, but a lot of the effort they’ve actually put in isn’t actually work, not in any useful sense. The ‘points’ that they’ve been chasing are the reward – and often the only reward – of a series of expensive and time-consuming displacement activities.

In taking issue with some aspects of Petersen’s argument, I’m not disagreeing with its central thrust. On the contrary, what she gets wrong serves as further illustration for what she gets right – which, fundamentally, is that Millennials have been sold a lie. In fact, a whole basket of lies.

As she says in the context of student debt, the cost isn’t just financial, but also “the psychological toll of realizing that you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be ‘worth it’ – worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization – isn’t”.

Well, quite.

But here’s the bitterest twist in the tale: many of the cool careers that Millennials are so ambitious to break into are with the industries most responsible for misleading them. The media, big tech and academia – these are the deceivers-in-chief. These are the guys peddling the dreams that cost so much for so little return.

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Why intensive parenting causes inequality

By Peter Franklin

The answer is that they were all born in the same year, 1946. It’s a coincidence that illustrates the enduring power of the Baby Boomers – the post-war generation born between 1945 and 1965. That makes Barack Obama (born 1961) a Boomer too, though one of the younger ones.

The next generation – ie ‘Generation X’, born between 1965 and 1980 – may have to wait some time for its turn in the White House. Even if Trump is not re-elected in 2020, most of the likely alternatives are also Baby Boomers (or even, like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, pre-boomer war babies.

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Boomer populism is a warning from the future

By Peter Franklin

Therefore, it might not be until 2024 or 2028 that a Gen Xer gets a crack at the Presidency. However, by that time the older members of the generation after X – the ‘Millennials’ born between 1980 and 1995 – will be old enough to run for the top job. This raises the alarming prospect that there will never be a Generation X President of the United States.

Why should that matter? A new book by Matthew Hennessey, deputy op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal explains what’s so special about an often overlooked generation. Entitled Zero Hour for GenX: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials it is reviewed for the American Conservative by Charles F McElwee:

“Hennessey… argues that Generation X is the country’s greatest check on a dystopian technological future. It is Gen Xers who can recall life before Big Tech’s omniscience, restores values extinguished by modern norms, and bridge the gap between Boomers’ lingering hubris and Millennials’ infectious callowness. Theirs is a generation victimized by timing—too young for the halcyon ’90s, profoundly traumatized by 9/11 and the Great Recession, and immobilized by the present turbulent age.”

The tech bit is certainly true. Gen X (to which I belong) was the last generation (in the developed world) to have an analogue childhood. There was no internet, no mobile phones and no social media. As for computer games, those were around, but on steam age storage media – like cassette tapes that would take ages to load (providing the tape didn’t get chewed up by the player and your dad’s computer didn’t crash).

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The hermit generation: The young aren’t rebelling against society, but hiding from it

By Peter Franklin

Of course, it wasn’t just Gen X who lived through the subsequent digital transition – everyone older than us did too (if they were paying attention). But I think it meant more to us because it coincided with our own transition from infancy. We literally matured with the technology.

McElwee says that Gen X grew up with “just the right dose of technology”. I’m not sure about that, but at least we know the difference between the digital and pre-digital worlds. Gen X are the first-generation settlers of cyberspace, with an appreciation of what we’ve gained as a result – and what we’ve lost:

“Baby Boomers, now seniors, seem unconcerned with Big Tech’s grip on society. After all, passively scrolling on an iPad is a leisure, not a burden. Millennials, meanwhile, have surrendered themselves to a pixelated existence. Life has become digital, told in short stories and filtered photos for hidden, dopamine-feeding advertisers.

“…In response to this rapid change, Hennessey believes Generation X must remind society of forgotten behaviors, products, and standards…”

Of course, not every Baby Boomer is disengaged from this issue, nor is every Millennial (and Post-millennial) so glued to their screen as not to notice the outside world. Yet Hennessey is on to something when he says that “the members of Generation X have an awesome responsibility to keep faith with reality”.

Admittedly, this overlooks the central role that television played in warping our ideas of reality, but at least the one-eyed monster – unlike the smartphone – didn’t follow us around. It was possible to head out into the world without a digital tether. And despite the lack of a constant connection to home, school and friends, we generally had more freedom to explore the world than today’s young people. 

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Why don't we talk about television anymore?

By Peter Franklin

I suspect we also had a greater inclination to use (and abuse) this latitude. Because diversion wasn’t available at the swipe of a screen, we lived with the ever-present threat of pure, undistracted boredom. When we couldn’t escape it, we had to put up with it – an invaluable test for any young mind; and in some cases, a spur to creativity and/or mischief.

So, perhaps, Matthew Hennessey is right. The on-coming wave of Gen X leaders could provide the refresh that our Boomer-dominated political system so desperately needs.

One word of warning though. For all, the nice things that can be said about Gen Xers, the fact is that crime rates peaked just as we reached adolescence / early adulthood. That makes us the most delinquent, and indeed violent, generation in modern history.

Perhaps we should skip to the gentle Millennials after all.