The New Zealand singer, also known as Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, first slouched on to the world stage with her acapella-style hit “Royals” as an actual teenager in 2013, when her door-slamming earnestness made sense. A tangle of wild hair and breathy vocals, she emerged as an understated prodigy at a time when high-gloss X Factor alumni crowded out the charts. She also masterfully captured the greatest fixation of Gen Z: themselves. In her hands, songs became mopey private reckonings; concerts were reverential affairs imbued with the cringe sincerity of a slam poetry night. Audiences of excited girls were shushed for singing along so that the teary archteenager could wail about being dumped. Shut it — I’m talking about my trauma!

Lorde’s great thesis is that being uncomfortable in her own skin makes her fundamentally interesting. It is unfortunate, then, that most of her fans are girls and young women — a demographic for whom being a bit self-conscious is basically the cost of admission. Now, however, the singer has gone nuclear in her battle to prove that she is not like other girls: maybe, she suggests, she isn’t a woman at all. Perhaps nobody should be surprised that after more than a decade of submersion in the entertainment industry and its attendant fantasies, Lorde has come out with revelations about her own gender trouble: the most popular song on her new album Virgin, saucily titled “Man of the Year”, hard-launches a non-binary era with the lyric “some days I’m a woman / some days I’m a man (oh-oh)”. Imagine Lorde’s dismay, then, when the boring old cis girlies of TikTok started clipping her song to use over videos showing horrible texts sent by ex-boyfriends, sarcastically declaring them “man of the year”. As much as she yearns to break free of the breakup ballad, her conventional fanbase drags her back.

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In some ways, Lorde is a good bellwether for Gen Z’s self-centered neuroticism. Adam Curtis’s new documentary series, Shifty, goes some way to describing how we got to this stage, when collective culture and the external world gave way to personal fantasy and self-expression. In one episode, a woman explains to a cut-glass Seventies reporter that her boxer dog is undergoing a sex change, and must now be considered a girl. The dog looks entirely nonplussed, oblivious to the delusions of his owner. Curtis splices the clip with others of societal discontent and political upheaval, heavily implying — but of course not saying outright — that gender identity is a feature of bourgeois individualism which has disconnected people from reality. Lorde’s confusion of the realities of womanhood with a fundamental mislabeling crisis enacts this process perfectly: instead of questing to the root causes of her stated problems, from bodily discomfort to the vagaries of love and sexual politics, by considering the macro issues like misogyny, medicine or the media, she has turned inwards and focused on herself. This technique, and the high-concept misery it inflects her music with, is what makes Lorde and her ilk so ineffectual — and so difficult to take seriously.

If Lorde is sometimes a bloke, she’s a bad one. The singer, it is rumored, split up her producer and his partner — and took him for herself. A few years ago she was also rumored to have had an affair with Lena Dunham’s boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, another producer. The naked facts of Lorde’s love life, the great theme of her work, reveal her to be nothing more or less than a melodramatic young woman, subject to the same bland human frailties as the rest of us.

Lorde’s obsession with beauty standards — and freeing herself from them — is all-encompassing. She recently left a comment under a post of Addison Rae frolicking about in her pants, saying: “It’s so yummy seeing someone so in their body.” Rae, who became famous by dancing on TikTok, is probably okay with how she looks — but no matter. The point of the compliment was really to signal Lorde’s own delicious complexity, her saintly self-alienation. She recently told Rolling Stone of her own far more interesting relationship with her body: “I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,” she said of putting duct tape over her boobs. “It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.” Enlightenment, after all, is how you look.

Pretentious androgyny has proven the refuge of the overpromoted teen star ever since Harry Styles popped on a frock for Vogue. Unfortunately, such an approach cannot salvage bad music. The former One Direction heartthrob may have cribbed his dresses from Bowie, but it has not saved him from churning out record after record of froth destined to be piped into the changing rooms at River Island. A similar problem confronts Lorde, whose new album is impossible to listen to without imagining a teenage girl angrily lip-syncing into a mirror, because that is, essentially, what it is. “I swim in waters that would drown so many other bitches” is the sort of lyric that could only ever sound good if you’re 13 and practicing applying eyeliner.

There is a hidden revelation in Virgin, though: Lorde is, it turns out, horridly conventional. She has a unique talent, but not the one she thinks: the talent for transforming real-world problems into yet more mirrors for her own inner jaggedness. The most honest thing about Lorde’s latest album, which pledges to bare all with a sleeve showing her own pelvic X-ray and artwork that includes a picture of her own vagina (brilliant), is the following lyric on “Hammer”: “I don’t have the answers.” In this, I heartily agree.

Many of my Gen Z comrades, however, have bought Lorde’s world view — that of her own navel — wholesale. One young woman playing about with duct tape and publicizing the granular details of her journey to self-discovery is not the end of the world; I’ll not hold this single New Zealander accountable for the mopey, limpid youth culture which raised her. But I will say this: sadgirl pop is indicative of a bigger problem, a global self-awareness deficit, of which our Lorde and savior is the sulking face. The message of this album is that the world is impenetrable and victimizing; the solution is to turn inwards and wage war on your own body, taping and drugging and titillating it until you can bear your own company. We may forgive 13-year-old girls for being broody, pouty and self-obsessed, but as grown-up women we have a responsibility to look beyond ourselves. If only someone would tell Lorde that.

And, most unknowably, will we import our globalized, post-MeToo, post-BLM politics into the 2070s and beyond? I suspect not. The newest crop of pensioners, who came of age in the late Seventies and early Eighties, was as ever far more likely to vote Conservative than their younger compatriots in last year’s general election. Though each successive wave of bus-pass-holders is likely to be more tolerant — or less baffled, at least — on social issues, the inevitable slide Right is a product of shifting priorities, towards pensions, winter-fuel payments and the ability to secure a doctor’s appointment. Gen Z will not be an exception: a cynical view is that the politics of self-interest always supersede voguish causes, such as quibbling over the definitions of identity, as one heads towards the Stannah stairlift.

So what, then, will become of our most hot-topic political feeling: alienation? This is particularly apparent when it comes to questions of nationhood, as one shocking study conducted by The Times found last week. In it, we learned that just 41% of young people felt national pride, crashing down from 80% in 2004. A number of Gen Zs gave quotes to the paper about what can only be described as a sense of national cringe, with one 22-year-old woman reporting that, when she went abroad on holiday: “I sort of try to be quiet because I don’t want people to know where I’m from.” The vision of this young woman skulking around Seville, only communicating via gestures and whispers for fear of being outed as a tea-sipping, marmalade-chomping Brit abroad is really rather pitiable; after all, these are not sentiments shared by the throngs of Spanish teenagers who foghorn their way around central London every day of the week.

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It’s mostly pitiable, though, because it carries a sense of being cowed. The real shamers are not, as our hushed holidaymaker might suggest, the locals in your quaint holiday destination of choice (only the French hate us so viciously as to make it clear to paying tourists) but our peers. I’m unsure how I would respond to a survey question posed in this way — “Would you say it is true or untrue that you’re proud to be British?” — because if we’re honest, saying “it is true” is freighted with the charge of being unchic. A straw-poll survey of a few of my peers threw up similar anxieties; most of the responses were sardonic, fixated on the coolness or otherwise of the British identity; “I would rather be French”, “Everyone’s ugly”. Others cringed at the “self-obsessed” nature of patriotism, with our national “small-man syndrome” speaking to a country in managed decline, harking back to its grand but irreplicable imperial past. The vision of a proud Brit conjures sunburn, obesity, baldness and racism — basically the satirical X personality Big Rob, who hails from “norf ingerland” and punctuates his bigotry with “simple as”. What horrified thinkpieces in the wake of The Times survey have missed is that there is a question within the question here: what we are really asking is not “are you proud to be British?”, but “are you by any chance an uneducated, unfashionable swine?”.

