Later that day, I searched “Crohn’s disease” on the X app and found someone talking about Dr. Ray Peat. I connected with several sick people who were following a Peat diet, and they helped me one-on-one to build a recovery plan. Their instructions — avoid pork and seed oils (polyunsaturated fats), eat raw carrots, take desiccated cow thyroid — saved me. After I ovulate each month, I take progesterone dissolved in Vitamin E oil. The product, Progest-E by Kenogen, is crafted by Dr. Peat’s widow. The first time I took it, my body was so affected by its immediate tempering of estrogen — a key Peat idea is that estrogen is a driver of disease — that I had to lie down.

My muscles, taxed by estrogen dominance, became so relaxed from the progesterone that I could no longer stand. I still take it. The regimen runs for 14 days post-ovulation until I begin bleeding. I pop aspirin, another Peat hallmark, like candy every day. A few times a week, I take a custom blend of Vitamin D and Vitamin K called Estroban from a Washington, DC, cosmetics lab to offset aspirin’s blood-thinning properties. I eat as much red meat as I want, and my gut inflammation is at an all-time low. Three years later, my Crohn’s disease is no more. I will never try a new medication, I will never get surgery, and I will never stop Peating.

My devotion to Dr. Peat is what’s now being called healthmaxxing. It’s an online trend that, along with the intertwined practice of looksmaxxing, is drawing ire from the online Left, Millennials and Gen X specifically. “Why should so many perfectly healthy young women spend their youth tending to their imagined poor health?” The Cut asks. It’s “warped and wrongheaded” to looksmaxx, according to The New Yorker. In these precincts, taking pride in cultivating your health and personal appearance is coded as selfish and indifferent to Palestine, and women interested in healthmaxxing are targets for ridicule. 

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Women are subjected to shame online and offline. A popular Peat poster, Veronica Hoffman, known online as the mononymous Veronica, is the founder of anti-aging and hormone-safe skincare line Aurabiōm. Veronica is dragged across X as a crackpot anti-vaxx lolcow for her insistence that a cortisol-free lifestyle is required to stay beautiful. Others celebrate her and credit her with changing their lives. 

Many “Trust the Science” Millennial and Gen X women have accepted chronic illness as just part of living in an America under siege by people they disagree with. They brand themselves the permanent victims of obesity and mental-health disorders. Lena Dunham, the self-appointed voice of Millennial women, has recently completed press for her new memoir, Famesick. Like Veronica, she publicly diarizes — but instead of discussing health, she discusses her relationship with her fatness and mental illness. Dunham presents obesity as a feminist victory, a rejection of patriarchal ideals of beauty. Non-famous Millennial women watch Girls and read Famesick and see a stunning and brave heroine theatrically parading the medical interventions necessary to correct health issues that shouldn’t have arisen in the first place. Motivated by these negative examples, my generation, Gen Z, has taken health into our own hands.

Americans are sicker than they have ever been. A 2023 article in the journal Current Opinion in Immunology puts the global figure for autoimmune-disease prevalence at 19.1%, up from the approximately 8% estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal in 2004. At that time, 78% of those affected were women. Nobody with a medical degree treats this as an emergency, and the Millennial American treats psychiatric conditions as just another personality quirk.

In an inversion of the days of pro-anorexia Tumblr, the internet has become a solution for sick women. If I had not connected with the Peat community on X, I would be dead — because I refuse lifelong, humiliating interventions for my health condition. Substack and X have become places where hyper-online sick women discuss experiences in and out of the medical-pharmaceutical complex. Many of these women conclude that contemporary illness is tied to hormonal disruptions, such as estrogen dominance, thyroid dysregulation, and progesterone deficiency. They believe that nutrition and environmental conditions contribute to these disruptions, and that seed oils, synthetic additives, urban living, artificial light, lack of sunlight, and the psychic stress of New York City or Los Angeles have negative impacts on our bodies. Contemporary life is incompatible with health, and has created a public-health crisis to which women seem to be the most vulnerable.

Lily Sperry, a brand consultant who runs the popular alternative-health Substack Health Gossip, articulates the environmental side of the issue. Sperry has posted on X about living in Chicago and feeling drawn to more rural environments. “Your approach [must] consider the context that you’re operating in — like, are you living in a city, alone in a studio apartment, not getting sunlight? I think those factors should be addressed,” she wrote me in an email. Sperry’s paid-subscriber chat room functions as a nouveau, female-oriented forum for this philosophy: acupuncturists, energy healers, and the alternative-health-curious post threads asking for infrared sauna recommendations, healthy restaurant lists, and product reviews. Women share what has actually moved the needle for them, not what their doctors suggested.

Balancing hormones is the pillar of this movement, which distances itself from looksmaxxing, though both exist in overlapping internet circles. Veronica and others explicitly identify hormonal balancing as the holy grail, first for female health and second for beauty. Hoffman diarizes her wellness routines publicly on Instagram: European travels under red-light chicken lamps, nibbles of the Mexican thyroid medication Cytomel, and aspirin in between. My own Crohn’s is a case study in what hormonal intervention can accomplish. When I began progesterone supplementation post-ovulation, it deleted my symptoms. My inflammation markers sank quickly. I still see regular doctors, and haven’t given up conventional medicine entirely, but I credit my deep remission to my desire to balance my hormones, and not to my yearly $8,560.32 box of Humira.  

Health is a nobler goal than beauty, especially for women, who are labeled vain if they prioritize the latter. But healthmaxxing and looksmaxxing are intertwined, though they’re also polarized thanks to unhealthy (and fertility-destroying) pharmaceutical looksmaxxing approaches practiced by influencers like Clavicular, who takes meth to stay skinny and uses a hammer to reshape his cheeks. Hoffman coined a phrase now printed on hats: “You’re spiking my cortisol and making me less beautiful.” Chronic stress elevates cortisol, which destroys skin, hair, and body composition. Modern female life is a cortisol machine. Taking action against it is both a health intervention and an aesthetic one. 

The Millennial author Tao Lin, one of the earlier adopters of the health-first philosophy, reached similar conclusions via a different route. Like the healthmaxxing women of today’s timeline, Lin took to the internet to determine what was wrong with him, and self-diagnosed with autism and other disorders. His approach is centered on detoxification — first of the body through garlic and bentonite clay (a detoxifying skin mask), and then of the mind by opting for psilocybin over benzodiazepines for anxiety. In Lin’s 2021 autofictional book, Leave Society, he portrays the protagonist’s healing as a meaningful, spiritual event. 

Still, he says, looks can’t be separated from the overall holistic health approach. “I healed myself to reduce the amount of pain and itchiness and anxiety and depression and autism and other undesirable symptoms,” he told me. However, “most forms of healing make people look better, which can help people motivate themselves to heal themselves, which seems good.” 

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New Mexico podcaster, author, and wellness influencer Chloé Happe frames the movement with characteristic clarity: “The entire basis of alternative health is us calling out into the void, ‘Hey, we’ve really lost ourselves here. How do we find our way back?’” she told me. Happe was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, a tradition in which health is a religious obligation. The first time she understood that this wasn’t a universal principle, she told me, she was at the state fair with an aunt who hadn’t been raised in the church. Happe, waiting in line for her first hot dog, pointed at an obese man and asked, loudly, why he was so fat. Her aunt was horrified and made her apologize. She felt guilty, initially about the comment, and then about eating the hot dog. “I knew that being fat and eating hot dogs were things to feel guilty about,” Happe says. It’s not allowed in Leftist circles to say so, but she was right.

Ultimately, this has become a political problem. In a scene from Desolation E-Girl, Happe’s debut novel, her protagonist deletes photos of herself wearing a MAGA hat from her X profile because she assumes that it may cost her suitors. For the Left, MAHA-type alternative health-consciousness and Right-wing politics have become almost the same thing, and people are afraid that embracing one means embracing the other. When RFK Jr. joined the Trump campaign, he effectively poisoned the concept of health for most Left-leaning people. Rational engagement with the health question now requires social courage. This, even though many of these impulses — a view of industrial modernity itself as the cause of illness — used to be Left-coded.

What actually drives the healthmaxxing wave is something older than MAHA and even older than the crunchy California Left that RFK channels: a concept as old as the Greeks that beauty is synonymous with health, and that both are good. What’s truly sick is that we can no longer state this without controversy. 

But as I’ve gotten older — and I’d like to think wiser — and as my own worldview has evolved, I’ve started to understand that the joy I experience around kids is not just about surplus energy or drawing a contrast with my New York City lifestyle, but actually the activation of an inborn paternal instinct. Some part of my being has a desire to make what sociobiologist Robert Trivers calls “parental investment.” That is to say: to play a crucial role in the future, to sacrifice something, to be a part of a clan and not just an isolated hedonic maximizer.

My generation, Millennials, is having children later, and at lower percentage rates than generations that came before us — only 40% of Millennial men are fathers, compared to 46% of Gen Xers, and only 33% live with a spouse and children, as compared to 66% of Gen X men. Among Zoomers, breeding is even less likely, in part thanks to a significant gender gap: 57% of Zoomer men want kids (a priority valued much more highly among Trump voters), but only 46% of Zoomer women want them (and likely they don’t want them with Trump voters). Add to this the ethos of AI, robotics, and life extension, and it suggests that one of the many schisms coming to our civilization will be that of the childless versus the parents: those who maximize life extension and hedonism, and those who value what will start to be considered “trad immortality” — that is, old-fashioned biological procreation. I don’t mean that everyone will fall into just these two camps, of course, but that this distinction will be a meaningful and historical one. The seeds of it are already planted. 

Much is said, and rightly so, about the consequences of delayed parenting for women: both positive and negative. But there is far less emphasis on the consequences of delayed parenting for men. Men also undergo hormonal, neurological, and psychological changes when they become fathers. As biological anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa writes, “humans are unusual among mammals in that our offspring are dependent upon older individuals for feeding and protection for more than a decade.” 

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Men, like women transform when they have to provide care and protection to a family. The shifts are less obvious but no less existentially and morally meaningful. Men of my generation, however, are reaching or crossing the boundary of age 40 not only without having had kids, but without ever having thought about having kids, and thus remaining in what can only be deemed a long adolescence — or a long 20s, at least.

To be sure, not everybody should have children. And I suspect that lifelong bachelors do play a valuable role in civilization (for instance, there’s a reason why historically almost no philosophers have been married). Certainly some people’s most procreative acts are creative and intellectual, and not biological. But on the whole, something is wrong with a society in which increasingly few men unlock the deepest meaning of their own masculinity — a tissue-deep meaning. In a 2014 Emory University study, fathers showed much higher levels of plasma oxytocin, higher prolactin, and lower testosterone than non-fathers. A landmark 2011 longitudinal study out of Northwestern found that the men with the highest testosterone — the most competitive, virile males by the manosphere’s own metrics — were the most likely to become fathers, and then experienced declines of roughly a third in their testosterone levels after becoming fathers: peak masculinity leads to fatherhood, and fatherhood transforms it. For some in the manosphere, this sounds like a disaster (because “high T” is God), but we are meant to become less aggressive and more nurturing when we have children. 

Fathers also live longer than non-fathers, even controlling for marital status. Fathers show lower rates of mental illness and engage in fewer risky behaviors. Moving away from the reductionist sociobiological point of view, any serious reader of great literature knows that fatherhood is often the mark of the hero, of a boy transformed into a man, who is ready to apply the lessons of his long education to the future and the next generation.

Whether extrapolating from Tolstoy — think of the birth of Prince Andrei’s son in the first part of War and Peace — or science, it is not hard to see why a world with fewer fathers, and a lower share of fathers, is less healthy, less civilized, less enmeshed in the meaning and drive of life.

Earlier this year, the internet writer and former academic sociologist Justin Murphy wrote a long post on X, perhaps to provoke conversation, about his own dislike of being a father. The responses to his post were, to my mind, salutary: one premise of Murphy’s confession was that fatherhood is central to manhood, and that manhood without fatherhood — or without a taste for fatherhood or love of fatherhood — is a manhood or masculinity that must question itself and interrogate itself. Certainly this is the right track. 

The gulf is wide between the pleasures of a civilization that suspends adolescence forever and the ancient challenge of sacrificing one’s own gratification for the sake of new life and of the future. What Murphy’s viral post demonstrates is that it’s hard to transition from an easy life to a difficult one, where you must be ultimately responsible and seek more than self-fulfillment. I have this anxiety myself. One reason for it is that men of my generation never learned how to overcome such feelings. Without rituals of manhood, which bring men gradually, but definitively, into modes of responsibility both positional and spiritual, the shift from bachelorhood to parenthood produces anxiety and shock. 

A highly technologized, ultra-modernized world where everyone lives far from nature, tradition, and religion, is one with more choices, and concealed preferences. So my point here is not to punish those who choose not to have children, but to inject some kind of paranoid philosophizing into the conversation. Are we forgetting that we have a choice — and that both tradition and biology make a very powerful case for fatherhood? 

Some, yes, are meant to be monks, playboys, philosophers, esoteric computer programmers who spend their lives in largely solitary conditions. But those are few. How many of us are really Leopold Bloom without wives and without children — without a hero’s journey, without the inheritance of Odysseus, who knows who he is because he has an island home, a wife and a son, an old father, a loyal dog? Many of us. Which means, ultimately, that many of us will never experience the sweetness of growing old.

The prenuptial agreement is also a container of sorts, the kind you preemptively clap over a bomb before it explodes, to minimize the blast radius. When I got married in 2008, signing one of these would not have occurred to me. Prenups were for people who were coming to their marriages with something to lose, a fortune either made or inherited before the spouse came along. The rich divorcee, looking out for the interests of children from his first marriage; the heiress with family money and anxious parents; the elderly billionaire who wanted to hedge his bets against having a tragic accident while on honeymoon with his 25-year-old trophy wife. (The protagonist of my upcoming novel, a wealthy tech founder, has a prenup with an adultery clause: if her husband cheats on her, he won’t see a dime.)

But now the prenup is getting a glow-up, especially among Millennials and Zoomers who are signing them in droves. Brooklyn Beckham famously has one, as do Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian; Taylor Swift, after her fairytale engagement, reportedly brushed the stars out of her eyes and got busy with a contract to protect her fortune. But it’s not celebrities, who’ve always signed these agreements, who are responsible for their sudden popularity; it’s everyone. A recent poll found that 41% of engaged or married Zoomers, and 47% of Millennials, have entered into one.

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The advent of the digital economy is no doubt a factor here; an article from The New Yorker notes the proliferation in recent years of “new apps such as HelloPrenup, Wenup, and Neptune that fast-track the process; the latter has couples discuss their finances with an AI chatbot before being matched, by algorithm, with a lawyer”. Surely, though, it isn’t only this. Algorithms and apps represent the supply; the demand, on the other hand, is cultural. The money quote comes from a 38-year-old consultant named Kaylin Dillon: “This generation just doesn’t trust marriage.” In other words, signing a prenup isn’t about protecting your assets. It’s about guarding your heart.

Perhaps this was predictable. What more inevitable fate for a generation raised on a steady diet of safetyism, complete with the notion that every interaction should have an escape hatch to protect one from emotional harm? A generation so hell-bent on litigating disappointment that they invented the concept of “nonconsensual ghosting”; whose playdates were arranged by their parents and whose messy breakups were mediated by deans; in whom has been inculcated such a horror of failing at anything, ever, that they have learned to live in a state of perpetual caution while eschewing vulnerability at all costs?

For 10 years in the 2010s, I wrote a teen advice column; about halfway through that decade, I started to notice a disturbing uptick in the number of letters, usually from girls, asking how a person might pursue romance “without getting hurt.” My answer, which invariably horrified them, was that this was impossible — that getting hurt is table stakes for getting to fall in love, which is why it’s lucky for us that falling in love is so terrific.

But the contemporary young person doesn’t necessarily see it that way. The decline of social trust — not just in marriage, but in other people; the rise of online communities where women gather to annihilate the reputations of the men who disappoint them; the lingering sense, in the wake of the MeToo movement, that men are so predatory and heterosexual relationships so fraught with danger that they’re hardly worth the trouble: these, to quote one Jon Bon Jovi, give love a bad name. And having been encouraged to gamify everything from their workout routines to their sexual encounters in search of safety and predictability, of course young people remain drawn to the friction-reducing promise of prenups, to the suggestion that we might never get our hearts broken at all if we just find the perfect container to cushion them, the perfect set of rules to govern their affairs.

It’s just that insofar as it works, it’s a great way to ensure you never feel much of anything, bad or good; certainly, you won’t experience the transcendence that all the songs and stories are about.

And it’s hard to think of a more potent illustration of the notion of setting yourself up to fail than entering a marriage with one eye already on the door, already thinking about what you want to take with you when you leave. To be planning how you’ll break free of your vows before you ever make them; to be asking yourself, “What do I want to take away from this?” instead of “What do I have to give?” The couple planning to wed should be like two people building a rocket to the moon, practically delirious with excitement for the journey they’re about to embark upon and faith in the person they’ve chosen to make it with. To introduce a prenup is to shatter the fantasy with pragmatic fatalism, redrawing the rocket to include a nice big escape pod — whose inclusion not only suggests the inevitability of failure but also paradoxically weakens the structure that was supposed to transport them to another world in the first place.

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None of this is to say prenups shouldn’t exist. I’ve read enough murder mysteries and celebrity divorce memoirs to know that pre-marital contracts have their uses, just as I’ve read enough about the plight of women in the era before no-fault divorce to understand why lowering the bar to exit a bad marriage was a good development. Ironically, the rise of the contemporary prenuptial agreement may even signal a return to tradition, insofar as it suggests a view of marriage more in common with that of ancient people — who saw it as a means to transfer property, consolidate wealth, and form strategic attachments between families to accrue power and resources — than with the modern romantic.

But that traditional, transactional approach to marriage was a product of a time, and a system, in which women’s rights were limited; in the girlboss era, in a society organized around equal rights and individual self-actualization, it suggests a totalizing inability to let our guard down even when it comes to love, to family, to lifelong commitment. And if the impulse to contractually protect ourselves from heartbreak and betrayal is understandable, there are nevertheless tradeoffs to changing the way we think about our commitments to each other, to adopting norms that undermine their seriousness and strip them of their magic right out of the gate — because isn’t the entire idea of marriage to build something lasting, something that isn’t easy to dismantle, something it would cost so much to walk away from that you’d do it only as a last resort? Isn’t that why we mark the act of commitment with ritual, tradition, and an enormous amount of cake; why we make our vows in sacred spaces, in the sight of God, in front of our families and our communities? The purpose of all this ceremony isn’t just to celebrate love, but to make a promise for which you will, and want to, be held accountable.

The obvious defense of prenuptial agreements is that having one is simply good sense, on the order of having car insurance or a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. The trouble is that what’s sensible when it comes to fire safety can look terribly cynical when it comes to love — maybe even fatally so. Because to really make a go of it in love, in marriage, does require a certain sort of delusional belligerence. Not just to make the delirious leap together, but to keep leaping, like fools, forever, because the foolish act of leaping is everything. It’s the material the rocket of your marriage is made of; it’s the fuel that makes it fly. And maybe it’ll take a while to get there, and maybe it won’t always be easy, but who cares? Yes, who cares, when you’re going to the moon!

Sims fans are not what laymen would expect gamers to be. The shouty young men who crack rape jokes in Call of Duty lobbies are nowhere to be found in Pleasantview. The fandom, unusually for gaming, skews about 80% female; the gameplay is less about gunning down insurgents than building homes and families, nurturing relationships and customizing interior decor. The game gives players godlike control over their creations, allowing legions of highly skilled “modders” to tinker with bespoke elements. Its limitless customization has attracted a sizable and vocal LGBT constituency; some exclusively program lesbians; others make almost all their Sims parents polygamous. Physicality and clothing is entirely unisex, fitting neatly into transgender philosophy; same-sex marriage was introduced to the game in 2009, six years before it was legalized in the US where the game was created.

