20
Last summer I attended an advertising conference in the south of France. I was taking clients and there was a mistake with the booking, and I ended up staying in a swanky five-star joint up in the hills above Cannes. Sitting out by the pool one evening admiring the view, I was joined by a silver-haired American man. His wife had just bought a house in the area, he said, and they were staying here while she finished off the interior décor. They had come from the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes. ‘You know? That place where all those famous people stay,’ he drawled, sounding a little resigned. A few days before they had been in Monte Carlo, but ‘So many hills! I had a gall bladder operation a year ago and it’s no good for that.’
He was curious as to what had brought me to the south of France. I explained I was at a conference that used to celebrate creativity in storytelling, but these days was mostly concerned with technology. It seemed, I said, to be populated by young men running round championing distribution platforms that had names that frequently skipped all the vowels. Sprinklr; xAd; DataXu; InMobi; OpenX; AppNexus; Mblox; YuMe. He looked baffled (as well he might), so I politely enquired, ‘Do you like this hotel?’
‘Well, yes,’ he said, and then sighed. ‘But there’s only so much wine and cheese a guy can eat and drink.’ He looked around at the rolling hills and terracotta-topped houses dotting the wooded landscape, and shrugged his shoulders as if he were faintly bored. ‘I didn’t want my wife to buy the house here, but she insisted. After all, what else is there to do?’
Oh. He told me he was in the cheese industry. He must have sold a lot of cheese.
That night I flew back to London. It was the day of the referendum on the European Union. I was late and when I arrived home the first results were beginning to trickle through. The consensus had been it was going to be close, but ‘Remain’ were going to pip it. People voted for the status quo. Remain was the culmination of so many of the achievements the world had worked towards for the last 20 years – globalisation, multiculturalism, economic growth through free markets, social libertarianism, the European Court of Human Rights, the validating of workers, parents, migrants, prisoners, gays, the disabled, students, any ethnic minority you care to name. Funding for the arts and the sciences, a health service and a tech industry built on the best of talent from all over Europe, all over the world.
It was a world, dare I say it, envisioned and fashioned by Generation X: a generation who have grown up feeling European, living the European dream. We learned European languages in school, mostly French, German or Spanish, we Interrailed around the continent before university, we weekended, holidayed, worked and partied there. Our friends live there, in Paris, Milan, Rome and Lisbon. Back in the UK we are friends with Poles, French, German and Dutch people. We are European, in lifestyle, business and society. Mostly, it suited us.
But our parents, they are not so sure. Many never left the country, or only did so when they retired. Holidays for them were Margate or Prestatyn, Penzance or Whitby. Their honeymoons were in Devon or the Cotswolds – never mind the stag parties in Tallinn. Our music comes from Mali and Cuba, theirs was home-grown, with the odd bit of Beatles-inspired sitar. Our food is from Vietnam and Peru; when Claudia Roden introduced Middle Eastern cooking to Britain in the late Sixties it was considered fiercely exotic. Our fashion is Uniqlo, Zara, Helmut Lang, Dolce & Gabbana, theirs was Laura Ashley, Mary Quant, Ossie Clark, Biba.
My friend Natalie, who turned 40 last year, has just had a baby. Her daughter has a half-Welsh, half-Mauritian mother, and a father who is Saudi Arabian but was born and lives in London. My friend Louise is Danish, but she was brought up in the UK and now lives in Paris. My next-door neighbours are French, my son’s best friend is Muslim, my yoga teacher is Croatian. None of these people feels any different from me. But somehow, somewhere, fear has crept into the national psyche, especially outside the magnetic melting pot and powerhouse that London has become.
Now this was not our vote. Generation X do not do fear. We are not anxious in the way Millennials are, and we do not fear ‘immigrants’ and an ‘erosion of sovereignty’ as our parents do. We are old enough and experienced enough to have witnessed change and young enough to have relished its advantages.
In the aftermath of the vote, this letter appeared in the Financial Times:
We are the 48 – years old as well as per cent.
We have small houses and large mortgages. We went to raves and we stopped fighting at football matches. We got very drunk one night in 1997 then felt betrayed because of Iraq. We like being European and we understand the world is interconnected and complicated … We have friends in other countries and we’re embarrassed. We feel … the need to apologise in person to our Polish friends at the school gate. We’ve explained to our kids … we’ll still be allowed to go camping in France.