This elision is a huge problem. Firstly, it makes such surveys essentially meaningless; most Gen Zs, asked how being British fares compared with most other nationalities on specific issues, would answer positively — about our imperfect but at least democratic political system, our comparatively tolerant values, our creaking but free-to-use NHS, our distinct national sense of humor, and so on. And secondly, it sneeringly patronizes those who do take the question at face value, and who answer earnestly that they are proud to be from the same place as the Industrial Revolution, the Beatles and Bakewell tarts. Yes, young people now are more concerned with the evils of empire — and our meddling in wars in the Middle East — than they were in 2004, when that comparison survey showed four in five were proud to be British. But I suspect these facts have far less bearing on the 2025 responses than the fact that, in a way that would be considered ridiculous 20 years ago, patriotic sentiment has become a marker of class: of course you, intolerant, pink and provincial as you are, are proud of being from this racist, rainy island. You don’t know what I know from my three years reading Noam Chomsky at Bristol, then smoking rollies outside my minimum-wage barista job in Clapton: that we suck and being proud is contemptible. Nigel Farage’s Reform has itself exploited this class-patriotism nexus by suggesting that effete, detached progressive elites “don’t care” about Britain; those progressives themselves would argue that bullish Right-wingers don’t care about anything else, a Little Englander stereotype dripping in disdain. Is it surprising that Gen Z are reluctant to pin their colors to the mast?

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All this is to say that the terms of the question of national pride are not neutral: there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and the reputational stakes are increasingly high. The only way that the closeted patriot might circumvent social suicide is by cloaking their feelings in self-hating irony, as was on full display in that god-awful viral Guardian article about “Britishcore” in the autumn. This view holds that Britain should be proud of its quintessential shitness, and that arming yourself with twee Gavin and Stacey-esque patter might soften the blow of being on a perennially sinking ship.

But Britishcore’s hyperspecificity is also its downfall. If Gen Z’s patriotic apathy continues into old age it will not be because of deeply felt spite for British culture, but its having been swamped by globalization. The Americanization of youth culture — our politics, our tastes in food, even in the most extreme cases our accents, has reinforced a vassal-state mentality in which everything British is small, crap and has bad teeth; the glamorous, bombastic and earnest pull of American culture, and in particular its politics, has engaged its conservative youth in a new MAGA wave, in a way that would be impossible to replicate here.

A further reason why Gen Z cannot grasp nationhood is because we live our lives on the internet. Online worlds are more integral to youth culture than ever; they are not so much boundaryless utopias as separate provinces of vaguely American values, of hopeless materialism and obsession with individual identity. Why would Gen Z Britons feel particularly united with their countrymen when they spend half their lives clocking up screentime on American influencers via a Chinese shortform video app? It should not be surprising that they feel more connected with others of their generation of what we once called “digital natives”, who share their online slang, meme quotability and profound sense of alienation.

Life moving online also means we are unanchored from place: we work from home rather than schlepping into town centers to mix with our communities; many move abroad and retain remote jobs, ever more disconnected from hometowns. In this, again, national pride’s class valence matters: those in blue-collar jobs are moored alongside their fellow citizens, while the ever-growing tranche of corporate, remote graduate workers are bound only by the strength of their WiFi, having no need to get out of their silk pajamas and talk to “real people”. They are sucked further into the monoculture of the internet, divorced from the office, tea-break canteen and post-work pub in which you develop local, then greater, loyalties.

So, will we still be ashamed of being British when we’re old enough to covet a Saga cruise? It depends almost entirely on whether we remain anchored to those deracinating online worlds — and whether being British will benefit us. There are many reasons why Gen Z feels let down by this country: the housing crisis and the job market have created a generation of aimless, overeducated graduates who stayed inside for two years during Covid to protect a generation of wealth-hoarders, then emerged into made-up email jobs, half of the earnings from which will go to protect their grandparents’ triple-locks. Politicians have much to offer us to address this imbalance; if they manage to do so, by the time we reach our comfortable fifties we might feel that we also have a stake in Britain. Only if we land on our feet after a period of social and economic uncertainty, and only once we inevitably grow out of caring what other people think of us, will people begin to say that they feel proud to be British. National pride is earned by good governance; if Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, both of whom commented on my generation’s concerning lack of patriotism this week, want to bring us back into the national conversation, they must make it worth our while.

At some point after the angsty vortex of teenagerdom, this flips around. Kids who want to be adults grow into adults who want to be kids. Many young(ish) professionals in their twenties and thirties are “kidults”: they spend their free time and disposable income on experiences such as Bubble Planet, which opened last weekend in London. This 11-room “immersive experience” is filled with giant pink balloons, bouncy inflatable clouds, a hall of mirrors, and an LSD sheet’s worth of colourful projections.

There’s also Dopamine Land, an “interactive sensory museum” with pillow fights and musical tiles, and Ballie Ballerson, where you drink cocktails and flail in ball pits with other consenting adults. The London Transport Museum, ostensibly aimed at children, has offered evening “Permission to Play” openings for grown-ups. Kidults are also propping up the physical toy industry, particularly at the higher end of the market — £150 water guns and £735 Lego kits are a bit out of reach for pocket money. “Disney adults” dedicated to Mickey and friends are such an established subculture that they’ve got their own gift guides.

The reason why adults might want to pretend to be children is obvious: growing up has turned out to be a trap. Buying a home, particularly in a city, is nigh-on impossible. With so many young people stuck in a cut-throat rental market, or even living with their parents, it’s unsurprising that they’re getting married and having children later, if at all. Why not spend the little income that doesn’t go to your Boomer landlord on tranquillising yourself with nostalgia?

At KidZania, in the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, children can explore a miniature city in which they do work-like activities and earn pretend money called kidZos. The professions on offer skew towards what kids think are cool (pilots and firefighters), and those that uphold KidZania’s state security apparatus (spies, police officers and bank guards). The kind of midrange email jobs which most kids will grow up to do are absent. KidZania has adults-only nights too, where you can put yourself in “the driver’s seat of your dream career”. Adults are playing at being kids playing at being adults, because the grown-up futures they used to act out were so much more hopeful than the ones they got.

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Childishness is also rampant in cinema. Marvel’s all-conquering superhero films, numbering 33 and counting, have generated a combined $30 billion at cinemas. The beginnings were inauspicious: the first movie based on a Marvel comic character was 1986’s Howard the Duck, about a duck from outer space. It didn’t do well. Robin Williams voiced Howard for about a week before quitting in disgust. “I can’t do this,” he reportedly said. “I am being handcuffed in order to match the flapping duck’s bill.” But since Iron Man was released in 2008, things have gone rather better, and Marvel has absorbed practically every A-list actor and director into its sprawling, easy-watching empire. (One notable exception is Leonardo DiCaprio, who once warned Timothée Chalamet: “No hard drugs and no superhero movies.”)

After the success of Barbie, the toymaker Mattel is trying to emulate the Marvel empire. We can look forward to Daniel Kaluuya starring as Barney the purple dinosaur; Lena Dunham directing Lily Collins as Polly Pocket; and J.J. Abrams cook up an “emotional and grounded and gritty” take on Hot Wheels, those tiny cars that do loop-the-loops. Mattel executive Kevin McKeon is clear about the intended audience. “We’re leaning into the millennial angst of the property rather than fine-tuning this for kids,” he told The New Yorker, in reference to the Barney project. “It’s really a play for adults.”

Why are so many talented artists debasing themselves like this? It’s not just about money. There has always been money in trashy films. But there used to be some amount of stigma around “serious” people getting involved. The art critic Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, set out the binary: avant-garde art of all mediums was abstract and hard to understand; kitsch, a product of industrial capitalism, could be gulped down effortlessly. “Kitsch’s enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself,” he wrote, and many ambitious artists “will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely”. Hence all the discourse around Barbie: did director Greta Gerwig have her pink, frosted cake and eat it, by making a weird, ironic film about a doll, or did she lose by the very fact of making a corporate-sanctioned film at all?

That the critics squabbled over this shows that any remaining stigma about “selling out” is too partial to be effective. The battle has already been won on a different terrain: pop music. In 2004, a New York Times article by Kelefa Sanneh took a stand against “rockism”. “Rockism,” he wrote, “means idolising the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionising punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.” Old dudes who played “real” instruments like guitars did not have a monopoly on quality.