The Sims is a Californian export, a strange flower from the hothouse of Silicon Valley in the Nineties. The game’s conceptual power was that it reflected the radical entrepreneurialism of that time, allowing players to pull up the roots of known institutions — the family, the town, life and death itself — and redesign everything to the whims of the individual. The Sims is one big lab experiment for different social and sexual dynamics, and even in marketing EA was careful to court progressive favor with Pride campaigns and tactical brand partnerships. Although the spectrum of gameplay is as varied as that of players themselves — some choose, as above, to simply rehearse traditional family roles by putting a mother through three hours of tedious housework before sunrise — both the format of the game and its ideological foundations are inherently liberal.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario more heartrending than grubby realpolitik clashing with this sunlit cyberworld. Unfortunately for Sims players, that’s exactly what happened: EA, the game’s Californian publisher, founded in 1982 by a former Apple employee called Trip Hawkins, has been acquired for a cool $55 billion by a consortium including none other than the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (run by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the US not too long ago determined had personally ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi) and Affinity Partners — the Floridian investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an architect of the Gaza peace plan. A Gulf petrostate where homosexuality is punishable with decapitation, and a son of the Trump dynasty; you could not possibly cook up a less desirable cast of buyers for perhaps the most liberal gaming franchise in history.

Predictably, the players are rattled; a boycott is underway. “It’s always disheartening as a queer woman and a disabled person seeing the places [where] I once found comfort and safety online shrink to a significantly smaller degree,” writes one. Many fret that LGBT content will be phased out of the game, distasteful to the Saudi stakeholders or plain old American conservatives in the Trump orbit. “Even if the Sims stays the same, I don’t want my money to go to those people,” writes another. “The series is very much dead to me after this.”

For some players, this is less about the selling-out of a favorite game than the loss of a better world. One put-out Prometheus, watching the gods snatch back fire, writes: “It’s not just a video game to so many of us; I’ve rebuilt Paris, New York, Barcelona… I can’t just abandon ship and start over, [after] 10 years of world building. I can’t support Saudis or Kushner. I guess I bought my last pack.”

It is difficult to think of a cultural product, game or otherwise, which so precisely captures the spirit of Western hyperprogressivism. The naive political philosophy of Millennials is perfectly mirrored in the dynamics of the simulated world: it is an exclusively digital, infinitely customizable reality which comes into being simply because I say it does. The basic facts of life — one’s intelligence, talents, physicality, even biological sex — are all mercifully tweakable within the game’s cyber utopia. Grinding moral forces like shame and disgust are reduced to minuscule “moodlets” which waft away in a few in-game hours. As in the ethos of Millennial liberalism there is no solid credo, just a shifting and conditional system of values geared towards gratification and experiment. Beyond the arbitrary goals of accruing wealth and building impressive houses each player ruthlessly pursues their own idea of satisfaction, sometimes through outrageous acts of sadism: the classic Sims experience is to put a character who displeases you into a swimming pool before deleting the ladder (I may be speaking from experience). Gamers often alternate between creating “good” and “evil” Sims, where the latter are simply agents of chaos sent to torment and exploit the other residents. The moral bent of gameplay tends to be black and white; it’s a world that suits players who see reality as such too.  The system even shields players from mortality itself if they so choose. “When my first cat died, I brought her back to life”, writes one, who has since chosen to turn off the aging feature altogether.

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The Sims is a tabula rasa for building second, third, fourth lives or recreating reality as you believe it should be. Many players recreate family members; some recreate exes and torture them or simply keep them around for company, fabricating a resolved timeline of their own lives devoid of loss or rejection. The Sims is such a compelling and successful game because it fully actualizes the desire to retreat into a dreamworld — but rather than the magical medieval land of Zelda or the pastoral cuteness of Stardew Valley, this dreamworld is of your own, almost limitless, making.

How strange, then, for this symbol of untethered idealism to come into contact with disturbing political realities. It is not just the idealism of fans thrown into disarray; The Sims is being thrown into confusion along with the American progressive optimism which created it as tech philosophy, and the country more broadly, lurches to the Right.

Like other experiments in tech utopianism, The Sims is still reliant on real-world capital and anchored to decidedly un-rad bad actors. I can sympathize with fans’ misery upon being rudely reminded that their paradise was a shadowplay all along; it must be quite a jolt suddenly to see the puppetmaster’s haggard face, his dirty fingernails. In a game centered around ultimate control, wresting power from the gamer god because of something as earthly as a business buyout exposes the illusion. EA has turned the big lights on.

What makes the case of Carlo Acutis so remarkable is the combination of youth and speed. The first millennial saint would be only 34 years old if he were alive today, the 19th anniversary of his death. His parents were in the congregation yesterday. “Carlo met Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents Andrea and Antonia,” said Pope Leo. That was a generous form of words. When Carlo was born, his father Andrea was working in London for the investment bank Lazard; neither he nor his wife Antonia were practicing Catholics, and it was only the piety of their son that drew them back to the Church. At the time, Carlo was the wealthy couple’s only child. On the fourth anniversary of his death, Antonia gave birth to the twins Francesca and Michele; the latter gave the first reading at the canonization Mass, speaking in natively fluent English. A popular image on Instagram shows Carlo, halo shining, with his arms around the siblings he never met.

The notion of a millennial saint, photogenic in his polo shirt and Ray-Bans, has proved irresistible to the secular media. Most Catholics are delighted. But, like every major event in a shrinking Western Church scarred by scandal and online factional warfare, it is tinged with controversy. The convergence of modernity and tradition in Carlo’s life has created a legacy that is unsettling as well as exhilarating. Many Northern European Catholics are unenthusiastic about the permanent exhibition of saints’ dead bodies; Carlo lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, at first glance incorrupt, though in fact his apparently flawless complexion is a silicone mask concealing what the Church admits are “normal signs of decay”. And some Italian Catholics, though accustomed to such exhibitions, think it was disrespectful to dress the boy in jeans and Nike trainers. But, honestly, it is difficult to get these things right. There is no precedent for the cult of a style-conscious computer geek.

A more fundamental controversy has been generated by the new saint’s personal faith — which, unlike his sartorial tastes, was impervious to fashion. Carlo Acutis’s Catholicism was rooted in the Eucharist: not just the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass, which is common to all flavors of Catholic spirituality, but the practice of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. The modernists who seized control of the Church’s liturgy after the Second Vatican Council regarded Eucharistic Adoration as a superstitious relic of the Middle Ages or, worse, sugary 19th-century piety. They and their successors have watched incredulously as a new generation of Catholics have embraced Adoration, falling to their denim-covered knees as the sacrament, encased in a richly ornamented monstrance, processes through the streets. Sales of mantillas or “Mass veils” for young women are through the roof; engaged couples, chaste until marriage and hoping for large families, cross themselves every time they pass a Catholic church.

Even before yesterday, Carlo Acutis, who coded websites celebrating the Eucharist and its associated miracles, was an unofficial patron saint of Generation Z traditionalists, many of whom attend the traditional Latin Mass that Pope Francis unsuccessfully tried to stamp out. St Carlo did not: he died the year before Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, later torn up by his successor, liberated the old rite for young people bored by the dreary folksiness of “youth Masses”. Yet the liturgical civil war that followed Francis’s 2021 document Traditionis Custodes, which attempted to drive the Latin Mass out of parishes, nonetheless cast a shadow over last weekend’s celebrations.

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Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Academy of St Anselm in Rome, was an influential lay advisor to the Argentinian pope; he is often described as “the mind behind the motu proprio” – that is, Francis’s brutal, and brutally enforced, restrictions on the old rite. Grillo has often written savagely against the traditional Mass. But last June he found a new target: the then Blessed Carlo Acutis. Writing in the journal Munera, he asked: “How is it possible that a young Blessed can communicate a Eucharistic theology so old, so heavy, so obsessive, so focused on the inessential …?” This “young ardent communicator”, he wrote, had a deficient, defective and one-sided understanding of the sacrament. A visit to Carlo’s website confirmed him in his view that the teenager manifested a “distorted fixation on Eucharistic miracles”.

The significance of Grillo’s polemic lay not so much in its venom but in his exalted position at the court of Pope Francis. This is not to say that the late pontiff shared his contemptuous view of Carlo Acutis. After all, it was Francis who — appreciating his popularity and reassured that he was untainted by the old Missal — would have canonized Carlo in April if he had not himself gone to meet his maker. What the Munera diatribe illustrated was the grip of the hard Left on the Bergoglio pontificate. Put bluntly, Francis knew that Grillo was a nasty piece of work, and it did not bother him.

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The battle for John Henry Newman

By Damian Thompson

In the act of canonizing Saints Piergiorgio and Carlo, Pope Leo displayed a perfect dignity that may yet develop into much-needed papal charisma. What remains to be seen is whether he grasps the extent to which, over the past 12 years, the institutions of the Church have been infiltrated by secular lobbyists. In this respect, it is not Sunday’s ceremony that matters so much as what happened on Saturday, when gay activists wearing T-shirts reading “Fuck the Rules” processed into St Peter’s Basilica as part of a papally-sanctioned LGBT pilgrimage. The contrast between the two events could not have been greater.

Leo can hardly attribute the scandal caused by the activists to homophobia; if he ponders the sequence of events that led up to it, and he is a deeply reflective man, perhaps he will realize that his own naïvety is partly to blame. In private he has promised to “bring peace to the Church”. Despite the joyful mood yesterday, there are frustratingly few signs that the healing has begun. Perhaps a prayer to St Carlo Acutis is in order.

But it had nothing to do with the sanguine message from the formal panels: that neoliberalism is vastly underrated and that our elites should be trusted to steer the country back on track. The real revelation was that my fellow professional-class 30-somethings haven’t been budged at all by the “vibe shift.” They remain as committed as ever to pronoun declarations, land acknowledgments, identity-based breakout groups, and other hallmarks of “peak woke.” 

This puts my generation at odds with just about everyone else, from the populist Left to the tech Right to normie voters in both parties. For other cohorts, the woke pot boiled over and cooled down by circa 2022. But for educated Millennials, it stayed on simmer. 

It isn’t remotely surprising, for instance, that Democrats opened their annual summer meeting with a land acknowledgment last month. As the clip went viral on social media, party strategist James Carville begged, “Please stop this, in the name of a just, merciful God.” Democrats — who were walloped in the swing states by President Trump last year, who alienated voters by pushing the culture war too far Left, and whose brand is crashing in opinion polls — seem practically suicidal in these moments.

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By Emily Jashinsky

When in 2024 the Trump campaign ran a swing-state ad blitz featuring the devastating line “Kamala is for they/them,” the leading Kamala Harris super PAC found that the spot “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The ad targeted a Harris pledge in 2019 to publicly fund transgender medical care for detained illegal immigrants as the woke fever was rising ahead of the 2020 Democratic primary.  It’s not unusual for primary stances to backfire in a general election, of course, but by 2024, the country’s mood had shifted dramatically. 

An Economist survey published last fall added research to the Trump campaign’s instinct that peak woke had already been reached by general-election season. “The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business,” the magazine wrote last September. “Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22, and has been declining ever since.”

The authors went on: “We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (gss), Pew, and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021.”

Why, then, would Democrats smarting from a loss with some very obvious causes still allow the party to be branded by causes that are partially responsible for tanking the brand? The reason will haunt Democrats long into the future, and it’s why the problem cropped up in the first place. Affluent Millennials, whose early adulthood was rocked by the Great Recession, got addicted to cheap virtue-signal opium as their source of meaning and purpose. Their worldviews are built on this foundation of sand, which is why “woke” isn’t quite sticking with Gen Z, and why it never dominated among older Americans. 

Trump’s rise accelerated the realignment of educated, affluent voters away from Republicans and toward Democrats. This happened just a few years after Charles Murray, in his book Coming Apart, documented how socioeconomic sorting into “superzip” bubbles was creating vast cultural divides between the rich and the poor. The more people who went to college filtered into high-earning careers, the more they settled in the same neighborhoods, the more they watched the same shows, read the same books, and ate at the same restaurants. 

The sticky cultural progressivism from Ivory Towers carried over from classrooms into board rooms and newsrooms. But that’s the thing about an ideology that insists one comply with an ever more radical set of rules: dissenters are purged to the point where it becomes impossible to assess the political climate because disagreement is dismissed as bigotry. Before you know it, Trump is back in the Oval Office.

At a panel on school choice in Aspen, Tommy Schultz of the American Federation for Children, asked audience members how many went to private school or sent their kids to private school. Most of the festivalgoers in the crowd raised their hands. This, Schultz noted, set them dramatically at odds with the rest of the country. 

Throughout the week, well-meaning, ambitious fellows broke themselves into identity-based chats, posted their pronouns, and cheered for invocations of privilege. I jumped off a shuttle having chatted with the driver about Aspen’s hollowed-out middle class to see a Pride flag on a taco truck and a woman pairing her cowboy hat with Louis Vuitton. The vibe was cowboy chic and, between the Balmain and Goyard, Birkenstocks and Broncos, started to feel like elites wearing the skin suits of the people they’d conquered. In fairness, one panelist in a trade discussion seemed almost ashamed to admit, “I’m part of the neoliberal order!”

All that is to say, it’s clearly true whatever postmodern fever gripped the culture five years ago has broken. Gen Z is diffuse, with no monoculture. Boomers are drowning in Facebook-slop-fueled anger. Affluent millennials, though, are clinging to the ideas that soothed them through the tumult of the Great Recession, the post-9/11 wars, and the fragmenting of their youth by the advent of smartphones. And the problem for Democrats, who face the prospect of infuriating their colleagues and activist class, is that it’s really hard to tell an interest group or employee you’ve indulged for years that they can’t do a land acknowledgment anymore. 

Many email jobs have disappeared overnight. The material economy of the Millennial manager is under pressure from automation; from DOGE-era disclosures about NGOs; and from broader, Trump 2.0 shifts back toward — or at least, an appreciation for — family and church, farm and toil.

The Millennial economy was a virtue economy. Some of the most successful among us held managerial roles in tech, education, finance, arts, and politics that centered on controlling and reshaping language and brand perception — what might be called “virtue refereeing”. The most ambitious American Millennials, in a broad sense, became the apparatchiks of the globalized economy built by our parents, in part because there were few other pathways to the American Dream: stable jobs, home ownership, rising wages. Successful Millennials scuttled across the narrow footbridge between the eras. Many others, however, fell into the voids on all sides.

The new economic and political paradigm that is settling into place suggests redress, and greater social dignity, for those who didn’t land managerial email jobs in the first place, who didn’t sell out to become virtue referees. Put simply: many Americans look forward to paying fewer taxes indirectly into the managerial caste’s pocketbooks and to the potential reshoring of industrial jobs. Thus, these changes may be bad for the few and good for the many; many of them deserve to be celebrated.

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By Matthew Gasda

Start with politics. Because former President Joe Biden’s staffers ran his administration, the Biden years were the first Millennial presidency: inauthentic, bureaucratic, neurotic, seduced by jargon and theory, indifferent to the needs of those outside their own caste. The Biden era was a great reveal: we saw the wizard behind the curtain (and that wizard talked like us, with upspeak and a tendency to twist declarative sentences into the interrogative tone). More damningly, the wizard also made things worse: there was a seeping sense of decline in the Biden years, which produced the inevitable political backlash.

Beyond politics, virtue-referee work has lost its appeal, and the way Millennials talk about their jobs is shifting. Sunny, Obama-inflected language about contributing to progress is an embarrassment for all but the last true believers. My friend Sam Venis, for instance, a journalist and part-time corporate consultant, admits that he is “completely disenchanted by the notion of a ‘job’, which makes me much more comfortable exploiting the money sloshing around the corporate world”. Halfway through this decade, he feels “freed of the delusion that that portion of my work matters in some spiritual [or] societal way, which allows me to view it transactionally, and take even more seriously my creative work”.

There were always, broadly speaking, two groups of Millennials (at least, among the millions with college degrees who attempted to make it in the big cities). There were those who, in some way, kept the faith of early-2000s hipster bohemianism — the late-30-something who still shares an apartment and doesn’t have a spouse or kids and has slowly turned toward Trump. The second group are the careerists and strivers, who built up good credit scores and used grad-student jargon to facilitate unnecessary meetings for the last decade and voted for Kamala Harris — the professional overclass.

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While the two groups have always co-existed, socialized, even aligned politically for a long time, the bohemian caste not only voted for Trump, but did so with a deep sense of vindication. Trump’s high approval ratings aren’t coming from rural evangelicals or blue-collar voters alone. Recall that the areas that shifted most sharply to the GOP in last year’s election were the blue strongholds; the calls are coming from inside the house of urban liberalism.

This turn of events flows from 2008, the year of the financial crisis and a pivotal moment for older Millennials. The economy of our parents disappeared in that year. As a consolation prize, we were offered the opportunity to be morally better than them. Our generation might be a generation of baristas and bartenders saddled with debt, but we could nurture our own inflated sense of importance by being more socialist, less racist, more liberatory, more linguistically sophisticated. Maybe we wouldn’t own homes, but we’d have doctorates.

Those who managed to parlay moral superiority into actual, dependable, well-paying jobs remained staunchly progressive — because fervency unlocked job security. Those who didn’t manage this feel some sense of hope now, only because practicing the verbal rituals of liberalism is no longer a prerequisite to social credibility.

It would be fascinating to see time-lapse movies of Millennials’ Facebook pages (and later Instagram and Twitter feeds) from, say, the mid-2000s to 2025. Essentially, 20 years of social media: from apolitical to staunchly progressive to whatever we have now — skeptical, realistic, finally clear-sighted, and even optimistic in ways we have never had reason to be.

The weird reality of Facebook, the ur-social media for older Millennials, is that it has always been a place to advertise personal triumphs. I’m so excited to announce that I have been accepted into Georgetown’s security-studies program; I’m delighted to share that I’ll be serving as an editorial assistant at The Nation this summer; here’s our first child. And secondarily, for fears: Can’t believe Orange Hitler is taking away the presidential fellows program; climate change is so scary; I don’t feel safe here.

It’s a strange zone of contradiction, where the expectation is that one poses simultaneously as successful and fragile: I can afford to take an upscale vacation to Europe, and I’m afraid of the future and the responsibilities of family; a place where one’s network can watch and participate in this strange spiral of anxiety and bold confidence.

The Millennial virtue economy — the rump of the Boomer white-collar economy — had no room for people who couldn’t tap into this mix of anxiety and celebration, self-interest and “purpose”. They couldn’t do it, either because they’d chosen entirely different paths — farming, construction, small-scale entrepreneurship, odd jobs — that didn’t lend themselves to online self-celebration. Or because they were simply too dignified to post: I’m delighted to announce. . .

I think of people with whom I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. One of them is working odd jobs in halfway homes, going for long walks, praying — essentially, a secular monk. Another, last I checked in, was working on a hydroponic lettuce farm, painting every morning, ever an artist. Another works on film sets when possible and bounces back and forth between New York and Bethlehem. They, and many others like them, may relish the collapse of the virtue economy and the rise of something once again material and dignified — or at least, less self-righteous, less bloated with gaseous smugness.

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Clearly for others, especially in the absurdly affluent DC suburbs, the pain is real. Friends from college and my early 20s in New York City, who successfully tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2010s, who became Obama-era media figures, seem to be confronting not just joblessness, but irrelevancy for the first time. The magic produced by saying the ritual words the right way has run out. No one’s up for progressive scolding anymore. You can’t make a career out of it. The outrage, the nitpicking, the Ezra Klein voice — it’s out.

That doesn’t mean that what comes next necessarily makes for a good society. Far from it. There is a plausible version of events in which many jobs are automated out of existence and universal basic income will play the role that state distributions of bread played in the late-stage Roman Empire: a fragile band holding together urban civilization.

Cutting fake, grating, pompous virtue referees from prestige jobs that drive up the federal deficit is inarguably egalitarian. It is no guarantor of substantial progress and meaningful social security, however. Moreover, the Right shows signs of creating its own, reciprocal patronage and virtue economy, stocked with influencers and thought-leaders who similarly produce little more than anger at their now dethroned Left-wing counterparts. That ought to be abhorred as much as its progressive forebear.

2025 is partly about coming to grips with how tenuous, silly, and demoralizing the last era was for the many; this clarity has to be exploited, not obscured in new ways. This is the Millennial reckoning: the end of the moral-superiority economy, and the slow, painful realization that tangible value lies in places and communities many of us had long considered beneath us.