We are lecturers, nurses, systems analysts and engineers. We are the civil service. We run small businesses. We work for large, foreign-owned companies. We aren’t in charge but we are the backbone of the country. We can’t leave because our kids are at school and our parents are getting old … We didn’t prepare ourselves for this because we didn’t believe it could possibly happen.
We want a plan B, but we haven’t worked out what to do yet. We will. We want our country back.
Robert Gross
Twickenham, UK
As one of the comments underneath the letter read: ‘I wonder if the 48-year-old from Scunthorpe shares your view?’ But as well as a regional bias, when the vote was broken down it was clear there had been a demographic bias too. Sadly, the turnout of 18–24-year-olds was only 36 per cent, and 25–34 was 58 per cent. Generation X turned out between 72 and 75 per cent, while the over-55s had an over 80 per cent turnout. And the over 55s voted mostly to leave.
A week after the Brexit vote was the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme, in which over a million soldiers lost their lives. For our generation this is just a story. For the postwar generation it is nearly a memory. They feel the fragility of the world more keenly than we do.
Growing up in the Forties and Fifties my dad still remembers rationing, the first time he saw a banana. The postwar generation worked hard for the prosperity they now enjoy – they have consistently voted on an economic play that has given them wealth that outweighs their children and grandchildren’s. Pensions for them were a life’s goal; growing up we were constantly being urged to save into one. My parents wanted me to join the professional classes, study law or medicine or get on the graduate training scheme at a nice company like Marks & Spencer. There they saw safety, a ‘proper’ life. They were, and remain, baffled by the media, technology, the creative industries. They do not talk about ‘happiness’ or ‘emotional intelligence’ but instead they ‘keep buggering on’. They fear burglars and pickpockets, they trust policemen and judges.
This generation may have invented the Pill and rock ’n’ roll, it may have burned its bras and urged each other to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’, but very few of them were actually able to live it – that was the gift they gave to us. Most Boomer women married young, had children and gave up work for a domestic life. Sure the Seventies feminists fought for equal pay, but this is a fight we are still having. LSD and pot might have been around on the Kings Road in the Sixties, but they took a lot longer to reach Milton Keynes and Warrington. Instead it was our generation that benefited from a more independent life for women, an alternative view of the job for life system. It was our generation that picked up the anti-apartheid baton and installed a black president in the White House, it was under our watch that class barriers were broken down, homosexuality celebrated and normalised, gay marriage allowed and the great legacy of Thatcher – social mobility and entrepreneurialism – delivered.
Pay It Forward?
One of the most shared memes at the end of 2015 was the words attributed to Steve Jobs on his death bed. They weren’t actually Jobs’s words, but, like most things on the internet, that didn’t seem to matter:
‘At this moment, lying on the sick bed and recalling my whole life, I realize that all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in, have paled and become meaningless in the face of impending death. Now I know, when we have accumulated sufficient wealth to last our lifetime, we should pursue other matters that are unrelated to wealth … Perhaps relationships, perhaps art, perhaps a dream from younger days. The wealth I have won in my life I cannot bring with me. What I can bring is only the memories precipitated by love. That’s the true riches which will follow you.’
What do you want to change about the world now? This is the question I asked everyone while researching this book, and almost to a person the reply was ‘inequality’. It is what we feel most keenly now. Generation X reorganised the value system. We worked for love, not money, we prioritised our friends, families and relationships, we worked to make things better, more socially equal, to create more opportunity and more wealth – but here we are: it hasn’t turned out quite right.
‘If you look in the Seventies probably 75 per cent of the men and women who would have made up the Sunday Times Rich List inherited their wealth,’ says Ben Elliot, whose company Quintessentially – a lifestyle concierge company for the super-rich – services the new money. ‘Today 75 per cent of them have made their wealth. The question you’re asking is what is left behind. If you’re in a place where you could see no hope and you don’t feel opportunities are going to knock for you, there should be ways and means. We need more organisations like the Prince’s Trust, which is an excellent model of giving people opportunity, developing their skills and sponsoring them.’
Those who have been left behind have now had their say. Last year, 2016, delivered two shock results: in Brexit democracy triumphed and the majority (just) voice was heard, while Trump gained sufficient electoral college votes to become the new US president. Globalisation, liberalisation and wealth creation have not delivered enough to enough of us. This is the backlash to the changes we have wrought.
Generation X have also had to engage with the increasing demands of work–life balance. They have been the cannon fodder in a world that has exponentially increased, if not productivity, then the actual number of work hours worked. As digital culture has consumed us 24/7 we have had to work out where our families, our friends, our relationships and our own time fits in.