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The opposite to rockism is “poptimism”: successful music is often very good, the thinking goes, and should be treated as such. Poptimism has largely taken over music criticism. Pitchfork, a website once synonymous with snooty taste, went from reviewing Kylie Minogue as an April Fool’s joke to putting her in its “Best Songs of the 2000s” list. A lot of pop music, Kylie included, is very good, and it’s good that it can be properly appreciated. Poptimism can also apply to children’s art: for example, the Studio Ghibli cartoons. Plays based on My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away are currently running or scheduled to run in London, thanks to demand from adults as much as kids. And why not, when the works in question are brimming with soul and subtlety?

But poptimism comes with a bias towards celebration rather than critique, which obsessive fans of stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift zealously enforce. When one Pitchfork writer only deigned to give Swift’s album Folklore an 8/10, she got death threats. Another poptimist assumption is more sinister: that might is right. If millions of people like something, then who are you to disagree? When anyone, from Martin Scorsese down, suggests that filming people in tights against green screens isn’t the pinnacle of cinema, they get called elitists. It just so happens that going along with this non-elitist conception of quality makes a lot of rich people in Hollywood even richer. People have sleepwalked into arguing that the LA executive is more a man of the people than the struggling indie film director.

There are no kidults without poptimism. You can only jump into a ballpark aged 30 without shame if you’ve been warmed up on Harry Potter reruns. So what’s the alternative? High culture is silly too. Arthouse films generally consist of rich Europeans being sad or poor Europeans being happy. Contemporary art sometimes feels like a practical joke pulled by PhDs on the public.

But at least it preserves your agency. Being a kidult is about more than activities or aesthetics — it is about throwing away responsibility and letting other grown-ups, whether they be events companies or film studios, take control. These grownups are not your parents, and they do not have your best interests at heart. They want your money, and your pliant acceptance of their output.

The subversive beauty of high culture — or simply carving out your own tastes, whatever they are — is that it encourages self-improvement for its own sake. It provides pleasure that is heightened because it is difficult and demands effort. (And gives you a bit of cultural capital to flaunt at friends who might have more money than you.) So stop listening to mum and dad, because you’re an adult with a self to form.

One of them is individualism. In a society which lacks any strong bonds between its members, everyone is likely to have their own interpretation of the world, just as everyone is likely to have their own toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to borrow someone else’s version of the truth, any more than you would want to borrow their toothbrush. Truth becomes privatised. It’s a matter of my personal experience, and surely no one can challenge that. 

In fact, personal experience is as open to debate and dissent as the existence of God. There’s nothing absolute about it. One of the key insights of the late modern period, before the birth of postmodernism, is the recognition that human beings are constitutively opaque to themselves. “Constitutively”, because this lack of self-transparency is built into the kind of animals we are, not just some lamentable self-blindness which we could put right with a little more self-reflection.

When Oedipus in Sophocles’s drama finally comes to know who he is, he recognises that he is a stranger to himself. It has taken incest, parricide, pollution, self-blinding and self-exile to arrive at the conclusion that he has no certain grasp of his own identity, and that this is the condition of us all. There must be easier ways of learning this lesson. 

There was a time when we thought that we were transparent to ourselves and that it was others who were indecipherable to us. Nowadays, we tend to accept that we aren’t always in entire possession of our own experience, and that others can sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Among other things, this is because other people are frequently well-placed to see what we do, and what we do is a surer guide to who we are than what we say or think we are. If someone insists that he’s a passionate lover of animals and spends his spare time dissecting live frogs, then he is self-deluded. It’s the beliefs implicit in our behaviour, not those recorded in our memoirs, that really count. If the truth is what we feel, there can be no place for self-deception in human affairs. It simply wouldn’t be possible for a prime minister to declare himself a pretty straight sort of guy, and probably believe it, yet seek to deceive the public about the invasion of Iraq. 

So I am no infallible guide to the meaning of my own experience. I thought at the time I was furious, but looking back I realise that I was afraid. It’s true that my experience is beyond doubt in the sense that I really am in agony, and no mistake; but to know that what I’m feeling is agony rather than ecstasy, I must have the concepts of agony and ecstasy, and this isn’t something I can achieve all by myself. I can know this only by belonging to a community whose language includes these notions.

In this sense, even the most private of experiences is public. Toddlers don’t spontaneously come up with the concept of unfairness. Rather, they take part in a form of social life in which the idea of unfairness has a function, they watch how their elders behave and listen to how words are used as forces in these contexts. If they have the misfortune to be brought up in Conservative Party headquarters, they will never get the hang of the idea.

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Another insight of late modernity is that experience and reality are in some ways out of sync. It looks as though the sun circles the earth, but this is because the Earth revolves on its axis. (“The sun’s coming up — or as the new theory has it, the Earth’s going down,” as a 17th-century character remarks in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead). One purpose of science is to close the gap between reality and our experience of it, as well as explaining how the gap comes about. 

Like all concepts, truth is inherently social. There must be public criteria by which we can determine what counts as true or false, and these criteria are nobody’s private possession. The philosopher Wittgenstein imagines someone exclaiming “But I know how tall I am!” and placing his hand on top of his head. He hasn’t grasped the fact that tallness is a comparative notion, one that involves socially agreed modes of measurement. There must also be public criteria for conflicts over truth. Disagreement is only possible if you can agree on what you are disagreeing over. We aren’t conflicting over the value of the pound if you are thinking of sterling and I am thinking of the American poet of that name. 

A certain degree of consensus must underlie the most vehement of altercations. People who cry “Well, it’s true for me” (the #MeToo generation is also the “Me-Me-Me” generation) haven’t grasped this point, either. Rather than making the coldly impersonal idea of truth more warmly experiential, they end up abolishing it altogether. If truth is just what anyone happens to think is true, then the word drops out of use. It becomes impossible to distinguish between what I feel and the way the world actually is. There are people who insist that slavery is one of the most outrageous episodes in Western history, yet put the word “truth” in scare quotes. They tend to do the same with the word “fact”, while maintaining that it’s a fact that women are equal to men. 

Does all this mean that truth is beyond dispute? Certainly not for science. The fact that truth isn’t just subjective doesn’t mean that it must be absolute. The one is just the flipside of the other. Relativists and subjectivists fear that unless they are right, truth becomes dogmatic, infallible and authoritarian. But this is to be afraid of a bogeyman. To say that a proposition is scientific is to say among other things that it could be wrong. It’s the kind of thing that someone might always come along and falsify. It differs in this way from “Put that tiger down!” or “Sorry, make that two tuna sandwiches”.

Science is a never-ending argument, in which one’s conclusions are perpetually open to revision, and argument is fundamentally a political affair. You must make sure that everyone gets a chance to participate in the debate, that they do so on equal terms, that nobody is allowed to impose their own partisan interests on the discussion and so on. None of this guarantees the emergence of truth, but it’s an essential pre-condition of it. People who claim “It’s true for me” tend not to be interested in any of this. What is there to argue about? It is they who are the absolutists, since there would seem no way of disproving what they assert. Anyway, someone can always protest that the “it’s true for me” claim isn’t true for them.

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“It’s true for me” springs from a false egalitarianism. If everyone is to be included in political society, then everyone’s views must be respected as well. So what about the view that everyone isn’t to be included? Is that to be respected as well? And what of the so-called law of contradiction? If you think that reading Agatha Christie gives you prostate cancer and I disagree, then one of us has to be wrong. But postmodernists are reluctant to admit that anyone is wrong. It offends against the law of inclusivity, as well as making some people sound inferior to others. Anyway, from what Olympian vantage point can one make such a judgement? How can I possibly judge that there are some sexist police officers in Britain? Isn’t any such claim a sign of moral superiority or intellectual elitism on my part? 