Their timing has been awful. Every critical stage in their lives has coincided with disaster. Britain’s millennials were fresh out of university during the crash of 2008, and were struck again by lockdown on the cusp of middle age. Having no assets, they saw no benefit from the asset price inflation of the intervening decade. Unlike their American counterparts, Britain had no tech boom to make at least a few of them rich, or to serve as an outlet for their talents. Nor were they, as in continental Europe, cushioned through the long barren years by things like perpetual studenthood. Britain’s millennials instead had to settle for the quietism of the graduate scheme.

Unlike Gen Z, they are too proud to keep up a raffish existence on the margins, through streaming, cryptocurrency, the monetising of hobbies, or outright unemployment. But even the path of respectability has availed them little. Britain’s private sector has slower progression than in America, and is famously parsimonious with its salaries. Millennials are underpaid, overtaxed and overcharged for everything.

Politically they have also failed. Corbynism was the authentic cause of Britain’s millennials; it, alone, made at least some attempt to speak to their material interests — like student debt. All was soon blown off course by Brexit, an issue that millennials were entirely indifferent to. Nor can they claim to be any kind of cultural vanguard. Throughout the 2010s, Britain had no campus movement to speak of, no Antifa formation of any significance. All social reforms in Britain have been carried out by fiat from above, by Roy Jenkins in the Sixties or David Cameron in 2011.

Other generations have had their share of trials. But here’s the key difference: with millennials, none of these have brought any edification whatsoever. Bankrupted, locked indoors, wages winnowed away. For previous generations, war and disaster at least brought opportunities for advancement, and a general burning away of societal deadwood. The generation of Frenchmen who survived the Napoleonic Wars could look forward to the comfortable mediocrity of the 19th century. Not so with the millennials, who have been given neither catharsis nor a quiet life. Theirs was not the kind of adversity that hardens, only the kind that makes you curl up into a defensive ball, perhaps never to come out.

So it proved. British millennials are dutiful, conscientious, courteous almost to a fault. But they have essentially checked out of history. In most things British millennials have now simply fallen back on the tastes and assumptions of their parents — the Britpopper generation. They fawn endlessly over grandees like Ian Hislop. They’ve even taken their parents’ enemies for their own, like Margaret Thatcher, someone who left office before many of them were even born. Generational deference can even be seen in the music of the millennials, in Ed Sheeran’s strange thraldom to Elton John.

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As prime minister, Rishi Sunak went along in a similar vein. Of millennials he was, of course an atypical one: a Thatcherite who shared in none of their money woes. But Sunak — along with colleagues Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, and Claire Coutinho — was Britain’s first real experiment in millennial governance. Little was ever made of this. Unlike Blair and Brown, or the Conservative modernisers, there was never any self-sense of a rising group of youngsters ready to challenge the incumbents. That would require the breezy confidence of youth which Britain’s millennials had beaten out of them long ago.

This is the story of Rishi Sunak and his government, told one way: a younger generation dutifully upholding a set of inherited pieties that are basically alien to them. Sunak and his colleagues were the first true digital natives to hold high office, but they were called upon to defend an essentially analog worldview, these Alastair Campbellisms, which holds that the exact conditions of Britain in 1997 must be defended to the last.

Sunak, for his part, was a man of the 21st century. He had built up a fortune in private equity, and had, in Silicon Valley, seen a world beyond Britain and its “broadcast ecology”. But because of their generational hang-ups, people like Sunak never found the courage to tell Britain’s gerontocrats to get with the programme: that the United Kingdom cannot in fact maintain first-world living standards with “world-beating creative industries”, and that we might learn something from the healthcare systems of France or Singapore. At the very least, they were willing to log on to the internet and read about these things, a task that has always proven beyond the Britpopper generation.

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Rishi Sunak was thus one of the few “Wets” in the true sense of the term: someone who recognises what the historical moment demands of them, but dithers and temporises endlessly. He was talked out of things. His younger colleagues were taken from him. He suffered himself to be ridiculed for taking an early interest in AI, something that is set to transform all our lives. Internet use was second nature to him, but he went along with absurd legislation against online trolls that nearly caused WhatsApp to delete itself from the UK market.

But the subordination was never quite total. After all, Britain’s millennials did not share in the generational experiences that produced New Labour and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics; for them these “collective memories” are to be obeyed, not really believed in. When Rishi Sunak as Chancellor presented a new “Diversity Built Britain” coin, he was repeating the pieties of what is to him simply a public doctrine.

As millennials come into power, there will be a moment when this false consciousness breaks for good; when it is realised that these inherited pieties are what’s keeping them poor and diminished. Ending debt vassalage to the aged, school selection by property, and fiduciary obligations to non-citizens would each represent a huge social and financial windfall for them. They simply have to learn to say no.

This looks some way off. With the new administration, the British state has reverted to the Britpoppers, and ripe ones at that — Keir Starmer is 61, Sue Gray a stately 66. But I wonder. Even now, a millennial like Wes Streeting can say astonishingly frank things about the NHS: to the extent that the health service ever was a national religion, it certainly isn’t for people of Streeting’s age, who have actually heard about the alternatives.

No doubt, at some point in the future, a 34-year-old technologist from the Tony Blair Institute will chafe at being told by an ageing “Comms Guru” that his latest procurement request is unworkable, unlawful, and violates the Nolan Principle of Openness. In overthrowing these pieties, what is now the greatest weakness of the millennials will become their greatest strength: general disillusion.

Looking at the names being floated over the past week, there are two possible successor generations: Generation X and millennial. Yet of those being touted — Vice President Kamala Harris, Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker and Andy Beshear, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — only one, Buttigieg, does not belong to Gen X (while Harris, born in 1964, straddles the line). This is a shame. For while there is little doubt that the United States is overdue for generational change, it is not at all clear that Gen X embodies the kind of change that America needs.

Both these generations have been known to chafe under the suffocating domination of their Boomer predecessors; and both have gone through phases of rebellion against the same. Yet there are also crucial differences: one generation came of age in the heyday of globalisation, before Y2K and the other reached adulthood at the tail end of it around the 2008 crash. This has resulted in two distinct forms of political consciousness. As a consequence, beneath the question of which geriatric party establishment shall hold the keys to power in the next four years, a more important one looms: which generational value set will prevail over the next 40? For the present era is a one of paradigmatic transition: the days of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush are at a close, but what will replace it is still far from certain.

To answer this, we must return to the Boomers. Born after the war, this cohort grew up amid the greatest expansion of middle-class wealth ever recorded — the product of the dynamic industrial economy left behind by the G.I. generation. By the Seventies, however, it began to stagnate, and their response was to build a new economy based largely on financialisation, real estate and tech. As a result, between 1983 and 2023, average house prices rose by 500% and the value of stocks as measured by the S&P 500 benchmark index grew by 2,800%. Cheap credit, free trade, and a tech-driven productivity boom in the Nineties combined with these trends to give the impression of an economy growing in leaps and bounds. And it paid dividends, mainly for the Boomers, who got to keep the lion’s share of the gains, amounting to half the nation’s assets ($78.3 trillion in 2023), even as later events, such as the Great Recession and the reckoning over “the China Shock” exposed the growth of this era as illusory and unsustainable.

By the 2020s, as Boomer retirements accelerate, Gen Xers and millennials are set to inherit this wealth, in what’s been dubbed “the Great Wealth Transfer“. To what end this wealth is deployed will be the defining question of the next paradigm. And it is here where the divide between the Gen X and millennial political value sets come into play.

The romantic self-image of the Gen Xers is grounded in traits such as independence and stoicism: they were the “latchkey kids”, or as Rich Cohen put it in Vanity Fair, “the last Americans schooled in the old manner [who] know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds”. In their youth, anti-political cynicism formed the basis of their own counter-counterculture against the passé idealism of the Boomers.

Yet in its maturity, around the turn of the millennium, this cohort failed to produce a properly political expression that was practically distinct from the post-Reagan status quo, which they could only assent to, notwithstanding the directionless anti-corporate currents of the Clinton years or the anti-war movement of the Bush years. After all, these were peak “End of History” decades and the free market appeared to be humming just fine. Though not as socially mobile as the Boomers and despite having had to deal with recession in the early Nineties, Gen Xers still benefited from the boom times that followed; they had an overall easier time starting careers, forming households, and joining the middle class than the later post-2008 millennial cohorts. The same individualist ethos extolled by the likes of Cohen or Bret Easton Ellis worked well within the parameters of the highly atomised post-industrial paradigm that existed before the big crash: Gen X could afford to retain the apathy and detachment of their youth because, structurally speaking, there were little to no stakes.

Of course, Gen Xers were, like everyone else, affected by the Great Recession. But by this point, their institutional conservatism had arguably been baked into their generational character; and it would, in any event, have been unlikely for them to develop revolutionary aspirations in middle age (something left to the millennials). In the contest for a Biden replacement, this conservatism is discernible, albeit very subtly concealed, in the stances and rhetoric of the Gen Xer candidates.

In a recent New York Times interview, for instance, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, born in 1971, made her case for generational change: “We recognise that our parents’ generation has had a lot of excess. So I’m hopeful that we can really move the needle, whether it’s bringing down our nation’s debt or ensuring that we are active when it comes to climate and solidifying and protecting individual rights.” Here, strikingly, Whitmer’s unit of analysis remains “individual”. She also lists the debt as her leading issue, reflecting a scale of priorities unchanged from Boomer liberalism’s high noon in the Nineties, when fiscal rectitude, environmentalism, and social progressivism were the orders of the day.

Listening to Newsom, Pritzker or Harris, one also struggles to find awareness of political horizons outside this paradigm. Indeed, it may very well be that the whole idea of thinking in terms of material economic structures is anathema to the Gen X as well as the Boomer mindset, having been conditioned against that possibility by the “post-materialist” abundance of their formative years.

Contrast this with Buttigieg’s words when he was last a presidential contender in 2019: “A lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus… The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period… It turns out a rising tide does not lift all boats. Not on its own.” Where Whitmer has “the individual”, the unit of analysis here is “the paradigm” — that is, the web of structures, norms and rules which set the range of possibilities for most Americans.

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In recognising the passage of paradigms, Buttigieg is arguably closer to fellow millennials on the progressive, post-Occupy Left and the heterodox “New Right” than he is to his ostensible fellow centrist liberals from the Gen X cohort. While late Boomers like Barack Obama and Gen Xers like Jake Sullivan might have also acknowledged the need to transcend Reaganism-Clintonism, they have often had to come to their conclusions through reflection. But what is merely theoretical to them is all too real to most politically conscious millennials, who grew up in the wreckage of the old order. Unlike the Gen Xers, their youthful rebellions were explicitly political on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

In particular, there is a compelling parallel between Buttigieg and fellow millennial rising star (and prospective Trump VP candidate) J.D. Vance. Both hail from de-industrialised hinterlands, are veterans of Bush-era forever wars, and have expressed desires to break from their parties’ Boomer-era orthodoxies on political economy, even as they continue to hold opposing views on social issues. It recalls the dynamic between Clinton and Bush: they might have disagreed on abortion or gay rights, but the common denominator between them — support for financialisaton and globalisation — nonetheless underpinned the last consensus.

And today, so too might the common denominator between the millennial Right and Left give rise to a new consensus based on de-financialisation and national re-industrialisation, a worthy goal to which the flow of American capital and investment may be directed, as “the Great Wealth Transfer” begins to unfold. Unlike the Boomers, who sucked the world dry, or the Gen Xers, who failed to do anything about it, the millennials may yet leave a better and fairer country to those that follow in Generations Z, Alpha, and beyond. The elevation of a president from this generation, from either party, would likely hasten the realisation of this hopeful future.

Lately, Norma Desmond has become relatable. Tormented not just by the existential realities of middle age but the luminous spectre of her famous younger self, she is the very picture of the reluctantly-ageing millennial. We are the first generation to experience, en masse, something close to that agonising fade from celebrity to obscurity — the first generation whose younger selves aren’t tucked away in private photo albums but publicly immortalised on social media. For 20 years, millennials have been curating their lives for an audience, seeking affirmation from the internet like the queen in Snow White, obsessed with her own reflection.

We should have considered, perhaps, that it would end for us as it ended for her: with the mirror rolling its eyes and calling us “cheugy”.

Millennials, no matter how much we dress, act, or meme to the contrary, are not kids anymore. The youngest of us are approaching 30; the eldest turned 40 back during the Donald Trump administration. Just this week, our paper of record heard the “Millennial Death Wail”. Middle age has come for my generation.

As an elder millennial, I’ve witnessed this transformation sweeping through my own peer group on social media, and particularly Facebook, where all my high school friends now inhabit an eerie aesthetic limbo in which they look sort of like themselves, but also like they’ve been possessed by the spirits of their middle-aged parents. The days of taking intentionally hideous photos of ourselves — another trend pioneered by millennials — are surely over. The joke back then was that you had to try to be ugly; now ugly is, if not your default state, then attained with so little effort that it’s not remotely funny. Even the bravest among us aren’t so brave: when one of my prettier friends posted a “no makeup, no filters” selfie last month in honour of her 45th birthday, you could see the tell-tale circle of a ring light reflected in her irises.

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The alternative, though, would be to stop posting at all, and this is the one thing we cannot do. Millennials have been hashtagging their experiences, honing their personal brands, and controlling their narrative for two decades; of course we would turn ageing into content, just like we do with everything else. Younger millennials have taken to joyfully terrorising Gen Z with unfiltered photos of their barely aged faces, while elder millennials offer up ironic gripes about back pain and slowing metabolisms and the famous change of life that some portmanteau-loving posters have taken to calling the millenopause. (Others, it should be noted, have not taken to this and indeed would rather remove their own eyeballs with a spoon.)

Underlying this urge to hashtag is perhaps a sense that the best defence is a self-deprecating offence. Lena Dunham, a chronicler of millennials’ failures to grow up, once said: “Any mean thing someone’s going to think of to say about me I’ve already said to me, about me, probably in the last half-hour.” For a generation that once learned to style itself as a bunch of avocado-toast-snarfing, underachieving, financially illiterate libertines in order to keep Boomer critics at bay, it makes sense to rebrand ourselves as old and irrelevant before Gen Z decides to do it for us.

But ironically highlighting our impending middle-aged decrepitude doesn’t just protect millennials from the slings and arrows of the next generation’s mean teens; it also helps us pretend to ourselves that we’re not terrified by the inevitability, and vulnerability, of advancing age. To go through menopause is to confront the truth that our bodies are machines that run on their own, finite timeline: once you’ve stopped menstruating, it’s just a matter of time before you also stop breathing. To go through millenopause, on the other hand, is to hold your mortality at a cute, narrative remove. Menopause is existential dread; millenopause is a viral hashtag and a video of you taking your HRT out of a pastel-coloured subscription box.

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For a generation that has clung for longer than most to the sense of being youthful and misunderstood, this makes sense as a coping mechanism. Millennials have famously already either effectively staved off — or failed to achieve — so many of the trappings of adulthood. We don’t have a single furrow on our pre-emptively-Botoxed brows; we don’t have a single dollar set aside for retirement. Our living situations, bank accounts, and faces alike generally look like they belong to someone closer to 25 than 40, which only fuels the conviction, even now, that we never did get around to growing up. As The Times‘s recent take on the millenopause had it: “We’re not in charge here. We’re so infantilised that I feel as if I’ve skipped straight from newly graduated to middle-aged.”

Of course, that infantilisation isn’t just about creating a trendy new word — or a whole new marketing category — to describe the distressing reality that our generation of sexy babies is starting to sprout grey hairs and crow’s feet. It’s about the internal sense of having passed the halfway mark of our lives with little to show for it, which is in turn a product of our bizarre and fraught symbiosis with the generations above us.

If millennials haven’t aged into power, it’s at least in part because our Boomer parents are refusing to age gracefully out of it, instead maintaining a stranglehold on everything from their executive level jobs to their real estate holdings to the freaking White House. As long as the gerontocracy keeps hogging the spotlight, there’s little to do while waiting in the wings except turn on our front-facing cameras and crack ironic jokes about how much our backs hurt.

Eventually, perhaps we’ll even distance ourselves into a complete rejection of middle age, the way we “adulted” our way out of ever becoming actual adults — at least until the ominous creaking and crackling of our decaying bodies will grow too loud to ignore.

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And yet, we’re luckier than poor Norma Desmond, whose glamorous seclusion is really just a way of shielding herself from the world’s indifference. Joe Willis, Norma’s assistant and sometimes paramour, sort of understands this — “The plain fact was she was afraid of that world outside, afraid it would remind her that time had passed” — and eventually tries to force enlightenment on her: “You’re a woman of 50, now grow up! There’s nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25!”

But what he doesn’t understand is that when the whole world knew you at 25, being 50 is not just tragic but impossible. Norma lives in the past because there’s no place for her in the present. Gone are the silent films she starred in, and gone, too, is the luminous young woman she was, and still wants to be — a woman who can exist in this new, changed world only as a memory.

Some millennial women seem to share Norma’s mindset: these are the ones who’ve stopped posting pictures of themselves entirely, instead typing updates from behind profile photos that haven’t changed since 2018. I sometimes imagine us hunched at our keyboards or over our phones like a bunch of Dorian Grays in reverse: we are the ageing paintings hidden away from public view, while our youthful avatars cavort together in cyberspace.

But time is passing for millennials, as it has for everyone else. Cute portmanteaux aside, we are not the first generation to experience menopause, nor to reckon with the sweating, achy, existential dread of entering the middle section of life. But for the generation that invented the concept of the personal brand — and with it, the possibility of infinite rebrands — we don’t have to waste away like Norma, waiting for some Hollywood gatekeeper to invite us back into the spotlight. We can always turn the camera on ourselves; we can always tell a new story about who we are and what we’re doing. And we are always, thanks to fillers and filters and Facetune, ready for our closeup.

In this, she represents an entire generation’s penchant for repudiating the culture that shaped it. Nostalgia is resentment-tinged among millennials, for whom being downtrodden and disenfranchised has become something of a permanent calling card. Five years ago, it was a truth universally acknowledged that we would be the first cohort to do worse economically than our parents. Crushed by unmanageable college debt, unable to buy houses or start families, and burned out by the endless demands of side hustling, millennials were surely the unluckiest generation.

The only problem with this universally-acknowledged truth is that, actually, it’s not true: a fact that’s become inescapable this year. “Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically,” wrote Jean Twenge in The Atlantic in April. “Since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breath-taking financial comeback.” The data backs this up: although the wealth gap between rich and poor persists within the millennial generation, and the housing market makes home ownership slightly more challenging than it used to be, all the catastrophising seems to have been premature. Millennials are doing fine.

And yet, their image as uniquely put-upon has proved persistent — especially among millennials themselves. Once you’ve entrenched a generational narrative, people will continue to identify with it, irrespective of how things may have evolved. For the same reason that the children of the Sixties styled themselves as anti-establishment hippies from the comfort of their corporate offices, millennials have struggled to let go of the sense that there’s something uniquely difficult about their lives — even as they cruise comfortably into middle age, buying homes, having kids, accumulating assets. But if we’re doing well by every available metric, how can we explain the fact that we feel like such losers?

Enter the successor ideology to the debunked myth of the Left-Behind Millennial: the retrospective problematising of the Nineties. This oeuvre of cultural criticism, devoted to uncovering the evil subtext in every entertainment property produced before 2005, makes a certain kind of sense if you understand it as a coping mechanism for a generation that views their adult lives with not just disappointment but a sense of betrayal. The expectations we internalised — that the world was our oyster, that we would have it all — and which reality has so cruelly failed to meet, were the products of a Nineties paradigm in which millennials were not just avid consumers but guilty participants, victims and perpetrators alike.

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Hence why, where other generations dabble in more straightforward nostalgia for their formative years, millennials have developed an antagonistic relationship with them, rewriting and reframing it like a therapy patient searching out the hidden darkness in a seemingly happy childhood. (That this has happened in tandem with the widespread creep of therapy-speak into everyday life is surely not a coincidence.) Actually, your parents’ loving marriage was a sham; actually, your fun-loving father was an alcoholic man-child; and actually, Friends was a cesspit of racist sexist heteronormative bigotry masked as feel-good primetime TV.

The reckoning isn’t solely an American phenomenon: the latest season of The Crown, which opens with Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and doubles as a searing indictment of the tabloid culture of the era, is also a fine example of this sort of meta-commentary. But in the US, exposing the dark underbelly of our youthful obsessions has become a genre unto itself. There’s this year’s memoir boom, in which maligned Nineties icons have spoken their truth in documentaries and bestselling books. Paris Hilton’s memoir of abuse at a boarding school for wayward youth reveals that her “celebutante” antics and baby-voiced bimbo persona were the result of hideous trauma; Britney Spears’s tell-all, The Woman in Me, describes how her apparent career renaissance was actually a puppet show in which she dangled on strings held by a father who managed her life, her finances, her reproductive choices, even the choreography of her Vegas comeback show.

Meanwhile, on HBO, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage discovers a sinister valence to the gleeful raunch culture of the Girls Gone Wild era, featuring interviews with the musicians and media figures who were once its vanguard. Now, middle-aged and chagrined, they shake their heads in lemon-faced disapproval at the provocations of toxic male pop metal icons like Limp Bizkit — but also at themselves, for being complicit. The question hanging in the air is: how did we ever think this was okay?

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And then there’s Monica Lewinsky, who marked the 25th anniversary of the scandal that made her famous with interviews, articles, even a television series — highlighting how her Nineties-era infamy has transformed to become one of the greatest reputational rehabilitations of all time. In 1998, when the story of her affair with then-President Bill Clinton broke, Lewinsky was a Jezebel, a homewrecker, and a punchline to the worst jokes that the slut-shaming culture of the moment could think of. Now, for exactly the same reason, she’s a feminist hero, toast of the Hollywood elite and NYC social pages alike, greeted with a standing ovation when she walks into a room.

But stigma isn’t the only thing Lewinsky has shed: in the old paradigm, a woman in her early twenties who slept with a married man, even a powerful one, was considered an autonomous actor and old enough to know better. In the revised one, she’s not just a victim, but practically a child. Her shame is gone, but so is her agency — and with it, any sense that she may have had a hand in the current shape of her life.

The cultural revisionism that refashions the wanton seductress as a hapless innocent speaks to the interplay of millennial childhood nostalgia with the overwhelming sense that we still aren’t really adults. The same generation that treats grownup responsibilities like bill-paying or doing laundry as a sort of LARP (“adulting”) is also characterised by its insistent and continued interest in childish things. YA fantasy, Funko Pop dolls, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have supplanted the more sophisticated ideas and aesthetics that were once the hallmarks of adult taste. Even the most acclaimed millennial creators tend to be backward-looking, revisiting and reframing childhood favourites rather than writing something new, fresh, complex, grown-up.

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It was the approach to art expressed earlier this year by Greta Gerwig, director of Little Women and Barbie, when she proclaimed that the latter movie was both “doing the thing and subverting the thing” — the thing in question being Barbie’s pink-tinted, stereotypical, sexist tropes. But the bigger thing to accept about Barbie is not just that she’s sexist, but that she’s simple, in the way kids’ stuff tends to be. Where the irony-tinged approach to millennial nostalgia falls short is not in Gerwig’s notion of the thing that is at once done and subverted; it’s in its failure to comprehend that adulthood means putting aside the toys you used to play with, and doing something else.

The fact is, despite all the think pieces, reckoning with the naughtiness of the Nineties ultimately doesn’t change much. Britney Spears, freshly liberated from her conservatorship, may be understood as a victim to be pitied rather than a spectacle to be gawked at — but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re all still gawking. Monica Lewinsky, no matter how sympathetically she is now received in a discourse chagrined by the #MeToo movement, is still only famous for being the owner of a dress covered in Presidential semen. And the videos of women being groped and assaulted at Woodstock ’99, which were aired to such moral indignation in Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage are still… videos of women being groped. All this revisiting and revising does little, except give us an excuse to relive every titillating tabloid scandal, every salacious moment. The former Nineties kids who engage in this mode of cultural critique are like the murderer who gets off on reliving his crime through confession, almost as much as he got off on the killing itself. There’s an almost giddy subtext to the whole thing: we were so bad!

But of course, we’re also better now. We’re obsessed with the same scandals, but for morally superior reasons. This not only absolves us of our complicity in the raunch mischief of yore, but also conveniently align with the sentiments of the upcoming generation, the Zoomers, who are displacing us as society’s youngest adults whether we want to grow up or not. As the meme goes: How do you do, fellow kids? Maybe if we repudiate our own misspent youth enough, the zoomers will let us glom onto theirs? (They’re already wearing all our old clothes anyway.)

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The alternative, wholly unappealing, would be to abandon the protection that permanent adolescence affords — and with it, the central tenet of millennial identity that we have been, and remain, uniquely screwed by circumstance. The self-described “smol bean” who uses “adult” as a verb also maintains a teenager’s belligerent stance toward the world: a conviction that society doesn’t understand you, has left you behind. Millennials may not actually be materially worse off, but our expectations still don’t line up with reality. We still feel disempowered, disenfranchised, and victimised. The problematising of everything Nineties offers a sort of absolution: the expectations-reality gap isn’t our fault, but the fault of a toxic culture.

And as long as we can keep writing bitter think pieces about the heteronormative whiteness of everything we used to love growing up, maybe we don’t actually have to grow up. We don’t have to embrace complexity or develop more sophisticated tastes. We don’t have to confront the uncomfortable limits of victimhood as a safe haven from responsibility — or, for that matter, the uncomfortable truth that Britney’s social media output since winning back her independence raises some serious questions about whether she is in fact equipped to manage her own affairs. Like the therapy patient who returns week after week, year after year, to dwell on the childhood traumas that shaped the man he became, we can linger in this metacritical limbo, virtually forever.

On the traditionalist side, a loose assortment of classical conservatives, terminally online reactionary trad types, and the odd dissident feminist have coalesced around the idea that the sexual revolution has led to widespread malaise in society generally and among women particularly, for which marriage is the — or at least, a — cure. The more reasonable pundits point to the benefits of wedlock when it comes to our health, happiness, and ability to provide a stable family structure in which to raise children. The kookier tradfolk suggest that modern women have been hoodwinked by feminism into a barren existence, squandering their potential — that is, their biological imperative to become wives and mothers — in the frivolous pursuits of career, pop culture, and cat ownership. As conservative commentator Matt Walsh recently complained, the women who imagine themselves to be single and content are just “too stupid to realise how depressing this is”.

On the progressive side, meanwhile, marriage has become synonymous with misery: an institution that demands women sacrifice their professional ambitions and passions alike, putting themselves second — and picking up some unappreciative schlub’s dirty socks — for the rest of their lives. This perspective was recently articulated in The Cut by Rebecca Traister, who lamented that “hard-right commentators and politicians” were championing marriage not for the betterment of society, but to worsen the prospects of women who finally had equality within reach: “reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage”.

In a worldview where men are portrayed as burdensome creatures who ask too much, offer too little, and inevitably fail to deserve the female companionship they crave, to eschew marriage becomes a form of feminist empowerment, the only path to a fully actualised life. At its extremes, this perspective is accompanied by the sense that men in general are a waste of one’s time and hot girl potential, and that any woman who thinks otherwise just hasn’t found the right television series and/or brand of vibrator.

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The result is a zero-sum rhetorical hellscape in which marriage is one of two things. For its supporters, it is the last, best hope of a society on the brink of decline and disaster. For its detractors, it is an insidious ploy by reactionary dinosaurs to catapult us back to a less enlightened paradigm, just as we were nearing the utopian promise of a brave new world.

It’s hard not to notice a certain amount of horseshoe effect in play here, not just in each side’s notion of marriage as first and foremost a proxy for power, but also in their equally rigid ideas of what happiness actually looks like. The picture of female fulfilment is a caricature in either case. The anti-marriage camp celebrate the high-achieving, stiletto-heeled girlboss. Their opponents are in thrall to the barefoot, pregnant homesteader. And in either case, the proffered vision of womanhood has a pre-packaged-for-social-media feel to it: it is a lifestyle, rather than a life.

Perhaps this was inevitable at a moment when the basic tenets of human existence are not just politicised, but public and performative — and hence subject to endless hacking, tweaking, and optimisation. To participate in the attention economy requires treating your own life as not just a search for personal satisfaction but a source of content to be consumed by other people; you are writing, directing, and starring in a story about yourself, the main character of the universe. And when marriage becomes part of the plot, then of course we begin to think of potential spouses not as partners but supporting actors, bit players in the journey to becoming one’s most majestic, fully actualised self.

Obviously, this has certain implications for heterosexual women, for whom living with a man and living one’s best life are so often presented as mutually exclusive. But men aren’t immune from it, either: not long ago, I witnessed a friend in his 30s unhappily contemplating the ways his life had changed after moving in with a girlfriend, his complaints an unwitting and uncanny echo of so many feminist takes on the burdens of having a man around. The girlfriend’s presence in his life meant compromise, interruptions, distractions; another person’s needs and desires suddenly had to be factored in. It felt like a loss, he said — of time, energy, productivity.

But was it? Is it? Is it actually the ne plus ultra of human happiness to live unattached, the better to do exactly what you want exactly when you want to? It seems so juvenile, a child’s idea of fulfillment: to do whatever you want, and none of the things you don’t want, forever and ever, until death. Part of growing up is the realisation that a unilateral life is also a lonely one, that there is value in attachment. To be needed by another living thing — a spouse, a child, a pet, a plant — is a curb on absolute freedom, but there’s joy in it, too.

Progressives tend to cite women’s liberation and the rise of non-heterosexual couplings as positive factors fuelling the decline in marriage rates; less discussed but perhaps equally salient is the contemporary sense that marriage is square and stodgy and hence incompatible with the carefree state of perpetual adolescence in which it is now possible to live long after reaching the age of majority. Millennials aren’t even having midlife crises at the same rate as previous generations, at least in part because they aren’t settling into marriage, parenthood, home ownership — in short, into the kind of commitments that trigger existential dread about the road not taken.

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Of course, every entry into this debate — including this one, at least up until this moment — tends to ignore the practical issues that prevent people from getting married. Some of this, like the unaffordability of housing, is an economic problem. But some of it, I think, is fear. The fear of growing up, and getting old. The fear of doing something so serious it can’t be easily undone or written off as a childish error. The fear of building a whole entire world with another person, and all the terrible vulnerability that entails — a vulnerability which has always been scary, but perhaps particularly so for a generation that equates emotional discomfort with being unsafe.

It’s telling that even the most pro-marriage arguments tend to be data-driven, hanging on the pragmatic rather than the romantic. Much has been made of a study by economist Sam Peltzman, which charts American happiness levels against declining marriage rates. The benefits of wedlock are presented as a matter of simple mathematics; the marriage sceptics, meanwhile, say that its proponents have simply mistaken cause for effect. “For those who have money, marriage is likely to help them to have even more of it; for those who find a good match, there are many emotional and societal rewards of partnership,” Rebecca Traister writes. “But you need stability first; you need the money, jobs, housing, and health care first.”

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Notably, there’s not much room in this paradigm for love, nor for the couple who has nothing figured out, and no idea what kind of life they want to live, except that they’d like to live it together. The progressive idea seems to be that even in the best-case scenario, marriage should still be understood as the decorative flourish on top of a life, rather than the foundation on which to build one. But to understand marriage in terms of this cost-benefit analysis — What’s in this for me? — is to misunderstand it. Even the more conservative arguments in its favour — that married couples can expect better health, greater happiness, and a more stable environment in which to raise children — skate across the surface of the institution instead of plumbing its deeper meaning.

The pro-marriage camp has become associated with its loudest and most deranged voices, demanding an end to no-fault divorce, or a return to the dark ages of domestic misery — so that even more moderate commentary, such as Melissa Kearney’s recent book The Two-Parent Privilege, is prone to interpretation by critics as a call for forced cohabitation and legal entanglement for parents who do not want this. But one needn’t endorse those proposals to imagine a world in which that entanglement is something more people do want, and in which its deeper meaning is something we acknowledge in earnest. Enough pretending that we’re all too cool and ambitious and self-actualised to care about falling in love and building a life with someone; enough with the app-driven illusion that human connection is cheap and easy to find. A better conversation about marriage would be one that recognises how much of its value lies in things that can’t be measured or legislated, in the realm of the intangible. Intimacy. Companionship. The presence and rhythm of another heart beating beside you in the dark.

Whatever age she’s permanently frozen at, she’s quite the achiever. A by-no-means complete list of her professions includes doctor, lifeguard, news anchor. She’s been both ballerina and ballet teacher. She’s served in every branch of the US military and as a cashier at various fast-food franchises. She’s even run for president — four times.

So, she’s young enough to work the menial jobs we associate with teenagers, but old enough to hold the country’s highest office (for which eligibility begins at 35). Barbie’s age is like her identity, then: infinitely malleable, and entirely dependent on how she’s accessorised. Nor is she constrained by class or education. When it comes to the milestones of adult life, she achieves some of them with ease (a Dream House), while lingering permanently on the threshold of others (marriage, children).

The only thing that doesn’t change is her silhouette. The classic Barbie always looks exactly the same: wasp waist, lifted heels, improbably huge plastic breasts.

But what’s most interesting about Barbie is how, in being unconstrained — not just by age, class, or education, but by adult trappings like marriage and children — she embodies the paradoxes of an entire generation of women. Like Barbie, the Archetypal Millennial is both wildly accomplished yet developmentally trapped in perpetual adolescence: she dates less, marries later, and has fewer children, if she has them at all. Like Barbie, she lives in a world where women eclipse men on so many fronts that the latter become an afterthought, their comparative underachievement something between a punchline and a national crisis. And like Barbie, she is expected to be not just hot, but hot in perpetuity, in a way that previous generations were not — if only because the means to achieve it were not yet widely accessible.

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Millennial women’s entry into middle age has run in parallel to a veritable revolution in the business of appearance management — one characterised by low-cost Botox, ten-step skincare regimens, and those Instagram photo filters that make you look not just ageless but eerily smooth, something between a Pixar cartoon and a baby. Two things are true: that the past decade has given birth to a highly visible movement advocating body positivity and acceptance, and also, that the aspirations of women throughout Western society suggest that none of them actually believe in it. With enough time, effort and money, it is now possible for a committed woman to be hot virtually indefinitely; it is also increasingly understood that ambitious women probably should make this commitment, investing in their own faces for the same reasons that they pay into a pension.

The result is paradoxical: no matter how much you achieve, the greatest mark of success for women is to look too young to have achieved much of anything.

Enter Margot Robbie, the actress who plays the eponymous doll on the big screen, and who has lately been bearing the full weight of the Barbie discourse on her perfectly sculpted shoulders. While mainstream media outlets derided Robbie for failing to wear more “intelligent” outfits while promoting the film — that is, for being too hot — she was also hilariously negged online for being “mid” — that is, middling, on the one-to-ten scale of hotness. The negging came, of course, from a bunch of internet Kens: men who, figuratively speaking, clearly have naught but a modest plastic bulge where their manhood should be.

That Robbie somehow exists simultaneously in the oppositional states of being both not hot enough and also too hot to be taken seriously is intriguing. But then, at 33, Robbie is squarely in the age bracket of women who (according to some people, anyway), are at imminent risk of “hitting the wall”, a term that describes the abrupt (and, it must be said, entirely mythological) deflation of a woman’s sex appeal the moment she ages past 25. It’s not hard to see where this comes from: in a world where women are out-achieving men, a man may retaliate by trying to instil in a woman the sense that her true value to society is in her youthful good looks and fertility. She must settle down now, urgently, with any man who’ll have her — specifically, with him — before that asset value falls off a cliff.

Do these men want a living, breathing Barbie doll? They do appear to be the market for the NPC streamer, a new genre of professional hot girl. These face-tuned young woman perform on TikTok livestream, keeping up a constant stream of repetitive chatter while fans pay anywhere from a few cents to a dollar to send her virtual tokens. For those with a big following and the stamina to perform for hours on end, a single streaming session can net them thousands of dollars. The fact that the average NPC streamer’s fanbase is largely male has given rise to the theory that their performances satisfy a not necessarily sexual fetish for control — that, much like the tradbro posting about how the sight of 27-year-old Sophie Turner makes him want to vomit, the whole thing is an attempt by flailing men to reassert dominance, if only in one narrow way, over women.

On the other hand, who actually has the power in these scenarios? The woman making bank off a pretend performance of vacant, poseable femininity, or the guy glued to the screen? A video of one of these women breaking character to discipline a child somewhere out of frame reveals just how calculated these personas are. It’s like seeing a Disney princess briefly pausing mid-song to belch and drag on a cigarette. In a way, the NPC streamers have cracked the code: they’re hot, but in a cartoonish way that was never meant to be taken seriously — which is to say, in the way that Barbie was once understood to be, before we got it into our heads that she needed to be something more. Something like a role model.

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Barbie is the original problematic fave. The Barbie movie, then, is more than a nostalgia product; it is a redemption, or at least a chance at one. Under the direction of Greta Gerwig — whose polarising adaption of Little Women repackaged a story millennial women had come to hate ourselves for loving — we are offered, if not empowerment, then at least forgiveness, for our toxic relationship with all things Barbie. “The story of Barbie is the fight that has been going on about Barbie,” Gerwig told the New York Times last week. “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.” The thing, of course, is Barbie-brand femininity, and its well-documented conflict with feminist mores, enumerated in the movie by a teenager who breaks the heart of Robbie’s Barbie by explaining to her exactly how bad she’s been for women.

“Doing the thing and subverting the thing” is not a bad description of millennial womanhood circa 2023. For the generation that invented “adulting” enters the age of the midlife crisis, Barbie is an avatar for all the problems we don’t know how to solve. How does a smart woman succeed in an attention economy that dictates who and what is worthy of being seen, and who will fade into obscurity? What does a girl have to do these days for her face to be, if not acceptable, at least not a topic of conversation? Is performing femininity subversively that different from just performing femininity?

If Gerwig pulls it off, Barbie could be the cinematic version of the privilege acknowledgment so ubiquitous in the work of millennial women writers: a sort of ritual confession of fallibility that then frees you to do whatever you want. It might even do for its millennial audience what Fight Club did for the men of Generation X, or American Beauty for Baby Boomers. These movies, released amid what Fukuyama once called “the boredom at the end of history” — 9/11 was years off yet, and the internet still in its infancy — captured the distressing condition of having finally grown up only to hit the wall, not of your waning sexual desirability, but of your own inherent purposelessness. Consider Fight Club’s famous monologue, an ode to the listless angst of the middle-class American male:

“Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man; no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”

Nearly 20 years later, perhaps it is millennial women’s turn to look around — at what we were promised, what we were told to want — and ask: is that all there is?

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Gerwig’s Barbie is, in reckoning with the idea that she’s failed other women, having an existential crisis — one that mirrors the reinvention of Mattel’s Barbie for a more feminist world. Her professions may have been diverse, but in 2015, the company revamped its line of Barbie dolls to include more skin colours, hair textures, and — for the first time — body sizes. The image overhaul was an adapt-or-die plea to find new footing in a changing culture, one that seems to have worked. How is it, then, that just as the beauty and body standards of Barbie World finally expanded to become more diverse, real-world women are flooding plastic surgeons’ offices with requests for the same generic Instagram face?

The irony is that while Barbie prepares to launch her fifth presidential run, while also coding and dancing and saving the whales, millennial women are still trying to figure out how to have it all. Is it possible to dodge the social obligation of remaining Fuckable Literally Forever, yet also remain seen, in a world where women of a certain age have a way of becoming invisible? It remains to be seen if Gerwig can answer millennial woman’s questions, but she seems to offer hope. If Barbie can remake herself against the gravitational pull of obsolescence, if she can rage, rage against the dying of her cultural relevance, then maybe, so can we.