Such is the addled thinking that passes for genuine argument in certain circles. A fear of sounding authoritarian, when all you’re trying to do is tell the truth, haunts contemporary culture. This is why it’s fashionable to qualify what one says with the word “necessarily” — as in “It’s not necessarily that people are passing themselves off as Tom Cruise, it’s just that there’s a crisis of identity”, where what you mean is that people aren’t passing themselves as Tom Cruise at all. But it sounds offensively dogmatic to say so. Similarly, to say “It’s nine o’clock” sounds unpleasantly absolute, so it’s advisable to throw in a “like”. “It’s like nine o’clock” sounds far more agreeably uncertain. A pervasive sense of uncertainty is one reason why truth has come into disrepute. But there are other reasons, which i’ll return to in my next essay.  

The relief that comes with realising these are father-daughter pairings is short-lived, however, once the girls start to pledge their sexual purity to their fathers, and the men vow before God to shield their daughters from a fallen world. The feeling grows as the men place rings — cheap knock-offs with cubic zirconia and metal that will eventually turn their skin green — on the girls’ fingers.

They are called purity balls, and they emerged from Midwestern Evangelical culture just in time for the George W. Bush administration and the consolidation of Christian political power. If seeing Donald Trump groping at his daughter Ivanka made you gag, a purity ball is bound to make you heave. Grown men slow dancing with teenage girls, their arms wrapped around their waists protectively, promising to remain sexually pure for one another, taking portraits together that could easily be mistaken for prom photos.

The fathers receive rings, too, “symbolising my commitment to protect and shield you from the enemy”, as it’s put in a common version of the pledge. The “enemy” is a vague reference to secular culture, Satan, and boys, a mishmash of influences seeking to sully the virtue of good Christian girls. And it isn’t just an annual dance — it is an industry. True Love Waits was trademarked in 1993, and Evangelicals had made a lot of money from selling purity starter packs, from rings to books to workshops teaching girls how to be saintly young women.

When they emerged in the Nineties, purity balls were a reaction to what the Christians saw as an overly permissive, sexually charged culture. Premarital sex was not only seen as acceptable — it was the norm. Pornography was finding its way into the mainstream with widespread usage of the internet; girls were wearing pants with “juicy” written across the ass; MTV was a nonstop parade of scantily clad women in suggestive poses. (This sexually permissive culture was itself a reaction to the decades of sexual repression and conservative shaming, a time when sodomy was still technically illegal and teens were taught about sex through lectures about abstinence and doom-laden stories of how it will inevitably end in disease, pregnancy, and death. Aged 15, I was given a pamphlet that gave 101 alternatives to having sex: “bake a cake”, “hold hands”, “go on a walk”.)

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Since their peak in the 2000s, spreading to almost every state in America, purity balls have largely died down. But while there might be fewer father/daughter dances and cringe-inducing photo shoots, virginity pledges are back, albeit in a different form and for different reasons. It’s not surprising that the deeply patriarchal ritual of the purity pledge — swearing an oath to your father to obey; he in turn praying to a heavenly father for guidance — didn’t survive waves of vigorous social justice movements over the past few decades. Celibacy culture has instead fused with a secular self-care culture that prizes autonomy and comfort above all. While a decent percentage of the TikTok videos making declarations of virginity are from Christian and Islamic influencers and creators, most are not.

One particular trend on TikTok has involved dancing to The Weeknd’s satirical song “I’m a Virgin”. It was originally created for the animated show American Dad as a way of poking fun of the singer’s playboy image, but for many members of the platform it was taken sincerely. (The lyrics in the videos include “I’m a virgin / never got close enough / cell phone blowin’ up, but I’m waiting / for the right person”, but cut off before getting to things like “inside I’m a 12-year-old boy” or “the power of God in my loins”.) There are still videos being made of men and women of various ages lip syncing to the camera, professing their desire to find the right one.

TikTok is not a great way to get information about anything, in general. The viral videos found under hashtags involving virginity include both diatribes about why the idea of virginity is a myth and the word should be replaced in the lexicon with “sexual debut” and people proclaiming that losing your virginity is so painful for women it is common to develop PTSD from your first sexual act. But TikTok has a well-documented contagion factor, with followers mimicking not just dances but behaviors, politics, language, and even mental disorders that they watch being performed on the platform. While not too long ago someone remaining a virgin past a certain age, say 20 or so, was seen as strange or pathetic, now virginity until marriage is roundly celebrated and normalised on social media.

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Much has been made about the younger generation’s tendency toward prudery. Generation Z, or the Zoomers, have some of the lowest rates of sexual activity in generations. They wait longer to initiate sexual relationships, are more likely to have long stretches of celibacy, and, so far at least, have low rates of partnership. They’ve turned the stereotype of youths being the most transgressive and sexually active demographic on its head.

While they don’t share the justification for the celibacy — whether it’s patriarchal desires to control the female body or God’s commandments about morality — they do overlap with the religious Right in their desire to counter, and sometimes control, the oversexualised mainstream, which many view as harmful rather than liberatory. There is a worrying tendency when it comes to matters of sex to find these strange alliances between the far-Left and the far-Right, such as in the Eighties when several prominent feminists found themselves working alongside Evangelicals in their bid to outlaw pornography. Their reasons were different — the dehumanisation and objectification of women versus an unholy industry built on temptation and sins of the flesh — but their objective was the same.

With the new puritans, the concern tends not to focus on sexual deviancy but instead focuses on the ethics. They came of age when the culture had a libertine surface, awash in the sometimes violent imagery of online pornography, the legitimisation of sex work, and the proliferation of new and very specific sexual identities. But roiling alongside this were noisy and painful conversations about rape culture, sexual predators, and abusive romantic relationships.

So much of the online sexual puritans’ discourse can be understood as thinking out loud as they try to figure out how to be sexually active in a less harmful way. That they don’t seem to understand just how many previous generations have tied themselves up in similar knots to figure this out is just a problem of youth, not ignorance. The strange directions that online consent discourse take can certainly be off-putting. There is a popular idea on social media that movies should not have sex scenes, with people creating various justifications for why this is: from “it is potentially uncomfortable for asexual viewers”, to “asking actors to simulate sex is unethical” and even “we as viewers do not have the consent of the fiction characters to watch them engaging in sexual activity”. The logic was confusing to all who witnessed.

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Philosophical musings about the meaning and value of human sexuality is one thing, and designing hard and fast rules that you expect everyone else to follow is another. Discussions about whether “age gap” relationships are harmful have turned into online harassment of celebrities and public figures who have significantly younger romantic partners. The perennial “should there be kink at Pride parades” conversation can lead to threats against queers from older generations for whom being public and open about their sexuality after decades of repression and shame is still freeing.

As long as these declarations of right and wrong come with condemnation and control, it’s going to be hard to differentiate their notion of “consent” from the Christian idea of “purity”. But this is just another chapter of the long struggle humankind has had with their own sexuality, controlling it, understanding it, sublimating it. For all the handwringing and panic, it’s good to remember that today’s repression will inevitably fuel tomorrow’s liberation.

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.

How might this be explained? Are Zoomers just more irreverent, reacting against their politically-correct older siblings? Or is it that Britain’s newest voters are simply too young to have been shaped by the Brexit shock? Whatever the explanation, in the immediate post-Brexit years the youngest voters were 40 points more liberal than the oldest. Today they are only 20 points more to the Left.

The rise of Right-wing populism in the West from 2014 onwards led some to argue that the future heralded a nationalist revolt against the multiculturalism of the post-1960s era. The staggering demise of mainstream Left parties in recent years is attributed to their pivot away from economic issues toward an embrace of globalisation and a concern with the claims of disadvantaged racial and sexual minorities, and other identity politics issues.

Against this is the theory, found both in conservative analyses like Ed West’s recent book Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, and liberal ones like Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart’s Cultural Backlash, that young people are trending ever more Left. Less attached to tradition and more physically secure, they are embracing empathy and liberalising social change, and each new generation is more liberal than the last. Those who vote for anti-immigration parties like Ukip in Britain or the AfD in Germany tend to be older, and, as they die off, western societies will begin electing the Left once again.

The former theory suggests that Left parties need to shelve their wokeness and liberal immigration policies to avoid repelling disadvantaged whites. The latter counsels patience: history is on the Left’s side, and, with generational turnover, demography will carry it to victory. On this score, Biden’s strong poll numbers might be a harbinger of Left-liberal resurgence.

This certainly seemed to be the case in Britain, where, at the December 2019 election, the Tories won just 21% of the 18-24 age group but 67% of those 70 or above, so that age seemed to have replaced class as the primary cleavage of British politics. What seems to have occurred, starting slowly in the early 2000s, and gathering pace after 2010, very much fits his argument that newer generations, moulded in a progressive mediascape and education system, are set to enact “the biggest cultural shift in half a millennium”.

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Figure 1, which I have compiled from waves of the British Election Study (BES) going back to 1964, shows little difference in the voting patterns of those under 25 and over 65 up until 2001. However, beginning with the 2005 vote, a six-point gap opened up between young and old, steadily widening until it reached 40 points in 2017 and again 2019. In the last election, according to the BES, nearly eight in ten young people voted for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Greens or Left-inclined regional nationalists.

Young people really seem to inhabit a different world to the old, and it is about culture. Most of the age gap doesn’t concern economic redistribution, where Millennials tend, if anything to lean toward individualism and away from redistribution. Rather it revolves around “culture wars” questions, notably immigration, attitudes to race, gender and sexuality, as well as Brexit. Millennials are simply less attuned to British traditions of nationhood and more influenced by the liberal cosmopolitan ethos of film, vloggers, pop music, advertisers and the education system.

Figure 1.

The story of the never-ending march of each generation toward liberalism is difficult to square, however, with Gen-Z’s more conservative tilt. If the youngest voters are now moving in a conservative direction, much of the empirical ground under the West-Norris liberalisation claim collapses.

In the earliest stages of a new trend, it is often difficult to acquire sufficient data to rule out statistical blips — but the growing conservatism of the youngest British voters can no longer be readily dismissed. YouGov maintains what is arguably the largest panel of survey respondents in the western world, its Profiles dataset containing the views of over 200,000 people.

This means that for every single age (apart from the very old), there are some 3,000-4,500 people — a much larger sample than one finds for all age groups in most opinion surveys that make the news. So we can’t dismiss trends at the youngest edge of the age graph as a statistical aberration.

One YouGov question asks “Some people talk about ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and ‘centre’ to describe parties and politicians. With this in mind, where would you place yourself on this scale?” The scale is a 7-point question from “very Left-wing” through to “very Right-wing”. The share of those who don’t know where to place themselves is about 30-40 percent between age 18 and 40, with no clear relationship to age. If we remove those in the centre — where it is also difficult to discern an age pattern — and amalgamate all shades of left and right into two categories, this yields the graph in figure 2. (Coda for those sticklers out there: if we don’t remove centrists or those who don’t know, but instead compile everything into an index of all data, the results remain the same.)

What is striking is that the views of today’s 18-year-olds are basically aligned with those of 40-year-olds. If young people were trending consistently more liberal over time, the biggest gap between the two lines should be at age 18, but instead it is between 22 to 26, where there is a 40-point gap between Left and Right.

Figure 2.

These trends seem to be ongoing. Profiles data (at least that which I have been able to see) begin in July 2019, and Figure 3 compares data from a year ago with data from now. There is always some variability in a sample, but if you look at the same question a year ago, what you find is that the most liberal age was 20. Now it is 21 or 22. This is consistent with the pattern of a more Left-wing Millennial generation moving through the electorate as it ages while a more conservative Zoomer generation takes its place.

Figure 3.

Weren’t 21-year-olds always more Left-wing than 18-year-olds? After all, the younger group haven’t attended university. Actually, no. The British Election Study allows us to go further back to see how things have changed since Brexit. In 2015, the BES age-voting series showed the classic West-Norris cohort liberalisation pattern of Left-identification and voting rising monotonically with age. Eighteen-year-olds were most Left-leaning. That is no longer true.

Why is this? Could it be that today’s 18-year-olds have yet to go through the liberalising crucible of university education, and when they do, they will be as liberal as today’s 22-year-olds? In a word, no. For one thing, the evidence that university has much effect on the political attitudes of students is pretty thin. For another, whether we look at men or women, students or non-students, in YouGov Profiles, the 18-year-olds seem more conservative than the 22-year-olds.

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Further evidence comes from the BES. Unlike Profiles, whose data I can’t access for multivariate analysis (even the little I have shown is only permitted due to me purchasing an expensive survey), the BES allows me to screen out the effect of university attendance, gender and even attitudes to immigration and redistribution. Its latest wave asks people who they voted for in 2015 and 2019, so that assuming a 22-year-old in the 2019 data was 18 at the time of the 2015 election, this allows us to compare voters of the same age during both contests.

BES is a smaller sample than Profiles so the data are bumpier, but the basic trends are the same, and what the numbers reveal is twofold. First, in 2019, with the exception of a bump at age 20 which could well be noise coming from a smaller sample, support for the Left peaks at age 24, with 18-year-olds considerably less likely to vote for a socialist or liberal party. By contrast, in 2015, the line — with bumps for smaller sample size — slopes downward Left-to-Right: the younger the voter, the greater their chance of voting for a Left party.

Figure 4.

So what explains the Zoomers’ relative conservatism? While I can’t test this systematically because I don’t have the Profiles dataset, I have been able to look at patterns in the figures, and I believe there are two leading explanations. The first, which I consider more likely, is the fading of the Brexit shock. The second, revolving around Zoomers’ hostility to political correctness, receives weaker support.

After Brexit, Millennial voters shifted strongly against the Conservatives. The typical 23-year-old in 2019 had, controlling for gender and education level, an 80% chance of saying they voted Labour, Lib Dem, Green or for a regional nationalist party. But the same voters, aged 19 in 2015, reported just a 68% chance of having voted for a Left party. So young people moved against the Tories between the 2015 and 2019 elections. On the other hand, the 18- and 19-year-old voters of 2019, just 15 and 16 at the time of the Brexit result, hadn’t reached political maturity. Having missed the anti-Tory bump of Brexit, their voting patterns recall those of the pre-Brexit Millennials.

Is there any evidence for a “Jordan Peterson effect” of Zoomers rejecting the Left-liberalism of their older siblings? This would truly be the death-knell for the “coming left majority” thesis. One US survey finds Gen-Z to be more politically polarised, and, especially among men, less politically correct — influenced by countercultural voices on social media rather than the mainstream media and educational institutions. On the other hand, Pew finds American Zoomers to resemble Millennials. This said, firm conclusions are tricky because some of these surveys sample children as young as 13, before they have reached political maturity.

While the fading Brexit shock seems to explain Zoomer’s reduced leftism, this may not be the whole story. For example, in the BES data, which admittedly suffers from a smaller sample, a typical 18-year-old in 2015 — before the Brexit shock — had a 73% chance of voting for a Left party, whereas an 18 year-old in 2019 had only a 67% chance of doing so. This indicates a move to the Right despite Brexit, and that something else might be going on.

Attitudes to immigration or the economy in Profiles don’t appear to differ much between Zoomers and Millennials, so this is unlikely to explain the conservative drift among youth. On the other hand, support for political correctness (net of opposition to it) is 5-10 points lower among 18- and 19 year-olds compared to those aged 22-29. This seems to be especially marked among 18-19 year-old men, who are 10-15 points more opposed to PC than in favour of it — even as Zoomer women are 30-40 points more in favour of it than against it. This gender divide may become a critical one for the politics of Gen-Z.

Political correctness is generally a bigger issue for young people compared to the old. But even so, it’s noteworthy that in Profiles, 20% of 18 and 19-year-olds, the highest of any age, say political correctness is a top issue. This compares to around 13-14% of those aged 22-29 who say it is important. Despite this, there is bumpiness across age groups and results shift somewhat over time, so I am not convinced this relationship is as strong as the Brexit one, and the data seem to fit the story of a Brexit shock better than that of an anti-PC backlash.

West’s argument, like Norris and Inglehart’s, is that younger generations are becoming ever more liberal and will usher in a revolutionary change as the electorate ages. That story is yet to be written, but even though Zoomers appear more Right-leaning than Millennials, we’ll need to see evidence of further change before we can dismiss West’s thesis.