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

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

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

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By Jenny Bristow

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

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

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

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

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

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Boomer Europe is dying

By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

But then, at one point through our winter in this toxic swill, our bathroom ceiling caved in. The cause was wonderfully disgusting. The upstairs toilet’s “out” pipe (that’s the one bearing the shit) had been leaking into our ceiling for some interminable length of time. The waste (the shit) had then slowly seeped into the plaster and terracotta above until it became structurally unsound. One day in January, a great yawning gash opened up, and the next it fell in. It then took our landlord around two weeks to clean and repair this mess, which meant washing and bathing surrounded by the debris: shit-saturated shards of plaster and terracotta. We gave our notice in those soiled days and moved out about a month later.

It was a dispiriting exit. But even in the moment, being shat upon from a great height spoke more effectively than any mountainous graph to what is unjust about the current housing crisis. People (especially young people) live in very poor conditions, kept there by private landlords who suffer from near-criminal levels of apathy, for which we are expected to pay handsomely (my annual rent in the shit-flat was around 40% of the London Living Wage at the time — just under £10k). But the problem is, since everyone has a similar story, you’ve probably already heard it, if not lived it.

The political gravity of this situation lies not in its specifics, though, but in its generalities. Over the past week, in its house journals and attendant think tanks, the Conservative Party’s leading intellectuals have been puzzling over the fact that young people hate them. And they intimate that this has something to do with housing. They have finally listened to the housing scientists, with their heavy dossiers of facts and figures. A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive. This is far too late to redress or ameliorate — the best it can become is a historical lesson. The question that the Tories should be asking is a deeper and more threatening one. What is housing inequality doing to the political psychology of those living through it? What has it already done to us?

My answer is look to the language; look at the language we use for those we blame. Landlords — parasitic, indolent, unscrupulous landlords. In our oaths and curses, we reduce property owners to an existence of pure economic extractionism. Even landlords don’t want to be called landlords anymore. At the National Landlord Investment Show, a kind of bizarre lettings TUC, they threw around some alternatives — “Property investor”? “Accommodation provider”? — designed to help them slip back into anodyne anonymity. This cultural slander, found at all levels of output, from TikTok to acclaimed non-fiction, is the linguistic wing of something more profound. It is the first, experimental stirring of something rather anachronistic in our hyper-political age: social, tribal solidarity. Something a bit like class consciousness.

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This isn’t class understood in the cod-Marxist sense, with society sliced like a layer cake between worker, owner and aristocrat. Such arbitrary categories have long been discarded. Instead, as E.P Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class, class is something that “happens”. And it happens when “some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”. Class does not pre-exist, but is spun in the language people live and create.

Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young. A third of those aged between 35 and 45 rent privately, as opposed to a tenth in 1997, a proportion which rises the younger you are. And many of those not renting are living with parents, which would make private renting their direct alternative. In other words, across income levels, private renting has become as near to an economic universality as one can find in our atomised society. But most important: under present trends, this is never going to change. High marginal tax rates, low wages and rising house prices mean that those who do not receive a large windfall from generous or dead family members will never buy a house. They will retire with a landlord, paying the bulk of their salary and perhaps their pension to a people they have spent their adult life despising. They who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.

So much writing about our housing situation is self-pityingly childish, whinging over intrusive mezzanines and landlords’ disastrous DIY. It curries little favour with the older generation it is directed towards. But, left unchecked, the weight of sentiment is symptomatic of a more powerful force — the sense of existing in an unfair productive relationship. Like all great political vibes, it has the benefit of being both felt and true. And most transformative processes in British history have been the product of such a concoction, a wrong that can be mathematically proven and then communicably sketched.

Because the popular timeline of our past is one of political nightmares, stalked by political ghouls and monsters who provide a horror mask for our deeper concerns. Recently, our darkest dreams have been peopled by crooked Luxembourgian Eurocrats. Before that, we relocked our doors and windows, woken by the march of donkey-jacketed trade unionists. But reach back into the distant interwar period and a dynamic more like our own emerges. Between the pause of one world war and resumption of the next, Britain was learning to think of itself as a “democracy” for the first time. And in this age of new and nervous egalitarianism, two of the most repellent economic caricatures in popular culture were socially-useless mountebanks: the profiteer and the rentier. Like landlords in our housing crisis, both were linked to moments of social distress which they had somehow turned to their advantage.

John Maynard Keynes was obsessed with this plutocratic individual who in his conception lived off the national debt, furnishing his Depression with public money. And the cheater, the social swindler, was the constant villain of the era’s more politicised fiction. He crops up in the otherwise sunny books of J.B Priestley, but particularly in the works of A.J. Cronin, the novelist who was most representative of the Thirties mood. (His 1937 novel The Citadel is credited by some with establishing the emotional need for an NHS.) But in his earlier book The Stars Look Down, a contest is established between an autodidactic Labour MP and his double, a profiteer-chancer who avoids war service and cheats his way into arms-trading and factory-ownership through underhand business dealings.

It was not long before such evocations reached the lips of politicians themselves. In Clement Atlee’s 1945 election broadcast, he established his opposition to those who benefitted from “private enterprise, private profit and private interests”, and who demanded “more rent, interest and profit”. The dichotomy was clearly intended to appeal to a public already aware of the difference between its productive many and its exploitative few. That Labour government was the most ambitious reforming government of the century, and brought about the greatest programme of house-building and home-improvement the country had ever seen. The Conservative government that followed only imitated and expanded upon it.

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Language tracks the governing ideology of its day. After Thatcherism brought a halt to anything like the forward march of labour, Britain developed converse cultural neuroses. We gnashed at scroungers and skivers; we valorised the entrepreneur. As William Davies recently described, the working-class hero devolved from the punk, the disruptor or the organiser (Arthur Scargill), towards something more like the tamed yob, the capitalist-enthusiast (Chris Evans, Keith Allen). Britain, though, is more than capable of producing a culture that punches up. Think how harshly the word “banker” was hissed in the immediate post-2008 reconciliation. But despite the best efforts of the Occupy movement, bankers were fortified in their City towers, too lofty to organise against. Landlords, by contrast, inhabit a space much closer to home — our homes.

Today, millennials are approaching a sort of maturity. But in an arc that frustrates analysts of such matters, they stubbornly refuse to mature politically and shift Right-wards. Not only this — they are leaning markedly to the Left, especially on economic issues. Reared on a lifetime of economic vulnerability, of course they find redistribution appealing and resent the predatory potential of private ownership. Over the grim interwar, it took decades for this yearning to consummate itself. At the next election, millennials will predominate in the majority of constituencies. All those years of removal vans and disconcerting stains, of lost deposits and scratching mice, may finally find their voice.

And so I continue to live in a very strange mezzanine flat with a tin foil-effect, orange, dappled wall we are not allowed to paint over, praying they don’t raise the rent next year because there’s not much further east in this city I can go.

Problems with the housing system in this country track straight back to Thatcher’s “Right To Buy” Housing Act in the Eighties, which offered such irresistible purchase terms to council tenants that a huge amount of the country’s public housing stock went private almost overnight, and there it has stayed. We are not building enough homes, and the ones we are building very often loophole their way around the wet tissue paper of affordable housing regulation, to create stacks of dizzyingly expensive grey newbuilds — often over the exact same spot where thriving community blocks once stood.

A buy-to-let boom in the early Aughts winnowed the housing stock even further, and now look where we are: people are queuing for rental viewings, outbidding one another on houses for sale, writing earnest letters about how wholesomely they will live there. Housing prices stay high and stable, justifying the mythical “market rate” — a number made up, and reinvented every six weeks, by estate agents — which means rents go up in turn, which means people renting save less, which means their buying power diminishes even further. Then came the pandemic. I don’t know a single person whose rent hasn’t gone up since, and gone up drastically.

So those are some of the problems. But the main one is inter-generational communication. It’s in the mud. How do you explain to a generation who saved for a deposit for three years that cutting back on brunch isn’t going to be enough? All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In threatens, at least, to close that communication gap. Like me, Yates has lived in a lot of buildings (25, to my lowly 13): flats, houses, temporary accommodation, studios above car showrooms. Like me, Yates has written a lot about housing — as well as youth culture, politics, and music (an early chapter details how the thin walls of the since-demolished Green Man Lane estate meant you learned about music based on what your neighbours like listening to). Unlike me, Yates maintains her cool. I recently ruined a polite lunch with an elderly relative with one of my “landlords are scum” tirades, which went on far too long and changed absolutely no one’s mind.

Renting used to be a viable way to exist in this country. Figure out which parts of the city or country you actually like. Have 10 housemates and live on the cheap and pursue something dumb and creative for a couple of years. Don’t move in with that boyfriend you’re not sure about just because your tenancy agreements are both up at more-or-less the same time. It now just means paying the most money you’ve ever paid for anything, every single month, for something that mostly sucks and is actively stopping you getting on the fabled British dream, the housing ladder. And then you get an e-mail in January saying: rent’s going up again.

It would have been easy for a book about the bottom-to-middle unfairness of the housing system to turn into a manifesto shouted into an echo chamber, but Yates remembers to be funny while explaining how messed up it all is. She takes in the wonder of having a plant in your house, for a generation who rarely gets to actually plunge one into the soil of a garden; the small beauty of that one trinket that when you unpack it makes a place feel a little like home; the frequent movers’ aversion to collecting too much stuff. These details are important. The strange rift between those who rent now (in hell) and those who rented then (during the three years required to save a deposit) often strips out the sheer reality of being alive — of the comfort of home, of peace and quiet, of making friends with your neighbours, of forming stronger and more useful communities with years-deep bonds.

Those who float above the rental market have forgotten what it’s like to come in from a long day of work to find three random people in your front room because your flatmate says so. Or: how one person’s decision to abruptly move out and give you all only 20 days’ notice threatens to ruin the next month of your life and potentially bankrupt you. Or: not telling your GP you moved because you like them and getting a new one is a nightmare. Or: how renting feels like moving a cardboard box from house to house, never fully unpacking, because your role in the system isn’t to live a life and steal some peace at the end of the day, it’s to keep the value of the property you’re in nice and high by making it look like you were never there at all.

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In the chapter on her time in halls at Goldsmiths, Yates describes coming home from an exhausting catering shift to one of those pounding pyramid-of-tins parties that only students can throw. Her anecdotes always have a point. She makes it clear that, though the cheap furniture is the same for every student, the experience for those from working-class and middle-class backgrounds is vitally different: The Best Years Of Your Life don’t apply to everyone. These details, again and again, help push the central thesis of the book: living with a roof over your head shouldn’t be this hard, exhausting, and expensive.

This book is one that needs to be pressed into a lot of hands, then. Because we only hear about the housing crisis when mortgage rates go up. There is still a generational divide between what rent means as a system, and what it actually is now. Twenty years ago, my sister was able to rent a flat for a year on her own “just to see how she liked it” — this is fairly unimaginable to me. But the theory of renting still works — and the practice of it did for a long time in this country. Something has broken, though. Why can the fabled German rental market — with its infinite tenancies and rent-hike regulation — work so normally and so relatively well, while ours is just an Old West shoot-out? Because everyone still thinks the problem lies with avocado toast. The communication here has to change.

All The Houses… wouldn’t work if Yates didn’t finish up by making sensible, workable, viable suggestions on how to fix things, which she does: rent controls, “Right To Return” policies for communities dislodged by tower block regeneration, annual housing MOTs written into law and adhered to before a landlord can raise rent — which should be capped, by the way. We should actually enforce affordable housing targets, build more and safer social housing, and write housing administration lessons into the curriculum. There are radical solutions and there are community-driven ones, but there isn’t a clear one, and when the system is working so well for a privileged few, there’s not enough agitation to change it. This is why “stop going on holiday!” is somehow the dominant form of housing ladder advice.

If you’re living in a mortgaged property right now, and feeling fairly safe and secure about it, go kiss your doorframe for me. Pat your stairs and look out of your windows. Refresh your e-mail inbox and enjoy the fact that it didn’t just tell you that you’re being evicted. You’re one of the lucky ones. But don’t you think having a home shouldn’t be based on luck anymore?

The medieval era is often characterised as a dark age. But some historians believe that for women in England, it was a golden one. Caroline Barron, for instance, argues that they had social and economic rights that vanished in later centuries. In the 14th century, she says, a widow inherited at least a third of her husband’s property. Women often gained domestic autonomy when they married, living in new households with their husband and children, rather than with their parents or in-laws. And they could keep money that they earned during their marriage.

It was normal to see women in a wide range of jobs. While the most common occupations were in the fabric and clothing trade, in victualling and brewing, and in domestic service, medieval records reveal female blacksmiths, parchment-makers, and ship-owners. Widows often continued their husbands’ businesses, and some women traded as “femmes soles” — in their own right, rather than as part of an entity with their spouse. Matilda Penne, a London skinner, ran a lucrative fur business, employed apprentices, and left a gift in her will for a female scribe called Petronella. Chaucer’s own grand-daughter, Alice (who married three times), lent money to the king, and ended up with land in 22 counties.

Of course, any “golden age” claim has to come with a caveat: women did not have the vote, many were abused exploited, badly paid and they generally died quite young. But while they lived, some medieval women did have surprising independence.

Things declined for women a couple of hundred years later: a change that is reflected in the marked reduction in skilled female labour. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the records are littered with references to female apprentices, who learned a trade and became highly qualified in the course of between seven and 10 years. We can read about Katherine Lightfot, apprenticed to a carpenter; or Katherine Claver, apprenticed to a wealthy female silk worker; or the sisters Alice and Matilda Shaw, apprenticed to a notary or lawyer.

However, in 1570, the Drapers’ Company at first refused to allow Mr Calverley and his wife to take on a female apprentice. Only after advice did it allow them to employ her. Between that year and 1640, of the 8,000 recorded apprentice enrolments in London, none was for girls or women. Women certainly continued to work — for instance as servants — but a more skilled career path was closed to them.

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Many of us would like to believe in progress: that things will be better for our daughters than they are for us. And those who are socially liberal hope that change, even if it is slow, will be permanent. When my parents were born, there was no Pill and no legal abortion. By the time I was born, these things were mainstream. However, history can double-back on itself, as we are seeing in America since the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Major economic change plays a major part in such shifts. In the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out a huge proportion — perhaps even half — of England’s population. In the wake of this appalling pandemic, there were far fewer workers of course. More women entered the work force and moved to towns — and wages went up, for women as well as men. (More than 500 years later, the catastrophe of the First World War likewise propelled many women into jobs.) But by the 16th century, the population was beginning to grow significantly — and women were increasingly pushed out of skilled and more lucrative work.

Their rights declined, too. In pre-Norman Conquest England, wives could hold and dispose of property in their own right. Wills reveal women passing on property to their daughters: around 950, a woman named Wynflaed, for example, bequeathed an estate to her daughter, Aethelflaed, as well as an engraved bracelet and a brooch. But after the Norman Conquest, the idea of “couverture” entered English law, brought by the invaders, who had a different understanding of gender relations. Couverture suggested that a woman’s property became her husband’s after marriage — a wife’s legal identity was “covered” over by her husband. The law was unevenly applied in the Middle Ages and early modern England: women often managed to maintain a separate estate, and even to continue trading as separate entities from their husbands. But it was applied increasingly rigorously over time.

Over the course of the 18th century, judges began to impose a more restrictive understanding of married women’s rights. Scholars such as Susan Staves have suggested that liberal treatment of women precipitated a backlash from conservatives. In 1756, John Wilkes, a radical MP and journalist, agreed a contract with his wife, Mary, by which she could live separately from him and receive £200 a year. In 1758, he went to court in the hope that the law would say that such a contract was unenforceable, but the court upheld it. There are many other similar examples of contracts that allowed married women to hold possessions and income in their own right. But judges became increasingly uneasy: in 1779, Chief Justice De Grey said that a wife could only acquire a “separate character” from her husband through death, or a “civil death” such as exile — not by leaving him. In 1800, Chief Justice Kenyon asserted that husband and wife could not contract with each other because they were not separate people. The nature of English common law, with its reliance on precedent, meant that the position of women with property remained uncertain and unstable for decades.

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Progress, then, can unleash reaction. A recent survey demonstrated, astonishingly, that a majority of Gen Z and millennials think that women’s rights have gone too far. (In older age groups, such views were in the minority.) This is despite strong evidence that things are getting worse for women in some areas. For higher-educated women, for example, the gender pay gap has widened since the Seventies — for mothers in particular. In 1978, higher-educated mothers earned 72% of the wages of equivalent fathers; in 2019, the figure was 69%. Kelly Beaver, the chief executive of Ipsos UK, suggested that people might be pushing back on equality precisely because there has been progress in some areas: “change can often make people uncomfortable and resistant”.

But why is social change so easily reversed? Writing about the end of the medieval era’s so-called golden age for women, Caroline Barron notes that, despite their economic power, women did not manage to increase their political representation. They did not take up positions in the city wards or guilds, let alone in law offices and parliament. The contemporary USA, where the recent decline in women’s rights has been most precipitous, has far fewer women in politics than Scandinavian countries, which are routinely rated as the best for women to live in.

Women are useful workers — particularly in struggling economies. But the opportunity to earn money means little without the opportunity to represent ourselves, in parliaments and the judiciary, in board rooms and financial institutions. Without political change, progress, as we see time and again in history, can easily be reversed.

It was only a matter of time before the American media delivered a story of a millennial forced to choose between pure posting and real politics. And with the past two decades as our guide, their decision was inevitable: they would choose the post. Emperor Nero was alleged to have fiddled while Rome burned, but a millennial poster would today logged onto Twitter, “shitposting” his way through the cancellation of everything prior generations might have held dear.

On 19 January, the Chicago Reader revealed that 36-year-old Pericles “Perry” Abbasi — a campaign attorney, who was running for office in Chicago’s 25th police district with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police — had a history of posting bizarre and unseemly content on social media. In a leaked screenshot from a group chat, he had written that “the horrible black diet” was the reason for “13/50”, referencing a common internet meme about Black Americans’ percentage of the population (13%) and supposed share of violent crime they commit (50%).

Abbasi denied these accusations of bigotry. He claimed he didn’t remember everything he was alleged to have written (without necessarily denying his authorship, either), while also offering a second more general defence of his behaviour: this was the internet, he argued, and if he thought of something funny, he’d immediately post it. If this meant writing a tweet about how a relationship with a 36-year-old woman led him to conclude that child porn sentencing is far too long, then so be it. If it meant “making up insane things to stir shit up”, then it meant just that. Abbasi admitted he couldn’t even remember what he posted 48 hours ago; it was all just a blur of posting, retweets, engagement, and likes. He has posted nearly 104,000 times over the past four years, averaging roughly 70 tweets per day (one can also assume he retweeted hundreds of replies each day). In a sense, Abbasi was telling the truth: he was lost in the sauce, living from post to post.

Many of Abbasi’s clients were less than impressed by this. The original report in the Chicago Reader was quickly amended to insert various statements from political figures whose campaigns had him, each stating his comments were unacceptable. But Abbasi doubled down, posting a series of tweets about how being cancelled “was a choice”, that he was an “alpha male” and thus above apologising for things out of principle, and that Osama Bin Laden himself taught us that people will always prefer a “strong horse” to a “weak horse.” Then, he received a “like” on one of his tweets from Elon Musk and declared that the era of his cancellation had ended.

At first glance, this appears to be a fairly mundane story. Political candidates and semi-public figures have their improprieties revealed in the press all the time, and careless millennial posters have been ruining their careers for years, as people who remember the case of publicist Justine Sacco know. The story of Pericles Abbasi, however, deserves a second look. It shows a crash between two different worlds, and reveals what happens when millennial online culture collides with reality.

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Abbasi’s field of work — being an attorney for political organisations and campaigns, where he had begun to make inroads with Right-leaning groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police despite earlier support for Black Lives Matter — is based on trust and professional reputation. But the Chicago Reader revelation put his other reputation at risk: his reputation in the online world of “posting”, where he was among the most prolific posters on social media — perhaps the most prolific, as far as sheer volume of content production is concerned. In this world, online micro-celebrities fight with each other tooth and claw for likes, attention, followers, and social position inside a myriad of private group chats and social circles on Twitter.