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In the 2019 election 18- and 19-year-olds were about 10 points more likely to vote Conservative than those aged 22-30. There is a similar pattern for party identification, with 18-year-olds about ten points more likely to identify with the Conservatives than 22 year-olds. Nevertheless, the distance the Tories still need to travel among Zoomers is great.

Figure 5.

James Tilley, using data that tracked voters over a 30-year period, showed that people become 20 points more likely to vote Tory between the ages of 20 and 80. If this holds, today’s Zoomers will still be only 50% Right-leaning when they reach their ninth decade, and long before this the hyper-liberal Millennials will have worked their way through the electorate, causing elections to swing far to the Left before moving back toward the centre.

All told, Zoomer conservatism is currently not strong enough to alter the broad picture West paints. Only time will tell if younger members of Gen-Z drift even further Right, but it’s probably safer to assume otherwise. The Conservatives are going to have to do a lot more to reverse the leftward drift of the culture if they hope to remain competitive in a generation’s time. As things currently stand, they do appear on the wrong side of history.

This public health lesson is one that the Victorians knew all too well but one facing us again nearly two centuries later as businesses start up again post-lockdown. Let us not underestimate how difficult this will be, not because of stifling government regulation (one metre or two?) nor consumer fear but because our very economic model is based on high density.

The Tesco founder and First World War veteran, Jack Cohen, who used his de-mob money to set up a market stall in East London, had one abiding business principle: “Pile it high, sell it cheap”. His approach became the chief characteristic of 20^th-century consumption, in every sector from groceries to restaurants, from beauty to air travel.

Once the epitome of luxury and exclusivity, by the 1990s air travel had opened up to the masses. The new model was all about low costs and high volumes. That marvel of engineering and design, Concorde, was grounded just as upstart low-cost airlines such as Ryanair built their brand by stripping back add-ons and offering absurdly cheap seat sales. Middle-market companies such as British Airways had no choice but to follow suit and lower their prices. The ‘no frills’ competition reached the grocery sector too, with Lidl, Iceland and Aldi chipping away at market share. Their success lay in winning over middle-class consumers for whom ‘bargain bragging’ about a £10 flight to Florence or grocery savings became du rigueur at dinner parties.

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Whereas the consumer boom in goods relied on an increasingly globalised and cheap supply chain, the consumer boom in experiences — be it travel, eating out or a hair-cut — centred on tight margins and low prices funded by boosting capacity. If density is its founding principle, then social distancing puts that entire model in jeopardy as consumers begin to prioritise space and safety above cost, and businesses recognise they can only survive by raising prices to counter lower footfall.

Restaurant owners, who all work on an extremely fragile business model, are especially vulnerable. In a survey by Square Meal, three-quarters of bar and restaurant owners said they did not think their establishment would survive social distancing. What of those restaurants with long benches designed like a school canteen where you are so close to fellow diners you end up eavesdropping on their conversation? And will a bar that is only running on 60% capacity have the same ambience? For every punter happy to get a seat, there will be others who miss the buzz of a busy bar.

Jo Eames, director of Peach Pubs, stated that “margins are so tight and costs so high in hospitality that no business can operate for long with much less than 90% full turnover”. Social distancing reduces capacity and will result in job losses and higher prices. Those restaurants in the City or West End, with high rents dependent on international tourists and business lunches, may end up faring much worse than small local establishments who are able to diversify their service with home delivery, cooked to order meals and an add-on specialist grocery store.

Hair salons are another case in point. Hairdressing is modelled on the Ford Assembly line with stylists, colourists and apprentices allotted designated roles and slots. Under this system, one stylist has the capacity to work on three clients over three hours. This becomes impossible under the new rules; stylists may have to stay with one client for the duration, massively impacting on the numbers that will be able to come through the salon door and inevitably pushing up prices. But the salon experience too will be diminished with the removal of the waiting area, refreshments, magazines and the installation of inhospitable Perspex shields between chairs.

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The high-density model made everything more accessible and also fed a culture in which consumers prioritised the buying of experiences over the buying of things. This was especially true for the millennial generation priced out of the housing market. What became cheap as they came of age — technology, eating out and travel — were all things, unsurprisingly, that millennials loved spending their money on. More millennials have passports than driving licenses, which is testimony to the fact that the open sky rather than the open road has long been the symbol of millennial consumer identity (compared to their gas-guzzling Baby boomer parents).

For millennials, “keeping up with Joneses” was not about your car, home or stuff owned; we could rent, share or borrow that stuff anyway. No, our status derived from something different: our experiences — the places we went, the people we met, the things we saw — and crucially the documenting of these experiences on social media. It is not the selfie that defined us, but the representation of the self-captured in the moment at a concert, in a restaurant, on a beach.

But now the crowd has been dispersed and the experiences have been put on ice. In a post-Covid world, it’s the home that represents a safe haven while everything that millennials enjoy spending their money on has been curbed. Evidence for this lies in how much money this particular demographic has saved over the past three months. According to Barclays, 18-29 year olds’ savings balances have increased by 9.9%, with an average saving amount of £604, which is 11% more than the national average and the highest of any age group. According to Ipsos Mori, while shopping habits did not really alter for those aged between 55-75 under lockdown, they changed the most for millennials, who bought different products and in different quantities than they did before.

But as lockdown is eased, will millennials (in particular) resume their normal ways? Will we see an era of ‘revenge spending’, (a term first coined in China, which saw an initial uptake in designer items being purchased after lockdown eased)? Consumer analysts and the Government hope that “pent-up demand” will result in a spending splurge — and the long queues outside Primark yesterday certainly point to that. The Barclays consumer survey however reveals that for millennials, the immediate priorities are restaurant meals and getting a haircut. It also revealed that 37% of millennials would like to be more attentive and responsible with their finances.

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But good intentions often wane. What may be more significant is that millennials could be forced into different spending habits due to changing prices. It has been estimated that package holidays could rise by £1,000 per head (not accounting for rising insurance costs). In the short term, there may be lower fares to entice customers back, but with airline bankruptcies and reduced competition, an inevitable decline in business travel and consumer fear likely to be a lingering factor, airlines will need to make even more money from their economy-class consumers. As one travel agent put it to me: “The days of flying so far, so often and so cheaply are over” — a fact that will chime with millennial and Gen Z’s environmental concerns.

As if pre-empting this shift, Airbnb has already sacked 25% of its workforce. It may be that, paradoxically, millennials end up benefiting. If over-tourism becomes a thing of the past and all those empty commercial office properties are turned into flats, the urban housing and rental market may finally become more affordable.

Airbnb is already refocusing its attention away from rental business to what they call ‘Air Experiences’; recalibrating the experience economy for the digital realm (clumsily known as phygital). Pitched as “unique activities we can do together led by a world of hosts”, you can take your pick from an art tour of Lisbon, a water blessing meditation ritual with a Bali-based Monk or a virtual trip through Chernobyl with its abandoned dogs — all within the comfort of your home.

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Let's stop pretending we love our jobs

By ELIZA FILBY

For people in their thirties who were already feeling an acute sense of burnout, with a family or soon to start one and desiring greater flexibility at work, lockdown only reinforced what they already knew. A tiny pod apartment or flat-share in the centre of town, especially surrounded by closed shops and lifeless bars, has its limitations. So even if we do snap back into old routines in 12 months’ time, things will be different in the long term, in part because business models will have had to change to survive but also because new habits and values will have been formed. As long as the economic incentives are there, a significant number of them will be encouraged (and possibly forced) to make the same choice as their parents, shifting from buyers of experiences to buyers of stuff and assets.

It will mean the birth of the ‘homebody economy’, where millennials invest in their house as a home beyond a crash pad. Lockdown saw one quarter of millennials increase their purchase of home, garden and DIY products. A move triggered by lockdown will be sustained because of new priorities — not least the inevitable and hugely significant shift in flexible working.