Abbasi thus faced not one but two risks of reputational loss. He could either jeopardise his standing as an attorney entrusted with major real estate transactions and real-world political campaigns, where he is implicitly trusted not to embarrass his employers in public — or his standing as a preeminent poster. Abbasi chose the latter, which begs the question: why exactly would anyone choose to protect his standing — his “clout” — online, over his real-world career, for which he devoted years of his life? It is impossible to imagine scandalous figures from decades past, a rogue’s gallery ranging from Ted Kennedy to Silvio Berlusconi, risking so much for so very little — for a handful of likes, shares, and retweets.

There is little proof that Abbasi was motivated by some sort of genuine racist belief. He has in the past shared strong views in support of civil rights and, in his pre-shitposting days, cautioned a more intimate circle of colleagues about heaping too much scorn on BLM protestors. If Abbasi ever entertained a racist thought, I suspect he would just have forgotten it 24 hours later; lost in the endless stream of posting and “doing a bit” as he played some sort of role or character online. Abbasi, for instance, is engaged to woman, has also devoted a good many tweets to jokes about logging onto Grindr, a gay hook-up app, for the purpose of “outing” cheating husbands or “something I’m doing for a Nathan Fielder type show I’m developing”. Clearly, his tweets have little grounding in reality.

All of this ties into a curious fact about the sort of online culture that Abbasi is a part of: it is openly, almost to the point of being parodic, a form of “youth culture”, where the rules do not matter and where the norms of ordinary adult society are scorned. But time is a cruel thing: what might seem irreverent or radical at the age of 20 takes on a whole other sheen at 35. When Trump famously descended that escalator and inaugurated his campaign, an entire online “alt-Right” or “dissident Right” subculture clung to him like limpets, constantly stressing the “vitalist” and “youth” pretensions of his movement.

But that was eight years ago. During that time, many former members of these subcultures found partners and started families, leading them to naturally drift away as they assumed the responsibilities of the adult world. But others such as Abbasi remain there, stuck like Peter Pan in a permanent, virtual Neverland.

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The Abbasi story is interesting, then, because here was someone who had punched his ticket out of this overproduced netherworld of millennial losers: he had a good career, good education, good skills, and a good client base for law practice. He cultivated political patrons; he is preparing to get married. Yet there he is, posting under his own name at a prodigious rate others in his generation wouldn’t attempt to match unless masked by anonymity; posting his life away.

Historians and cultural theorists have argued that civilisations have collective “death drives” — fuelled by an oppressive atmosphere of decline and decay — and here is a new variation, the “posting drive”. Abbasi, who is continuing to run for office in Chicago now that he has secured the coveted endorsement of some New York-based “dissident podcasters”, is willing to go down with the ship, so irony-poisoned from years of hard posting that the pain of drowning will be nothing short of sweet relief from his need to respond to likes and notifications.

He is not the first such millennial to go out this way, nor will he be the last — as many in his entire generational cohort, along with the ageing, weakening American empire that subsidises its narcissistic waste, seem likely to follow suit in due course. There are alternatives to running a nation-state to failure, such as serious involvement in real politics, but are those as fun as Elon Musk liking your tweets? I think not.

***

An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Pericles Abbasi retweeted a photoshopped image of himself over police officer Derek Chauvin. This was incorrect: Abbasi tweeted a photo of himself next to another of George Floyd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob: What do you mean by “betrayed”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob: Is he an antisemite?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob: Try and answer it?

Bret: What was the first part of it again?

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

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

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

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

*

Is anyone going to write the great millennial novel?

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

What are you reading at the moment?

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

The Shards is published by Swift Press.

To be clear: there has not been a mass return to traditional Catholicism among New Yorkers. Downtown bars have not grown dusty as their former patrons marry, have children and stay in; their denizens have not renounced their stuporous ways. A few microcelebrities are going to Mass and confession; a few thousand fans of theirs post insular memes with half-remembered phrases from the Gospels; and a few brands sell things like “GOD WON’T LET ME DIE” booty shorts and the Praying “Trinity” bikini.

The aesthetics employed are tired and unremarkable: plaid schoolgirl skirts and altarpieces, bedroom photo shoots with Edwardian corseting, photos with nymphet eyes peering up from the kneeler. “Young Catholics” today, long after organised religion fell from centrality in American life, are scraping its remains; they are reviving the Catholic revival of Eighties Madonna, down to the intermammary rosary. The difference is that back then, Catholics weren’t pleased. Madonna started every “Blonde Ambition” performance with a prayer — and Pope John Paul II issued an official statement condemning it as “Satanic”, urging Catholics not to attend. Italian broadcasters refused to play the “Like a Prayer” video, and Pepsi dropped the singer from its ad campaigns.

Compare that to the Met Gala’s 2018 “Heavenly Bodies” theme: Rihanna wore a bedazzled minidress and mitre, while Cardinal and Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan gave an enthusiastic press conference. Are Catholics so desperate for religion to have relevance that they’ll take anything, even what seems almost too superficial to even be sacrilegious?

Apparently so. According to a recent New York Times guest essay, “New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church”. What is shocking about this piece is not, primarily, its subjects’ half-hearted prostitution of Catholic imagery. Rather, it is the seeming guilelessness with which its author Julia Yost, editor of the established conservative journal First Things, seems to take them at their word. Though not intimately familiar with Catholic doxa, I suppose her mission faces a challenge: how can one be a public-facing Catholic in a world almost too stupid to evangelise to? 

This is not to say there are no Catholics in New York: there are, and their folkways are quite identifiable. Most strikingly, they tend to abstain from fornication, believing this is necessary to avoid eternal damnation. They generally marry and have children at relatively young ages. They generally marry, therefore, one another. I have a friend who is a recently un-lapsed Catholic. As such, his romantic life, formerly abuzz with tantalising young heathens, primarily consists of a dreary, desperate succession of false starts and mutually embarrassing denouements. He suffers, and his sojourn in Purgatory may very well be shortened for it.

More from this author

Pleasure: a disappointing debut

By Ann Manov

To those for whom “Catholicism” has provided spiritual comfort and guidance, and introduced useful restraints, we should be encouraging. As famous convert Evelyn Waugh said when Nancy Mitford asked how he reconciled his awful character and his Catholicism, “were I not a Christian I would be even more horrible”.

We should be less encouraging, however, of those who use Catholicism in pursuit of attention and in the exercise of branding: that is, as pure spectacle, exactly like everything else online. The evolution of Catholic Twitter illustrates this. At least the Weird Catholic Twitter that the New York Times profiled in 2020 presented the intriguing oddity of anonymous Ignatius Reilly types, fuming about “dumbed-down doctrine” from the rooks they’d erected in their mothers’ basements. Today, it’s bigger and more banal: young women, unequipped for Instagram stardom, post selfies outside churches they don’t venture inside, and swarms of priapic men lose their minds. Both factions have the dove and fire emojis in their handles.

In these cases, rather than a cure for vanity, Catholicism is a veneer that makes their trespasses more palatable, even giving them cause for sanctimony. The harsh prescriptions of Catholicism could well be a respite from the modern world, but one’s hardly “not of this world” when she claims it to be so before thousands of Patreon subscribers, or Twitter followers, or Instagram voyeurs. Part of the Christian message, in my enfeebled understanding, is to not parade one’s piety (“when thou prayest, enter into thy closet” — Matthew 6:6). Early in Jude the Obscure, Jude recites the Nicene creed in Latin at a pub and is met with thunderous applause, which makes him furious. Repentant and ashamed, he storms off. Can we imagine any Twitter Catholic today feeling bad about making a spectacle of their faith?

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Is this the end of Pope Francis?

By Damian Thompson

In a striking turn, Yost’s essay doesn’t seem to question a “fake it till you make it” view of Catholicism; the idea that you should believe before performing the rituals is deemed Protestant nonsense. This might make sense in the context of a “dark night of the soul”, but it’s bizarre when applied to conversion. Historically, it doesn’t hold up: the overwhelmingly dominant account of an internal conversion is St. Augustine’s (“there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away”). And while it’s true that Protestants prioritise internal change over external sacrifice (as Luther said, “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly”), it’s not like the Catholic-adjacent, in the main, make any changes in their habits. One of the most vocal young converts I know — he’s told me, with a terrifying conviction in his large eyes, that even married men and women shouldn’t have non-procreative sex — shows up to every party with a different Tinder girl. He says they overwhelm him.

Why convert, if you don’t believe it? This is a distinctly postmodern attitude to appropriating the premodern. Sincere belief is hardly even conceivable these days. So, it seems impossible to imagine actually believing Mass and prayers and chastity are a matter of eternal life or death (as do countless Catholics to this day), or to believe it without compulsive ironising. The solution to that problem of imperfect faith could be submission to readily available religious authority. And yet, many of the loudest in this crowd espouse sedevacantism, the view that there has been no valid Pope since Vatican II, and even no valid ordinations — a theology so bespoke it would rattle the bones even of the most traditionalist Catholics. Spending their days engaged in arcane and unconvincing debates in which they copy stuff from Reddit and paste it onto Twitter, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the DSA cretins for whom they bear such scorn. 

I suppose this is how we do politics now that politics is dead: the near entire retreat to the imaginary, a casual contrarianism committed to nothing besides its own ability to shock. Yost claims that “members of a small but significant scene are turning to the ancient faith in defiance of liberal pieties”. The choice of Catholicism is, of course, not random. Pretending to embrace that rapidly dying faith, led by an octogenarian Argentine with one lung, is an expression of antipathy towards the mainstream status quo and its sacred cows. There is apathy here, too. The vague conservatism of the “Catholic revival” does not reflect commitment to improving society or even their own souls; instead, it is merely confused agitation born of obsession with a liberal class they imagine to be composed solely of Jezebel writers — a politics, faith, and worldview with all the conviction and all the consistency of one impetuous toddler angry at another.

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The kids aren't alright

By Hadley Freeman

It may be true, for the more sincere among them, that the draw of Catholicism comes from a painful and desperate place. Young people, particularly in the post-Covid years, feel adrift and alone, and may well feel, as Waugh did a century before them, that the choice is between “Christianity or chaos”. The draw is half a longing for rules of any sort. (Is it any coincidence that many of these new Catholics espouse Ray Peat’s Eighties nutritional code, with its inane admonitions against pineapple and paeans to hypnagogic ice cream?) But this so-called traditionalism betokens little more than a hysterical obsession with ever more arcane, ever more irrelevant concerns.

Another part of the draw, I suppose, is general dissatisfaction with the fuzzy, listless conformism of the post-Obama years; it’s almost too banal to observe that the milestones of adult life are gone, the union job, marriage, family home, children, all so easily available to an earlier generation. As one young Catholic podcaster tells the author of the New York Times essay: she didn’t like how everyone told her to get a job when what she really wanted was a family.

But wait: “get a job” is pretty reasonable advice for aspiring mothers. If you don’t have a trust fund, a job with health insurance is probably the single biggest facilitator of having children in America. You don’t have to become a provocatively Right-wing traditionalist to breed. A single stroll through Park Slope makes very clear that the liberal elites, in fact, love children. Throw a stone, and you’ll find a secular, Dem-voting female professional with a husband, children, and a life far more similar to that of any given parishioner than any on-trend “Catholic”. It’s not “choosing the better part” to be an unemployed podcaster, nor does self-marketing through semi-nude photography on social platforms compare to sitting at the feet of Christ.

Young New Yorkers are reacting to modernity via a touristic experiment with the American Right. But, with rare exceptions, they haven’t stopped fornicating; they haven’t started forgoing coke so they can wake up for Mass on Sunday. Instead, the fixation with “post-liberalism” or “post-feminism” or “Catholicism” is superficial: it reveals little more than a narcissism of small differences. Endlessly rejecting “liberal pieties” is easy; what’s difficult is taking a cold and curdling look at one’s own life.

Rule Makers, Rule Breakers explores Gelfand’s research into differences between cultures. Specifically, she describes cultures that are (using terms invented by Finnish-American anthropologist Pertti Pelto) “tight” and “loose”. Tight cultures are conformist “rule makers” while loose ones are creative “rule breakers”. According to Gelfand, tight nations include India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, China and Portugal; loose nations include Spain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, the Netherlands and Ukraine. (The UK sits somewhere towards the middle, and is slowly becoming looser.)

Life in tight nations can be strict compared to looser places, which have weaker social norms and a more permissive way of being. Gelfand contrasts tight Japan where “trains almost never arrive late” with loose Brazil where “clocks on city streets all read a different time, and arriving late for business meetings is more the rule than the exception. If Brazilians want to insist on timeliness, they will ask you to arrive “com pontualidade britânica” (“with British punctuality”). In notoriously tight Germany there are “mandated quiet hours” on certain days, during which lawn-mowing, loud music and washing machine use is forbidden. “After one Cologne resident complained about a yapping dog, a judge allowed the dog to bark for only 30 minutes a day in 10-minute intervals.”

What makes all this especially powerful is Gelfand’s understanding that we absorb the rules of our time and place, internalising them so that, to an extent, we become them. The halting but demonstrably true fact is that certain cultures produce, on average, certain kinds of human. We’re a tribal species and our brains are programmed to learn local norms, to follow them and to judge others by how closely or otherwise they conform to them. We need rules in order to live successfully in co-operative groups; they are our “cure for chaos”. And we love our rules. Gelfand quotes the Greek adventurer Herodotus who, in roughly 450 BC, observed our ethnocentric nature: “If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.”

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It’s not that loose nations don’t have any rules at all, then, but that they take them marginally less seriously than the tight. And so sometimes dramatic differences arise between people of different cultures. Loose types, raised in a more laissez-faire environment, tend to possess less self-control than the tighties. “People in the United States, New Zealand, Greece and Venezuela weigh much more than people in tight countries like India, Japan, Pakistan and Singapore, even taking into account a country’s wealth and people’s average height,” writes Gelfand, adding that, in the US, “over 50% of dogs and cats are overweight or obese, including my own dog, Pepper”. Similarly, loose countries such as Spain, Estonia and New Zealand are some of the booziest in the world, while tight Singapore, India and China are among the most abstemious.

In cultures that have “little tolerance for deviance”, though, life can get rather hatey. Tight nations are often not welcoming of outsiders. China reportedly “ranks in the 90th percentile of countries with the most negative attitudes toward foreigners”, while in Japan “many landlords have a ‘no foreigners’ policy, and certain bathhouses, shops, restaurants and hotels deny entry to foreign customers”. Closer to home, surveys show that “almost 30% of Austrian citizens hold anti-Semitic attitudes”. Research by Gelfand and her team, involving more than 33,000 people in 19 countries, found loose nations to be the most tolerant, being “much more willing to live next to a wider range of people, including homosexuals, individuals from a different race or religion, foreign workers, unmarried couples and those who have AIDS”.

In an especially fascinating passage, Gelfand examines the causes of tightness. Her conclusion is straightforward: it’s a response to trouble. When the going gets tough, groups get tight. Each tight culture her team looked at “had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature and her constant fury of disasters, diseases and food scarcity, or from human nature and the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts”. Take China: here is a nation that borders 14 countries, each of which it has fallen out with at some point. As well as experiencing “massive conflict throughout its history”, internally and externally, China has suffered terrible assaults by nature, having lost 25 times more lives to natural disasters, over the past 50 years, than the US. It also has relatively few natural resources, when compared with looser nations, and suffers from poor access to safe water and significant food deprivation. (It’s worth noting here that tight and loose differences can also be found across individual states of the US, with looseness found more in the north, and tightness down south.)

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In defence of class

By Justin Webb

As I read Rule Makers, it occurred to me that you could apply the tight-loose paradigm not just to cultures, but to all human groups. I applied this to the book I was researching, The Status Game, in which I note that some political movements are tighter than others, as are some religions — even some corporate cultures. The tightest groups of all are cults: they’re extremely ethnocentric and demand absolute adherence to their rules with sometimes terrible punishments meted out to deviants. Cult members, like culture-members, tend to internalise their group’s rules. One former participant in the Heaven’s Gate cult wrote (the caps are his): “I WANTED TO BE IN [THE HEAVEN’S GATE] PROGRAM AND WANTED TO ABIDE BY ALL THEIR RULES. [Not conforming] would be tantamount to wanting to be a NASA astronaut but deciding this or that procedure didn’t need to be adhered to.” Another wrote: “We weren’t here to be programmed or brainwashed. We were here to beg to be brainwashed.”

It also occurred to me that it might be possible to view the culture wars through this lens. In The Status Game I note demographic research by More in Common that described a cohort called “Progressive Activists” as those “motivated by the pursuit of social justice” (you know who they mean). Progressive Activists make more contributions to social media than any other group, and are also the wealthiest and most highly educated group in the UK. And they have certainly tightened up over the last 14 or so years, becoming more conformist and less tolerant of those who don’t share their beliefs.

It’s significant, then, that this group has suffered a drop in perceived status: highly-educated millennials are more qualified but 20% less wealthy than Boomers were at the same age: the average millennial’s worth in 2016 was 41% less than those of a similar age in 1989. They’re finding it harder to secure jobs suited to their level of education, or get on the housing ladder, and are burdened with student debt, graduating with an average deficit of £40,000. Since 2008’s Global Financial Crisis, they’ve lived with the sense that the game of life is fixed against them; that there is major trouble afoot for their group.

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Meanwhile their enemies — Brexity-minded, anti-globalisation, anti-immigration nationalists — have also endured a period of trouble. During the era of globalisation, the white working-class communities of Britain have been significantly impacted by incoming populations of black, eastern European and Muslim workers. This group feels ignored and disrespected by highly-educated politicians and much of the media-class, who dismiss them as little more than aggressive, ignorant bigots. So, they tighten up. Of course they do: they’re human, and that’s what humans do.

My analysis here is speculative. While it may be impossible to prove that tightness, fuelled by declines in relative status, is at work in the culture wars, the evidence is there. It’s also a potentially worrying augur for the future. The ramifications of the Covid economy, the invasion of Ukraine and Brexit are descending. It’s possible that all this pressure will tighten us up on a national level, as it did in the Second World War, and we’ll all move closer together; the two sides of the culture war may focus less on their own local battles as their attention moves to recession, fuel bills and winter blackouts. But if these groups continue to look inwards, neither the wealthy, educated activists nor the angry, dismissed white poor will be loosening up their mindsets, or their prejudices, any time soon.

But just as social mobility has stalled, so has sex. Faced with an online bedchamber of horrors since they were pre-teens, successive generations are holding on to their virginity longer and having less sex. The proliferation of porn since the Seventies has changed us from chastely yearning swains, capable of producing beautiful sonnets, to masturbating chimps — a process completed during the sad months when we were warned not to touch anyone except ourselves.

Meanwhile, young feminist thinkers have reclaimed monogamy, convinced that all permissiveness offers is men who take, in Germaine Greer’s memorable phrase, “joyless liberties” with them. Once girls stayed virgins for fear of burning in Hell; now they stay virgins for fear of being choked to death by a callow suitor who has picked up his smooth moves from playground porn.

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The death of intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

We may be vaguely aware that there was once something better than this, but we have no idea how to go about regaining it. It’s always tempting to think that throwing money at a problem helps. Enter capitalism. The commodification of sex starts with pornography — where one literally chooses from a menu of flesh — and ends up with those nutters who get “physical with” model aeroplanes they claim to be in “love” with. But it also provides the wily entrepreneur with an excuse to get rich quick. Having ruined the sex lives of young men by confronting them with super-schlongs, the market then sells them the chemicals that can “cure” them; the most recent sales figures from Viagra Connect show that more than 60% of users are between 25 and 54 years old. Young women, meanwhile, blaming themselves for their lovers’ difficulties, will spend thousands of pounds while still in their gorgeous 20s trying to emulate the actresses they see writhing on screen.

Sometimes the discourse around these sexual accessories reveals unintentionally amusing things about both the buyers and sellers. Lily Allen probably didn’t mean to out herself as a prude when she stated that she didn’t know how to masturbate before she started using “sex toys”. But how else to explain: “I felt weird trying to give myself pleasure. It didn’t feel like something that felt natural to me — then I discovered sex toys and it broke the barrier of intimacy with myself.” Does she think Down There is too dirty to touch? Likewise, though the sexually naive may have found it arousing to see photographs of Cara Delevingne and her girlfriend lugging a £360 “sex bench” into their house, it made me think: “that relationship won’t be lasting much longer”. Within a year, it was over.

It remains a rule of thumb that if you need to spend money on sex, you’re probably not doing it right. But in our efforts to make monogamy last longer than is natural, we’re prepared to purchase endless hardware. We’re so steeped in the flagrantly dumb culture of “retail therapy” that it pollutes the most intimate areas of our lives, giving a glossy sheen to the corrupted heart. The Fifty Shades books were just as reliant on the fiscal as the physical for their appeal: substitute a succession of shabby mobile homes for the string of private jets and suddenly getting bashed about by the boyfriend doesn’t seem luxurious.

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Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

So, given the popularity of property porn and porn proper, it was dismally inevitable that Netflix’s How To Build A Sex Room would happen. The presenter Melanie Rose is one of those Game Old Birds who signals sensibleness through her shoes and specs but hints at a raunchy past with cropped hair and Statement Lippy. For over 15 years, Rose has been making “high-end” (over-priced) sex rooms for “bankers, teachers, cops” and more. I’m sure this was meant to be reassuring, but considering that last year a policeman became a household name for abducting and raping a young woman, it failed to give me the warm, snuggly feeling intended.

Still, the couple in episode one, Taylor and AyJay, eyes a-pop with anticipation, reassured Rose (and each other) that “we love each other and we love having sex and we’re ready to have a space to spice things up with a space where we can push ourselves, push the boundaries of our relationship!” Perplexingly, Taylor and AyJay desired “a sex dungeon — but not in any way that a dungeon implies”. Even more puzzlingly, they liked the fact that it was “hidden away, and no one knows that it’s there… It’s a pretty hot little secret”.

Well, unless Netflix has lost even more viewers than they let on, a secret is one thing the couple’s sex room is not. Which is the point. Despite the alleged variety of these couples’ tastes, they’re drearily alike in that they’re all exhibitionists. (Though one man in episodes four and five was very romantic, having asked Rose to help him propose marriage to his girlfriend.) By the time the “polyamorous family” — all seven of the dirty swine — rock up in episode four, you’ll want to watch a documentary on a religious order, just to break the monotony.

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You can't teach good sex

By Julie Burchill

Rose’s RP is clearly meant to give the show a frisson of incongruity, but ends up blurring the tours of various shag-palaces into one. She is not prepossessing, but knowing how horny Americans find English accents, I’d guess that the show’s appeal across the pond is the crisp way she says “tit” — like Mary Poppins on poppers. But her superior air rubbed me up the wrong way. Goodness knows I’m not the wokest, but watching this posh white woman instructing attractive African-American couples on how to have orgasms categorically turned me off.

Watching yet another couple gag each other prior to a good flogging (otherwise known as “impact play” — that creepy infantilising thing again), I reflected that, far from being a bit of fun, such antics may express sublimated resentment between long-married couples. Isn’t gagging what he longs to do when she tells the same story for the nth time? Isn’t flogging what she wants to do when he swipes the remote control? I couldn’t help thinking of the day these couples break up and argue over their sex room’s contents in a small claims court — now that I would pay to watch.

I suppose it shows how far we’ve come that no one will think that any of these couples is immoral. These days, ninnies reserve such judgement for bad people like Boris Johnson, who they childishly scold for “cheating”. At least Rose’s subjects are trying their very hardest — indeed, going to extreme lengths — to remain monogamous. (Except in the case of the seven swine.) But they are certainly misguided to ignore the simple truth that when you’re in the first flush of horniness, every room is a sex room, and when the thrill has gone, no room is — no matter how much money you spend on your “high-end” consolation prize. 

I first joined the party around 2011, 18-years-old and full of belief in the values that I think have delivered so much for my family, and the country at large. The right of individuals to choose how to spend their own money. The power of liberalised markets to deliver improvements in living standards. The importance of our national institutions. Empowering individuals to live their life on their terms. My belief in these values has not changed.

What has changed is the Conservative Party. While its leadership candidates would happily agree with these aspirational principles, to be a young Conservative today feels like being a Judas goat, leading its own generation towards destitution. It’s not just me — my circle of young party members didn’t have a positive word to say when we found out the choice was between the two continuity Johnson cabinet candidates.

I want to light a fire under the arse of the party. I want to grab it by the lapels and shout with the moral fury of a cri de cœur: “You cannot continue like this”. A country must build for its future, not relentlessly indulge its present. To continue as we are, offering crumbs to the young while ceaselessly gifting jam to the Baby Boomer generation, simply because it wins elections in the short term, is not just bad for our party’s electoral prospects in the coming decades. It is fundamentally unpatriotic and unconservative.

Acting against conservative principles has consequences. Thank goodness, the leadership debate has finally noticed Britain’s appalling growth record over the past decade and a half — a period that awkwardly coincides with 12 years of Tory rule. The leadership candidates even openly admitted in the BBC leadership debate that the party’s economic management has failed to make Britain any better off. We are no richer than we were before the financial crisis. The march of economic progress — the increases in real earnings and upgrades in living standards that defined postwar Britain — has stalled.

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The leadership contest the Tories deserve

By Philip Cowley

“We have had a consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times, with other outlets, peddling a particular type of economic policy for 20 years. It hasn’t delivered growth,” said Liz Truss. She’s right. If we don’t change course, we could well see the United Kingdom fall behind the per capita GDP of Poland in little more than a decade. The former Soviet satellite state had to play catch up after it was forced to run an uncompetitive and sclerotic command economy for the best part of five decades. What excuse does Britain — the birthplace of free trade, and of the industrial revolution — have for its lacklustre economic performance?

“What people in Britain desperately need now is change,” Truss added. She is, at least, challenging the orthodoxy that has led us to this juncture. But, like a plague doctor from 1769, while her diagnosis might be right, her cure is the equivalent of stripping at midnight during a full moon and standing in a barrel of eels. I lean heavily to the Right on economics — I should be delighted by Truss’s promises of immediate tax cuts to the tune of £30bn per annum. She’s proposed a reversal of the manifesto-breaching National Insurance hike, cancelling the planned 6p rise in corporation tax, and a two-year suspension of the green levy — a particularly eye-catching and juicy policy with energy bills soaring. Sunak, meanwhile, has pledged to cut the basic rate of income tax to 16% by 2029.

In one sense, less taxation is exactly what I want to see from a Conservative government, not least with my own marginal rate reaching beyond an eye-watering 60%. Cutting taxes is the fillet steak of red meat Thatcherism, is it not? While Truss may be claiming the mantle of Margaret Thatcher as her own with her tax cuts proposals, what the proposals forget is that Thatcher was cautious on tax cuts until the hard work — of eliminating the economy’s structural weaknesses — was done. In fact, taxation as a share of GDP continued rising into the early Thatcher years, only consistently falling after 1985, six years into the Conservative government.

In the Seventies, the structural weaknesses were all-powerful unions obstructing industry reform and undead, state-owned businesses kept going only through public subsidy. Modern Britain has its own equivalent of this economic drag anchor: the cost of housing and its root cause — the utterly dysfunctional planning system.

That planning system is designed not around growth, progress or even necessity. Rather, it is almost exclusively geared towards securing the lifestyle and preferences of those who already own — and who overwhelmingly oppose development. The result is laughably predictable: a severe supply shortage of homes and rocketing prices that far outstrip languid growth in earnings. Astonishingly, property listing website Zoopla found last year that one in five homes “earned” more in a year than the average UK salary. So much for the dignity of work.

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By Aris Roussinos

We cannot expect anything other than a sclerotic economy if we throttle the supply of workers in our most productive regions through high housing costs. One study found that by restricting access to workers through planning regulation, aggregate economic growth in the United States was a third lower than it could have been between 1964 and 2009. The cost may even be higher for the United Kingdom. Choking off all development is not small-c conservative protection of the “local character” of our neighbourhoods. It is nation-wrecking.

London, host to some of the most productive financial and legal services in the world, is now home to house prices 14 times greater than median incomes. Between the war and 2000, this multiple never rose above six. In Oxford and Cambridge, home to countless high-productivity businesses associated with the crown jewels of British higher education, the multiple exceeds 12. There is a clear economic incentive for young people to steer well clear of the country’s most productive jobs. That means lower growth, lower living standards, higher taxes, and worse public services.

And here lies the national practical joke: who supports this incredibly restrictive, nationalised and closed planning market? The party that liberally peppers its speeches with saccharine praise for privatised, lightly-regulated, liberalised markets. And what is the closed, state-regulated planning market that benefits existing players? A huge government subsidy. Again, anathema to Tory orthodoxy.

“The best way to achieve economic growth is cutting taxes and bureaucracy, and boosting private sector investment and innovation,” said Rishi Sunak, also at the BBC television debate. Yes! Reforming the planning bureaucracy fits hand in glove with the rhetoric. Yet neither candidate will touch the planning system with a barge pole, let alone seek a mandate from the membership to reform it, because it is an electoral livewire. Any attempt at change swiftly results in enormous electoral backlash, as proven by the 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election loss, followed immediately by dilution, if not abandonment of reform.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

Without seeking a mandate for change from the party, attempts at change will always fall flat. David Cameron’s leadership campaign back in 2005 featured an open, public insistence that the party had to transform to ever win power again. “When I say change, I’m not talking about some slick rebranding exercise: what I’m talking about is fundamental change, so that when we fight the next election… we have a message that is relevant to people’s lives today, that shows we’re comfortable with modern Britain,” Cameron said at his 2005 conference speech, widely seen as the turning point that put him on the path to victory.

Cameron challenged his party to accept the social liberalism of modern Britain or face electoral oblivion. By making this a core theme of his campaign, and by winning, he was able to move forward and drag the party with him. I see no equivalent pitch coming from either candidate on what should be the most salient issue of the day. Sunak is actually proudly stating he’ll give residents even more power to block housing near them. How is someone in their early thirties, in a rented flat, with no prospect of owning their own home, whose wages haven’t risen in more than a decade, to interpret that, other than as utter contempt for how the country works against them?

It cannot even be claimed that this inequity is in the party’s long-term interests. If multiple generations are locked out of homeownership, they will not vote Conservative. Why should they?

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By JAMES SEAN DICKSON

My message to the party leadership is very simple: you are not discharging the duty of society to care for and improve the lives of its young. How am I, as a young Conservative, meant to defend our party’s record? How can I, when it is directly lowering my standard of living in order to subsidise already well-off, retired and home-owning Baby Boomers — whose incomes, for the first time in history, exceed working age incomes?

And while housing is the worst part of a sorry national picture, the intergenerational war on the young doesn’t stop there. Working age benefits fall while pensioners enjoy the comfort of the triple lock policy. Usurious rates of interest are applied to student debt. Taxes are at their highest level since the war, paying for increased NHS spending that primarily benefits the elderly. To be young today is to be relentlessly milked for extractive, gerontocratic tastes.

It has become a common trope: the young, imperious politico announces their resignation on social media with an image of a cut-up party membership card. Why don’t I do the same, given my contemptuous descriptions of the party’s record in government? I’m clinging on by my fingertips, still believing in “our” values. Truss or Sunak need to actually implement these values, instead of just paying lip service to them, to get my vote.

Right now, I’m planning to simply scrawl “build more bloody houses” on my ballot paper in a thick marker pen. The young, renting staffer opening the envelope to record the vote, whose wages haven’t risen in a decade, is unlikely to disagree with the proposition.

Political alienation is at a high. As headlines proclaim disaster after disaster, from the pandemic to recession to the climate “apocalypse”,  people are losing their faith in the future. In the US, public trust in government is lower today than it was after Watergate, and Americans are disengaging massively from politics on social media and cable news. In the world’s democracies, voter turnout has dropped from an average 80% in the Eighties to closer to 60% today. More than half of that decline reflects generational change. In the US, for instance, citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 typically turn out at a rate more than 10 points lower than those over the age of 30.

Lower turnout, particularly among the young, has skewed politics towards the extremes. In France, barely 40% of the electorate voted in the recent election, part of what Le Monde described as “political de-socialisation”.  Those under 35 who did bother favoured Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the aged Trotskyite, or Marine Le Pen, the doyenne of French fascism, over President Emmanuel Macron, who embodies the technocratic centre.

A similar pattern is playing out in the United States. As apathy rises, young voters have tended to favour more ideologically extreme candidates such as Bernie Sanders, who, in the 2016 primaries, won more votes from people under 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. But for the most part, young Americans are rejecting the system altogether. According to the political scientist Yascha Mounk, while more than two-thirds of older Americans still embrace democracy, only one in three millennials do.

It would be one thing if people were merely tuning out of politics, but they are increasingly dropping out of the economy as well.  In Japan, the historical heartland of workaholics, observers in the Eighties began to note the rise of the “shinjinrui”, or the “new race”. These were young people who rejected work for a life as “freetors”, often living with their parents and spending their time traveling, playing video games, and pursuing hobbies. Lately, a similar phenomenon has spread elsewhere in Asia, including China, where millennials have abandoned striving in favour of “lying flat.”

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The cost of Biden's racialism

By Joel Kotkin

Even before the pandemic there were rising labour shortages in Europe, which are expected to become more severe in the future. But the problem isn’t limited to Europe. In the US, labour-force participation fell from its peak of 67.1% in 2000 to 61% today, according the St. Louis Fed. A 2021 report from the Chamber of Commerce noted that as recently as 2012, there were four available workers for every job. Today that number is barely 1.4, half the historic average.  The decline is particularly marked among men, whose participation rate has dropped by 5% since 1980. Today, an estimated one-third of America’s working-age males are not working.

The answer to why so many are dropping out starts with economics. In the United States, social mobility has declined precipitously over the last four decades. A 2016 study found that since the early Eighties, the chance of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder dropped by approximately 20%. According to projections from Deloitte, by 2030, millennials will be the largest adult generation by far but will own only 16% of the country’s wealth. Gen Xers will hold 31%, while Baby Boomers, who will be entering their eighties and nineties, will control 45%.

Partly, this is a result of the post-pandemic reluctance to take low wages or accept jobs in the “gig” economy, where pay and hours are often uncertain. Some low-wage workers have also found state support during the pandemic to be, in many cases, more profitable than work itself. In countries such as Italy and Spain, high levels of public welfare delinked from work have also been associated with the persistently high unemployment.

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California needs a recession

By Joel Kotkin

A recent analysis of Federal Reserve data shows that young Americans with a college degree today earn about as much as their Boomer grandparents without degrees did at the same age. Upwards of 40% of recent college graduates have jobs that don’t require a degree at all. In 2018, half of all college grads made under $30,000 annually, and another recent study suggests that most underemployed graduates remain that way permanently.

In Japan and China, too, college graduates face diminishing opportunities. And unhappiness among the young is growing across the developed world. A 2017 study found that young people in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany were even more pessimistic about the future than their American counterparts.

This rising disaffection has severe implications for our political and economic health. Capitalism certainly is not in good stead. A strong majority of people in 28 countries around the world believe capitalism does more harm than good. More than four in five worry about job loss. It’s hard to sell a system that provides so little opportunity, particularly for new entrants and small firms.

It is possible to imagine a future society in which a small, hyper-productive managerial elite delivers food, housing, and pleasure to unemployed and demotivated plebs. This idea has wide acceptance among American tech oligarchs. According to Greg Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, most believe that “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.” This notion, usually associated with Universal Basic Income (UBI), has been endorsed by numerous oligarchs, including Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman.

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By Matthew Crawford

This prospect — of governments providing their citizens with unearned lucre to boost consumption — would seem a natural fit for a population that is unmotivated and often lacks useful skills. Rather than working, people can live in subsidised apartments and spend their time feeding their cats, losing themselves in the emerging metaverse, drinking, and smoking pot as they grow old without ever starting a family. A prototype for this model has already been glimpsed in America’s Covid-19 relief program and in Biden’s proposed Build Back Better plan, which would have extended benefits to those who were able to join the workforce but don’t care to.

Some may call this socialism, but it is closer to Brave New World. Marxists and social democrats, whatever their flaws, traditionally celebrated work. They did not envision a a stagnant, oligarchic society that would come to resemble the last centuries of the Roman Empire or Qing dynasty China. As author Aaron Renn suggests, societies where income transfers have become a way of life tend to be bad for their members. Native American tribes that receive a form of de facto UBI from casinos show shocking levels of drug abuse, alcoholism, and idleness.

In the future, the disaffected masses could find themselves living more like prisoners than citizens. Avoiding that outcome requires finding ways to replace disaffection with ambition and a commitment to human progress. “The habit of despair is worse than despair itself,” Albert Camus noted in The Plague. Absent a recommitment to growth and democracy, we can expect a future of stagnation and ever-growing inequality — one in which we, lacking the will and capacity to create new riches, may find ourselves reduced to fighting, like junkyard dogs, over the scraps of a diminished world.

The young women of today have other expectations, apparently. In her new book Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century, Sophia Smith Galer scolds that sexual health service budgets have been cut by 25% since 2014, around the time she left school. She believes this has profoundly affected her life. “The sex myths that I unknowingly subscribed to went on to destroy my first sexual experiences,” she writes. “I spent my eighteenth year viewing my body as a failure… Nearly a decade later, I think quite differently. I see someone who was failed.”

But doesn’t everyone today feel failed in some way? There’s a “there-there” tone to Smith Galer’s writing which seems somehow incompatible with the swashbuckling nature of sex. Indeed, sometimes this book seems less about sex as the slappers of my generation understood it — something which would at least be fun and at best bring love — and more about feelings (preferably hurt ones) and “validation”. Still, despite my initial fears of Wokedom (“We need to be intersectional when we probe our sex lives”), Galer is not afraid to criticise other cultures. It is a relief from the relentless message from certain fauxminists that the white Western world is a hellhole unlike any other for women.

The ludicrous and often lethal value placed upon virginity in parts of Africa and much of the Middle East is examined in grim detail; I’ve never come across anyone who mentioned the lives of women in the West Bank without dragging in wicked Israel, but here we read of “Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank who died of multiple injuries in 2019. Thousands at the time expressed concern that she might have been killed by her own family members on the basis of photos that she had posted with her fiancé.”

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Teenagers need to have sex again

By Julie Burchill

Which is not to say that sex is a day at the nudist beach for Western women either. The author has come up against some grim stuff in her life; though much younger than me, she experienced a sex educator who told her: “Every time you have sex, you will lose your special glue. And when you have lost all of your special glue, no husband will love you.”

But many of the ignorant idiots involved aren’t worth railing at: “Countless interviewees have told me how this (idea of virginity) has affected their actual sex lives, including one woman whose partner told her ‘You can’t get into heaven now’ when they had sex for the first time.” Breast-beating and soul-searching aren’t the correct responses to this sort of thing; a quick knee in the groin and a cry of “Neither can you, Numb-Nuts!” might be a better reaction.

Thankfully there’s a chapter on asexuality because by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll be in the mood not to be In The Mood. This is something Sophia seems to understand — “sexlessness… exists perhaps not in spite of sexual liberation, but because of it” — while not grasping that books like these, presenting sex as a vale of tears, might well be part of the problem. It’s only slightly less off-putting than Laurie Penny’s ridiculous new book, Sexual Revolution, which really appears to believe that having queer sex (aka having regular sex but with blue hair) can bring down fascism.

Sex, as a problematic issue for women, was meant to have been “solved” by now. The Pill and divorce lessened the vulnerability which forced us into sexual servitude. The idea of “Free Love” also promoted in the Sixties promised that men and women could come together as free agents, motivated by nothing but pure pleasure — and nobody would get hurt.

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But somewhere between burning bras and online pornography something went awry, and now young women may well find themselves called upon to enjoy being slapped and choked as part of a “fulfilling” sex life. Now, it seems, getting hurt is part and parcel of having sex; as Rousseau might have said “Woman was born free, and she is everywhere in chains.”

And now, the state is increasingly giving hormones and amputations to young people with body dysmorphia. That is a true example of women being “failed” in sexual matters. But the young Smith Galer isn’t interested in inquiring why girls are submitting in droves to having sex organs hacked out of their unformed bodies — so great is their fear of growing up to be the mere Whack-A-Mole of orifices which they see in online pornography from childhood. Consider the admission of teen idol Billie Eilish: “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11… I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much”, adding that it made her feel “cool” and “one of the guys”.