Might we see the rise of a new demographic — the suburban or semi-rural millennial — in their detached houses with their detached phygital dinner parties? Can we envisage a 21^st-century millennial mash up of Mike Leigh’s 1970s satirical play Abigail’s Party where couples share a simultaneous delivery from their favourite restaurant, give virtual tours of their renovated home office, bark orders at their Alexa and share Spotify dinner party playlists while wistfully reminiscing about the good old days of music festivals and cheap adventure travel?

Now that really would be a status update.

That’s not bad going.

Born between 1996 and 2015, members of ‘Generation Z’ are now guaranteed to spend their formative years surrounded by economic shocks and stagnation. Given that what happens during these ‘coming of age’ years strongly affects our politics and how we see the world around us, what might this mean for Zoomers in a post-Covid world?

Unlike my students, I was born in 1981 which either makes me an old Millennial or a young Gen-X’er. Formative experiences for my generation included the dominance of the Conservatives and then the arrival of Tony Blair and New Labour, which seemed to usher in a new liberal zeitgeist. It was also a time of continuous economic growth, falling unemployment and expanding university education. There were certainly challenges but nothing seemed to go seriously wrong until the terrorist attacks on 9/11, or at least that’s how I remember it.

For my Zoomer students, however, the coming of age experience has been utterly different. Their formative experiences have included major economic downturns and recessions, international crises and divisive debates about the ‘losers of globalisation’ and the rise of global populism.

They were children when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the Great Recession followed. They were in primary school during the years of austerity, and in secondary school when the country voted for Brexit (a contest which they were not eligible to participate in). And today, after having already been set back by the Great Recession, they are preparing to graduate and enter the workplace just as a global pandemic sweeps across the globe and pushes the economy into yet another financial crisis.

Whereas older Millennials entered the workforce as the Great Recession hit, leaving them to navigate a ‘double crisis’ that was political and economic, Zoomers are about to enter the workforce against the backdrop of both the Great Recession and the Great Lockdown, leaving them to navigate a ‘triple crisis’ that runs across politics, economics and health.

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It takes years, if not decades, to make sense of generational effects, so we can’t know the true extent of the Covid fallout for years. But we can at least use past evidence to make a few informed predictions about the future.

We know, for instance, how values are shaped by what happens around us. It was the relative economic security and affluence of the post-war economic ‘miracle’ that at least played some role in encouraging the (then young) Baby Boomers to gradually move away from the concerns about physical and economic security that had dominated the minds of their parents, who had lived through two world wars, the 1918 flu pandemic and serious economic distress.

Coming of age between 1961 and 1982, the Boomers benefited hugely from the rapid expansion of the middle-class, welfare state and university education. They enjoyed rising living standards, rising life expectancy and did not need to worry too much about their basic security.

It was this wider environment that helped pave the way for the great ‘liberal revolutions’ of the Sixties. Boomers came together to push through a shift away from ‘materialist’ values — focused on survival, security and fulfilling basic needs — toward a new era of ‘post-materialist’ values where, because those basic needs are met, people had the resources to indulge other ‘higher-level’ concerns, over freedom, self-expression, social status and esteem. The political effects that followed — a preoccupation with lifestyle issues, minority rights, sexual liberation, environmentalism, and so on — were all downstream of this value shift.

Not everybody participated in this shift, of course. As we now know, the liberal revolution did not appeal to the economically precarious working-class and self-employed, low-skilled service sector workers and people without degrees, who still prioritise security over social status and group attachment over lofty appeals to universal principles. The Left’s failure to recognise this lies behind many of its crushing electoral defeats, like Jeremy Corbyn’s in 2019.

Nor did the liberal revolution appeal to traditional social conservatives who simply did not share these post-materialist values, no matter how many university degrees they won or how much money they earned. True, liberal progressives came to dominate the agenda, but they underestimated how, from the 1990s onward, these other groups would come together to try and slow the liberal revolution. This ‘counter-revolution’ would end up powering the rise of populist and conservative parties across Europe, pushing social democracy into an existential crisis and then handing victories to Brexit, Trump and Boris Johnson, among others.

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Many liberal progressives hoped that young Millennials and Zoomers would come to their rescue; that these newly-ascendant generations would mobilise a backlash to the backlash. But that was based on the assumption that these same young voters would have a somewhat similar coming-of-age experience to their Gen-X parents and Baby Boomer grandparents; that they would enjoy economic security and be able to afford the increasingly expensive university education — two things we know are central to the development of post-materialist values.

Yet the Great Recession and the Great Lockdown give us good reason to question that assumption. Even before the latest crisis researchers in the UK were already warning that the inter-generational contract was coming unstuck.

And even before the first of these two financial crises, young voters were suffering from low wage growth, leaving them with similar earnings to cohorts born 15 years earlier, were more likely than their predecessors to work part-time, to work in low-pay jobs, to be less likely to move jobs and so less likely to achieve pay rises, to have lower rates of home ownership, to have harder commutes, to spend more of their incomes on housing and, at least for Millennials, to live on disposable incomes no higher than they were for Gen-X’ers at the same age.

In short, whereas Boomers enjoyed considerable improvements compared to their parents’ generation, for the Millennials and Zoomers, this generational progress has stalled. Even before the current crisis, these youngsters were sliding back down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, back toward those more fundamental concerns over economic security. The arrival of Covid-19 will likely entrench all of this, focusing their minds not only on economic security but, at an even more basic level, their physical security too.

This is especially likely to happen southern Europe, where Zoomers in the more impoverished and indebted south are already having a fundamentally different life experience from the same cohort in the more secure and stable north. Even before the coronavirus crisis erupted, Europe’s next generation of leaders were grappling with unemployment rates of only 6% in Germany and the Netherlands but 29% in Italy, 31% in Spain and 36% in Greece. The Economist recently referred to the latter as the ‘pyrrhic victors’ of globalisation; while they have played by the same rules as their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, and also previous generations, two financial crises in close succession mean that they “have singularly failed to reap the expected benefits”.

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This not only helps explain why two million young Italians have left their families and country over the past decade, but also why we are now witnessing growing divides in the attitudes and outlook of Zoomers across Europe. As one study has shown, since the Great Recession younger people in ‘debtor’ states such as Italy, Greece and Spain have become far more sceptical of the EU than their counterparts in ‘creditor’ states like Germany, who have been much better insulated from the economic fallout. Such findings challenge the seductive narrative that Euroscepticism will steadily ‘die off’ and that a newly-ascendant generation of pro-Europeans is about to ride to the rescue. They also make it hard to avoid the conclusion that these divides will sharpen in the coming years, as different member states have very different experiences of the recovery.

This will have big political effects, even if we don’t see them for a while. As various academics have shown, economic crises also tend to be followed by a decline of trust in politics, a loss of confidence in how democracy is working and increased pessimism about the future. Just as the Great Recession was followed by a decade of political upheaval — one that witnessed the rise of populism, Brexit, Trump, the fragmentation of Europe’s political systems and also the rise of the Greens — it seems likely that the Great Lockdown will pave the way for something just as volatile.

Perhaps it will trigger a return to the familiar. If Millennials and Zoomers are now falling down the hierarchy of needs, then might they revive older debates about economic redistribution, jobs, taxation and inequality? We could be about to witness the return rather than the retreat of the traditional Left-Right divide in politics.

Who, then, will this young cohort trust to manage these pressing issues? Some thinkers have suggested that whereas the economic crash in 1929 represented a failure of markets that paved the way for a bigger role for the state, and whereas the stagnation of the 1970s represented a failure of the state that paved the way for the return of markets, then together the post-2008 Great Recession and post-2020 Great Lockdown might pave the way, once again, for the return of the state.

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Zoomers, it seems to me at least, will feel especially comfortable with a new era of big government, especially if it is far more active against climate change and crony capitalism. After all, unlike their Gen-X parents and Baby Boomer grandparents, this is a generation that, in little more than a decade, has watched the state come to the rescue on not one but two occasions.

And who will be the main beneficiary of this new wave of disillusionment? Given that economic hardship has tended to benefit the Left more than the Right, one way to answer this question is to suggest that we might now see something of a return of social democratic and/or Green movements, especially when their economic radicalism is combined with the one issue that really does animate my students: climate change. Whereas the liberal revolution of the Sixties often presented environmentalism as a lifestyle or status concern, for today’s Zoomers it is both existential and apocalyptic; it is often seen as being as central to their sense of security as food and water.

Might this point to a continuing surge of support for Europe’s Greens? Perhaps, although until now this has mainly been a phenomenon for the more affluent Zoomers in northern Europe. Further south, it seems just as plausible to me that, when their counterparts start to look for answers, they might simply not look toward politics at all.

As Stuart Fox, a leading academic on generational change, told me: “I think we will see the economic consequences of this have more of an impact than anything else in the medium term, and the likely impact will be to make today’s young people even less interested in politics, and even less likely to be politically active, than the Millennials”.

Seen through the eyes of these Zoomers, politicians have consistently failed to manage a succession of crises: the Great Recession; a refugee crisis; the outbreak of Covid-19; and, most importantly of all for this generation, climate change. Perhaps then — when yet another crisis has been and gone — Zoomers will not ask who they should vote for but rather whether they should bother voting at all.

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.

She used to purchase her items on Amazon but “that took loooong, like 24 hours to be delivered”, so she’s started going to her local library: “It’s great, the books are just there waiting for you.” Uploading a ‘shelfie’ of current reading material has become a popular status update amongst her friends.

Zoe’s generation is rediscovering books in the same way that Millennials discovered vinyl; the difference is that the former are increasingly doing it as a way of logging off from their smartphones. Last year, the psychologist Jean Twenge persuasively argued in The Atlantic that the device had destroyed a generation – but was Twenge too hasty in that conclusion?

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By Tom Chivers

Zoe is a member of Generation Z (those born between 1997-2010), who are very different from their Millennial predecessors (those born between 1981-1996). It is often remarked that whereas Millennials came of age in the smartphone era, Generation Z are the social media generation. But the real distinction is that Gen Z are the ones who can’t remember Myspace, think Facebook is for their parents and see the internet primarily as a video medium (using YouTube rather than Google to find something out).

If Facebook and Twitter turned Millennials into commentators, then Snapchat and Instagram have turned Gen Z into broadcasters and storytellers. The average Gen Z’ers have had a smartphone since they were 13, which means they have had the misfortune of living most of their adolescence on-line.

Babyboomers are actually the fastest growing demographic on social media, revelling in the sensation of greater connectivity, but Gen Z – who have lived its realities and its damaging impact on their time and mental health – are the ones questioning the point of it all. In the US, researchers at the University of Chicago found that 58% of teens said that they had voluntarily taken a break from social platforms in the last year.

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Why it's time to panic about kids and smartphones

By Peter Franklin

In the same way that those who grew up with multiple TV channels now find the unlimited choice rather mundane, many teenagers feel they’ve reached iPhone saturation point. They speak of being “phone-bored”; the feeling you get when you find yourself endlessly and aimlessly scrolling through your apps. Social media, as one 16-year-old boy put it to me, “cannot make dull people interesting, plus there’s only so many funny cat videos you can watch”. If such platforms thrive on keeping your attention, are they losing the attention of the young?

Some teenagers are logging off, others are embracing the novelty and freedom of “dumb phones”, such as the deliberately basic Nokia 3310, but it would be wrong to describe Gen Z as neo-luddites. They are, however, developing a very sophisticated and obsessional interest in their data and privacy. Gen Z did not need the Cambridge Analytica revelations to open their eyes to the fact that ‘if the service is free, you are the product’. Unlike their elders, they have been aware of it since their tweens. They have been curating, collating and uploading material for their on-line brand and filtering and ‘spinning’ their personal narratives for at least half of their life.

Snapchat is their favoured app precisely because the content disappears after 10 seconds, although many find the Snapmap feature (locating the live whereabouts of their friends) a bit creepy. Many have both private and a public Instagram, and some have multiple profiles to reflect their many passions, fantasties and, increasingly, identities. Many opt not to use their real name or email addresses to access their platforms.

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Gen Z are also using social media in more proactive, communitarian ways. While we can easily dismiss the virtue-signalling ‘clicktivism’ of Millennials (hashtags are the modern-day equivalent of pin badges), Gen Z, instinctively netcitizens, are going beyond this. Take, or example, the survivors and campaigners that emerged out of the Parkland shooting tragedy in the US.

Though themselves too young to vote, their on-line campaign, which began as #neveragain, spiralled into a GoFundMe that raised four million dollars, a national school walkout and companies from Delta to Hertz cutting ties with the NRA. It was remarkable in its speed, penetration and tactics – not to mention far more effective in pressing for change in gun controls than years of conventional consciousness-raising.

Online campaigning for communitarian interests may be a minority sport, but commercial transactions for private gain are where Gen Z is really showing tech intiative. It is estimated that over 70% of today’s teenagers are making their own pocket-money. And they are not doing a paper round or waitressing like previous generations, but selling goods, clothes or organising networks and events on social media. Depop, which has over eight million users, offers their mostly young subscribers a cross between Ebay and Instagram, enabling members to ‘flip’ secondhand clothes and trainers.

Many make a tidy profit and many more are learning a great deal about accountancy, photo-editing and marketing in the process. Scroll through the Depop markeplace and you will find teenagers exhibiting their items as if they were a fashion feature in Vogue. Depop now offers mentoring and support to would-be sellers, helping them to maxmise their market’s potential.

Companies have realised that the only way to reach this adblocker generation – one that is unmoved by traditional airbrushed celebrity-endorsed advertising – is to sell their products via ‘influencers’ on social media. But more than this, companies are seeing the value of ‘micro-influencers’; those with tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of followers. These are increasingly likely to get traction with a generation that prizes intimacy and authenticity.

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How technology sidelines the citizen

By Carl Miller

This generation watches less than an hour of television a day, but four hours of YouTube. The popularity of vloggers lies not in their offer of escapism but their promise of an education (in whatever you are interested in, from how to code to how to apply eyeliner). YouTubers may be the new celebrity class to their millions of followers, but the truth is that all members of Generation Z consider themselves ‘influencers’. That is the agency and perspective that the smartphone has given them.

But could it be that the touch-screen is destroying their sense of touch? A recent survey found that 16-18 year olds prefer sexting to actual sex, with 84% admitting to flirting and over a third confessing they had sent a sexual or nude image on their phones.

It appears that this generation is on a continual loop of digital foreplay, preferring virtual to real interaction. They are also less likely to indulge in the traditional means of social lubrication that often underpin such trysts. In a survey done by the Office of National Statistics, less than half of UK 18-24 year olds had consumed alcohol in the last week, compared with 66% amongst the same age group in 2005.

‘Sober socials’ are now mainstream on university campuses and teenage pregnancy is now at its lowest rates for decades, but should we really be surprised, given that every bar a teenager walks into and every bed that they consider lying in now has a surveillance and recording device nearby? The potential for social shaming through video (not just photos) is so pervasive that it’s no wonder that this generation are sensible and unrebellious.

The iPhone camera has achieved what years of sexual and drug education failed to do; prevented deviancy where public shaming is the ultimate deterrent. Teenagers live in fear of their misdemeanours being broadcast and will therefore do anything to maintain their brand. It is, however, this pressure to control other people’s perception of them which is also leading to record levels of depression and anxiety.

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The glitches in the UberCon ambition for a smartphone state

By Eliza Filby

Kids already groan about online ‘sharenting’. An average child in the UK has over 1,500 images of themselves shared on social media before they are five years old. How long will it be before before they start to use GDPR to remove the material?

“My mum needs to learn how to use social media properly,” said one 15-year-old girl I interviewed, “she doesn’t understand that what she posts about me I’m stuck with forever.”

There is a new slang word doing the rounds in the primary playground lately; Tapass. It is what the kids call adults who are on their phone too much. If you think your child spends too much time on their phone, chances are they think the same about you.

Far from destroying a generation, the smartphone has conditioned them in sophisticated, surprising and exciting ways the older ones are only really beginning to understand. And what they learn now will shape them in the future – whether as consumers, activists, voters or entrepreneurs.

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By Nigel Cameron