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In the face of this, we have Galer’s at times an unintentionally comical blend of sleeves-rolled-up can-do gumption and existential sorrow: “If I do my job right, you will finish reading this book armed with knowledge around sex, relationships and society that you have been both actively and passively denied. I am not a doctor or sex expert — just a journalist who is used to reporting on the fault lines between the spiritual and the corporeal.”

Much as I love my trade, I wouldn’t trust a journalist to give me advice about sex, as I’d presume they’d want to take surreptitious snaps of my subsequent folly and sell it to the papers.  Somehow a profession which invented Love Rats, Threesome Romps and Hot Tub Frolics isn’t quite the one I’d recommend to instruct the nation’s youth in the way of sexual wholesomeness.

I realise that as a louche sexagenarian who, in the words of the old pop song has “seen some things a woman ain’t s’posed to see”, I’m not the demographic this book is aimed at. Of course, all education is a good thing and only a cretin or an exploiter would say that ignorance is bliss. But education doesn’t seem to improve sex either; you can recite all the terms and technicalities and still never understand why X made you want to do Y. You still can’t understand why people risk their marriages, lives, and empires for what is on paper a simple physical function.

That’s why it’s not like just having a cup of coffee, as the swingers liked to say. We know 69 ways to have sex but not the first thing about sexual love — what it is and why it leaves, why it can make us so happy and so sad. At the risk of sounding like an old romantic, getting to grips with the ins and outs of sex is probably the least interesting thing about it.

In the late 2000s, we drifting twenty somethings took our freedom for granted. You might have a friend doing something unclear in Shanghai. Somebody else appeared to be rather bored learning Arabic in Aleppo. You could go to any of these places. Never realising we were living in a low-key golden era: a time when things were more or less open and alright. 

It felt so easy. We went so casually to these places. Now, never again will we spend long afternoons smoking in the French Institute moaning how dull it is in Damascus. Or get drunk in the hutongs by the Drum Tower in Beijing talking big money dreams and see Hong Kong for the first time and think — I could live here forever. We might go back there, someday, and stroll, like we did, through Aleksandrovsky Sad. But never will the ground feel solid beneath our feet.

Because that Moscow I knew — nocturnal, daring, drunk — has finally been destroyed completely. Since we watched him — there’s only been one “him” in Moscow for a very long time — declare “a special military operation”  at 5:45 in the morning. Half of those characters I used to drink with were all WhatsApping in shock: He’s actually done it. Now we are watching a map turn from one country’s colours to another. It’s so horrifyingly simple. It’s happened so many times. And even tweeting that what he’s doing in Ukraine is a war could mean fifteen years in prison. But then: even with all those MAs in Russian Studies we couldn’t conceive of it.

Minute by minute the collapse of Russian capitalism is coming through in Telegram alerts. Apple leaves Russia, Netflix suspends operations, so has Louis Vuitton, brand after brand after brand pulling out until, even though my job is to analyse this stuff, I can barely make sense of the sanctions and capital controls that have cut Russia off from the world. And somehow I’ve ended up at a think-tank Kremlin labelled an “undesirable organisation” and that means I can’t even phone half the people I want to because I’m nervous what it might mean for them. Russia has gone through the looking glass and I can only see my time there like Stefan Zweig. A world of yesterday. 

Now, a decade of obsessions make sense. Vladikavkaz. Vladivostok. I would look at these places on that incredible map and know I had to get there. I’ve often wondered why I let that emotion carry me for so long but only now, belatedly, do I realise I was running out of time. I kept on going back to this spot in the Urals, pulled by some force, shuttling on the platskart wagon onwards to Siberia, to stop at this monument, the obelisk on the Europe-Asia border.

I kept wanting to stand there, each time I went east, at this point in the forests. Almost like a premonition. I’d read a story (I didn’t even care whether or not it was true) in a history book that grabbed me. It was about the Decembrists, those officers, exposed to Europe and the enlightenment, in the afterglow of the Napoleonic War, who rose up in St Petersburg for something like a constitutional monarchy. It was a moment Russia could have turned — who knows who she would have been had they succeeded — but of course, she didn’t. And they were exiled, so many of them with everything they had to give, to Siberia. They had stopped here: by the cross on the continental border and wept. Knowing they would never see Europe again. 

Now people can barely even get there. Friends are booking flights to Tashkent. The FSB are interrogating them at the border. Others are panicking; there are hardly any flights left: they’re all booked up, everything’s grounded, sanctions have closed allied airspace in every direction. And these are same people, the same generation, who only ten years ago, were marching happily through Moscow, raising money and fighting corruption, only to dash their heads, just as the Decembrists had, when it frightened Him, when it enraged Him, when He turned out not to be this pathetic topless clown — he was Gollum in all of the memes — but truly a beast. Those were the protests that set it in motion: the squeezing of freedom, the arrests, the filetting of journalists, until now we have this.

Why did I refuse to see it at the Tretyakov Gallery? The whole of Russian history is laid out in wall-sized gold rimmed portraits of autocrats: Nicholas I to Joseph Stalin. Each saying: there is something both very fragile but very durable about repression in this state. Something undying about the spooling “organs” as you say in Russian: security forces with shifting names like the Cheka, NKVD, KGB — who have always supported these tyrants, more or less, since they were founded as the Oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible for the task. Men just like him.     

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Millennials were Putin’s Decembrists. Back in 2011, young Moscow crackled with a kind of giddy excitement that it was happening — that this generation, if it just tweeted, if it just Facebooked and posted enough — could topple Him. This energy that youth, technology, the world as it was and was becoming — would simply prevail. Because who was He really? Just some squinting little bureaucrat in a pinch. Alexei Navalny, he looked so young, he was far away from prison, yelling at the big protest on Prospekt Sakharova, flanked by liberal celebrities screaming: “Rossiya Budet Svobodna” — Russia will be Free. I believed him. 

What is Russia’s future? I must have asked everyone, every EU think-tanker, every sallow faced-Western diplomat I met in Moscow the same question. Like it was the only one that mattered. The answers came in a hundred and one theories, not one of them, it pains me to say, as mad and dark and pornographic as where we are now in Ukraine. I was swamped with academic gibberish such as “competitive authoritarianism” or “mimetic institutions”. They didn’t say that Napoleon is always with us, that in every generation, there’s a leader who has grabbed such control over his society, whose mind is so set on glory, he has to invade somewhere. Like it’s a role coded into the human species in some way we’ll never understand.

Instead, I was told Russia was a “BRIC” or a “normal middle income country” and now all I see is the absolute intellectual poverty of looking at things only in data sets. We should have listened to the one thing — in that language of Fyodor Dostoevsky — that Russian culture has always revered as holding that gift of vision. That is to the prophetic power of art. 

The writer Vladimir Sorokin, with his long, flowing grey hair, was one of the first people who “knew”. He was woken up one morning to be told, His creepy but still little comic youth movement, were chucking his books into a giant toilet. One placed right outside the Bolshoi Theatre. Then they started harassing him. A strange woman came to his house saying she’d got an order to fit his windows with prison bars. The doorbell rang and there was a sack of his books: each stamped porn. Then the prosecutor called. They’d opened a case against him, this satirical novelist, who’d written these weird, funny scenes, about a Stalin clone fucking a Khrushchev one — for pornography. 

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Then something came over him like a fugue state. He got in the car, with his wife, and they drove north, out of Moscow, out of Russia, until they were in Estonia, in the woods. And then after that he wrote. It was like a trance. Like he was vomiting bile. It had taken him five years to write a novel and this one had come in one month. Published in 2006. 

I read it around then on one of those trains, The Day Of The Oprichnik, those swamps and forests, flashing past on a visa run: my mind half seeing tanks that had been there in the second war world between the birch trees. In this book, The Tsar, at last, has been restored. The country walled off behind a Great Russian Wall: only pipelines sticking out of it. It’s this latter-day Opritchnik’s hours: this fured agent hard at work murdering a boyar, gang raping his wife, then visiting a clairvoyant in the name of The Tsar. One day in 2028. But it’s a fake Empire: utterly dependent on China. Their characters have crept onto everything and even the Tsarina makes sure to educate her son in Mandarin.

I put this book down but it never left me. A feeling like I had seen the future. And now — its pieces falling hour by hour — everyone I know in Moscow is living in it. I don’t know for how long.

Someone recently described to me, vividly, the anhedonia of severe depression: of finding himself in sublime mountains, in champagne-service clubs, with gorgeous women who loved him, feeling nothing. And I guess somewhere on the depressed-neurotic axis there’s an overlap between “I don’t enjoy things anymore” and just wishing you were the type of person who likes Marvel movies and Ed Sheeran and doesn’t feel a bored yet self-satisfied despair as you attempt to chat with the median individual on a dating app.

There’s something bovine about cinema, which is also what is spectacular about both popular art and art in public: the confirmation that the individual spirit is also the shared spirit, that what is vulnerable and personal and redeemable about us, is in all of us. Art makes us feel realer and deeper, and to share that with others makes us feel less alone. But for the same reason, bad art can also seem like an insult to the human race itself: that’s all we are?

To play on David Foster Wallace: Licorice Pizza is a supposedly good movie I will never see again. Los Angeles, especially, is plastered with ads for the film; so is my demographically overcoded web browser. I am supposed to like the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, having seen quite a few of them already; yeah, I’ve listed “film” on the interests line of my résumé. And, seriously, how many art films are there today besides low-budget films intended for an audience of 100 individuals residing mostly in Bushwick, Israeli-Austrian dramas about the Holocaust, and slow cinema about outsider farmhands from low-GDP EU member states?

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Nonetheless, I was left asking myself: what were all those moviegoers so excited about? Why are critics so impressed? How was this moving?

Much as the film’s alleged anti-Asian racism is more shockingly unfunny than it is shocking, the romance in Licorice Pizza is neither revolting nor remarkable. Anderson can make touching films about characters struggling toward misguided intimacy. But Licorice Pizza isn’t even a cloying teen romance: Gary and Alana neither consummate their mutual attraction nor even mourn it, and instead simply bounce around for over two hours: cute, charming, and completely inconsequential.

The moment Gary asks out Alana, she cheerfully declines with, “That’s illegal!”, but it’s not like he tries that hard, anyway. At their first dinner, they tell each other they’re not going to forget each other, but they seem pretty happy to goof around with his more prepubescent-looking friends in zany, period-piece pursuits (waterbeds, pinballs, slightly unsavoury politics). There’s little narrative momentum, little impediment, and little sense of “the stakes”. The leads are affable, and Haim is astonishing; but these characters are as thin as the candy on an M&M.

Previous Anderson fare arguably went a little overboard on the downbeats: all that really degrading stuff at the end of Boogie Nights, all those dying men in Magnolia, all the violence in Punch Drunk Love. But at least that mattered. Here, the downbeats are basically that two people who’ve agreed not to date get a little bit jealous when the other one flirts with someone else. The tensest scene involves Alana driving an out-of-gas truck in reverse down the Hollywood Hills. To no one’s surprise, it works.

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But the scene after that, I think, holds the key to the movie. They’ve gotten the truck down the hill and collected some jerrycans from the gas station. The sun is rising, painting the quiet road in almost psychedelic purples and oranges. The younger boys are ecstatic silhouettes on the horizon, laughing and leaping and pretending to hump each other with the gas tanks. Meanwhile, Alana is crouched on the sidewalk, near trash and glass, head hunched over her knees — something good has happened, something fun is going on, but she can’t enjoy it.

I don’t know why Anderson made a film that was clearly going to be accused of paedophilia — he told Variety that while walking by his local middle school, he saw a teenager flirting with a girl taking school pictures, and instantly thought the premise was “ripe for humour”. And anyway, he says: “It’s not romantic in any consummation of things. That would be inappropriate.”

Regardless of whatever PTA was thinking, we live in the era of the “Mommy Girlfriend”. Infinitely affirming and infinitely caring, the Mommy GF is the ideal mate for a generation of men that commonly self-identifies as autistic or anxious, and who have no idea how (or whether) to be masculine or mature. With the Mommy GF, you can stay a kid. As an iconic 2013 4chan post went: “that face when you’ll never have a cute slightly older Mommy GF who cleans up after your loveable-fuckup-self, helps you do your taxes, brown-bags a lunch for you to take to work, wakes you up on time, and cuddles you to sleep.”

That’s not exactly the deal here; I doubt the phrase “Mommy GF” was thrown around Licorice Pizza brainstorms, and Gary, anyway, seems like a perfectly confident and competent young man. But for better or worse, the Mommy GF has graduated into end-of-year lists — and maybe even real life. A number of millennial girls in my circle have started dating Zoomer boys, and I’ve been wondering about these relationships.

They’re all around 30. They’re all, more or less, ambitious. It’s tried-and-true for the clout-chasing young woman, to date an older man. But why date a younger one? As Mariah Kreutter has pointed out, it’s hard to see why Alana’s “borderline incoherent character” has any interest whatsoever in dating a 15-year-old. What, after all, does the Mommy GF want?

Maybe this: to enjoy things, one last time. Very young people, especially boys, enjoy things with an unbridled, carefree insouciance that evaporates the second one becomes concerned with becoming an “adult”. And perhaps on the fringes of show business and in the afterglow of the Sixties — or in the youth-obsessed inertia of millennial life, screwed by 2008, scared of settling, mired in therapy-brained exploration of the unconstrained yet unfulfilled self — one can soak in that sweet, warm limbo for just a little longer.

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But sooner or later, it has to end. As a young woman told me recently, for the educated millennial woman, it’s a bit odd to marry in your twenties; but once you hit 30, you’re suddenly “an unmarried 30-year-old woman”. Essentially, you’ve got one year. The clock starts ticking, and all time becomes time lost. Every joy contains its future loss. And for the archetypical millennial woman — with no savings, no house, and no children – ageing reaps no accomplishment and no satisfying narrative. It’s purely something that makes you look worse in photos.

If you date the younger guy, you can zip around the Valley plotting hare-brained schemes, or at least understand TikTok. But you’ll still feel old, even older than you are. Just 25, Alana is, as Gary calls her, the “old woman”. It’s unclear what her main worry is — material success, glory, being single — but she’s going to be worried for the rest of her life. And Gary doesn’t care about any of that, not really. He’s just having a good time. And seeing that good time — a band of boys, playing as the sun comes up — she wants to cry. Tellingly, from the next scene, she commits herself (rather unconvincingly) to “politics”.

But this breezy, sugar-dust cloud of a film doesn’t dwell in despair. At the end of it, Alana and Gary just run toward each other, with a condescending intercut of identical earlier sequences (they really could be walking, but I suppose running looks nice in trailers). They kiss. Music plays. Did you notice that this was shot on 35mm and the colours were very warm? Did you see that the characters had cool clothes, which included many prints? Yay! You’ve seen an art film. Nice.

Perhaps that’s what the Mommy GF wants: to be able to just enjoy a film like this. Maybe I’m just growing out of it.

Those she went on dates with frequently turned out to be married, or single and committed to a polyamorous lifestyle. Most, like her, weren’t aiming for a conventional monogamous relationship. One man, around her age, had recently left his wife and two daughters to live in a bedsit and sleep with as many “girlfriends” as he could muster. Rana, a 47-year-old who tells men up front that she is only interested in having lovers, and will never again embrace monogamy, says that every last one of them has joyously accepted her terms.

Once, boomers’ sex lives were seen as an embarrassing topic; now, they’re exciting, worthy of attention from HBO, even. The remake of Sex and the City, And Just Like That, in which original cast members are now in their 50s, starts this week, and it has been heralded by some as the best instalment yet. “Let me tell you,” said star Sarah Jessica Parker in a recent interview, “there’s still a lot of sex in this version of Sex and the City.” As the series will make abundantly clear, sexual glamour is no longer the preserve of the young, although that’s partly thanks to technologies that keep people looking younger longer. Porn has also helped shift the relationship between age and sexiness, certainly for women, thanks to the rise of the Milf category.

Long a feature of the intellectual elite, the rich and the landed, sexual libertinism among the middle-aged is hardly new. It is newer for the middle classes, though, who became, in the West, less monogamous after World War Two. John Updike, in the Sixties, became known for a set of novels in which bored and angry married people, of varying degrees of affluence, took to sleeping with other people, including their friends’ wives and husbands. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” he wrote wryly in Couples (1968), set in 1963. (Working class morality before the Seventies was likely to preclude sexual and marital high-jinxery.)

But the picture of suburban, middle-class libertinism has changed. In the Sixties, the typical practitioner was younger, bored and miserable: the average age of couples getting married was lower, and women had fewer opportunities. But this stereotype has been replaced by a breed of boisterously exploratory 50-somethings in unashamed pursuit of personal fulfilment. This is partly because most moral strictures around sexuality have been eroded — including the final taboo of fidelity, which can now be dressed up as “ethical non-monogamy”, a phrase that now recurs on dating apps.

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We have the progressive young to thank for this: Sietzke, a 57-year-old divorcee with four lovers, tells me that “people my sons’ age” — they are 25 and 28 — have “also helped by making it easier to bring these things up, to talk about them openly”. But “ethical non-monogamy” actually leaves some young people, especially women, frustrated or worse in their quest to find someone to settle down with; it’s actually well-to-do older people who seem to be reaping the sexual fruits. Some of these are bitter: STI rates in the over-50s doubled between 2002 and 2012, and have kept steadily rising.

And so we are at a strange pass. As the olds are merrily fucking, rates of sexual activity in the young have dropped. The preoccupation with being ‘correct’ is perhaps to blame, as well as the sheer barrage of terminology evident on all apps, but particularly on Feeld, the “dating app for couples and singles”, which describes itself as “a space where you can explore your identity” and “start connecting with open-minded humans”. Scrolling through an account, I struggled to understand what the men were saying. “A Dom [dominant] looking for FWB [friends with benefits], etc etc, I don’t prefer ONS [one night stands]…” wrote one. Another, defined as a “Man Queer”, introduced himself thus: “Playfights, cuddling, kissing, lake swimming are all good things. Maybe you want to do them? Say hi, make me feel pretty J.” A pan-sexual 29-year old’s “interests” were “crossdressing, pegging, cum play, lingerie, eye contact”.

The men might have been lovely people, but the way they presented themselves romantically was alien and didactic, even to me, a fairly liberal 39-year-old. The rise of these highly specific demands come, I suspect, from the infiltration of an identitarian politics into the bedroom — one that prizes kink and the erosion of boundaries as ‘inclusive’. Living on the internet has also given many young people a sense of entitlement to instant, bespoke results. Schooled in getting exactly what they want, they’re met with the confounding reality that humans are messier and needier than is convenient.

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Back in the over-50s pool, there seems to be less taxonomising of self and kinks, and those who have had children seem less phased by the complications of having ‘lovers’ rather than either casual hook-ups or a conventional relationship. Many are simply going for broke, hoovering up what sensual pleasures they can — because they can. “As you get older — it’s sort of an Eastern idea — you sort of think, all you’ve got is now, which is much more valuable than a future I really think,” says Sietzke. In other words, age is a freeing agent. “There’s a liberation that comes from being older,” says Rana. ”You know life doesn’t last forever, so there’s an added incentive to give anything a try.”

Rana also points to the fact that being “financially independent” helps. Young people, understandably, are more likely to be focused on the future, and with getting on the housing ladder out of reach for most of them, especially those in the south, the quest for a partner is also a strategy for accruing financial stability and property — and a basis for having children. After her divorce, in her early 50s, Sietzke recalls being constantly told by well-meaning folk that she would meet someone again. It irritated her. “Finding someone is such a construct — someone? What do they mean by that?”

When you’ve had marriage and kids, this perspective makes sense. But for the millennials yet to pull off financial stability and a family, the old, unsexy quest for ‘someone’ may feel more natural. Libertinism is perfect when your traditional romantic life, and its fruits (children), are behind you. Those with the desire for a family and a home in front of them may feel that the joys of free love are not theirs to enjoy. Yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The great climate change fallacy

By Tom Chivers

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

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

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

The 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.