Millennials look on absolutely aghast – many of them cannot imagine adapting their lives now to include children and a family of their own. As the Millennial Emma Gannon, author of the girllostinthecity blog and the book Ctrl Alt Delete, a memoir of a girl growing up online, observes, ‘At work I see these really hardworking, ball-busting business women, but then I also see them as mums. I see them panicking, “Oh shit, I’m late to go and pick them up!” or just drained after a mental weekend looking after children. I see them pulled in very different directions and their situation terrifies me. It makes me think perhaps I do actually have to choose between work and motherhood, which is really sad. And could I really have children, because the sacrifices scare me. Maybe it would just be better if I don’t.’
Sometimes our struggle feels like a war of attrition. The two-working-parent family is now the norm and has spawned a culture of frantic childcare arrangements, a loss of freedom (that quality we all fought so hard for) and a life of ridiculous micro-moments where you are simultaneously worrying about a spelling test, a presentation at work, the last time you saw your husband and whether you have run out of laundry powder.
The fallout has been an obsession with happiness, what it constitutes and what it means. Simple, meditative practices like baking a cake, planting a flower bed, embroidering a cushion, even writing a letter, have taken on a totemic meaning of self-determination and are celebrated as antidotes to modern life – the sort of things that not so long ago would have just been a regular part of each day. The ability to balance life and fun, home and the office, care and duty, analogue and digital, children and friends, parents and lovers has become a dizzying juggle that claims many sacrifices along the way. As such, the ‘lifestyle business’ has become a sort of X-er mirage: a way of life that pays your way and allows you to live in the way of your choosing. Whether that is managing a surf school, opening a bakery, making jewellery, running a B&B in Costa Rica, teaching yoga or subsistence farming in Wales, we endlessly obsess about these mythical careers that allow you to work on a hangover, see your children, be in touch with nature, exercise your creative spirit, fuel your passion, answer your vocation, pay into society and the world, and live your life in the way we fantasise about.
The criticism often thrown at British small enterprise is that it never scales into a world-dominating brand. The UK has not spawned a Google or a Facebook or an Apple in recent years. Where is the twenty-first-century East India Company? Is this because the ambition of our generation lies elsewhere or is it because we are scared to commit to one thing? Famously, we have creativity in spades, but lack commitment to take that creativity from one cultural movement to another. Our values are based on cool, and cool is transient. We would rather cash in for comfortable millions, than scale to what is known in Silicon Valley as ‘unicorn’ levels – when your company is valued at over a billion. Isn’t ‘billions’ a bit vulgar? A bit undemocratic?
We have not wanted to grow up, we are childlike in our approach, we nurtured nerd culture, comics, nostalgia, school disco – what is rave if it’s not a grown-up version of a children’s birthday party with everyone dressed up in bright colours running round high on sugar, going a bit mad? We held on to our youth for as long as we could, till the Millennials took it back. Whereas Boomers wanted to grow up quickly – the world of their parents was not a nice one, they wanted to get on and set things right, and they knew just how to do it.
Meanwhile the proliferation of the media is busy disposing of a pluralistic spectrum of voices (university campuses have voted to ban tabloids like the Sun and the Mail as they ‘fund hate’). Instead, social media and its algorithmic culture allow users to live in an echo chamber of their own opinions and beliefs (Facebook was roundly attacked for handing Trump the presidency – many were simply not aware of what everybody else was thinking). Technology is promoting Millennial exclusion zones where you can ‘safely’ inhabit a world constructed around your own desires, rather than reality.
Now we have children we have had to wave goodbye to youth, and mortality is beginning to stretch its cold fingers into our lives. Friends and family have begun to be touched by death and disease: we are not going to live forever, as Liam Gallagher sang it. As parents we have been forced, finally, to articulate to ourselves what kind of life and world we want to have and we want our children to have. Generation X venerates and protects its children more fiercely than ever: we adore and respect the sanctity of their moment (after all we have tried to hang on to our own childhoods for as long as possible), and we play with our kids on a flat hierarchy. They are our friends, our equals.
As we crest the middle of our lives, we now have the conscience, the insight – it is our turn to fix the world. But, like children, childlike, we didn’t have plans – how could we when the world has changed so much? Most of us would never have imagined the jobs we do now when we left school, and the chances are those same jobs won’t exist in ten years’ time – we will be doing ones that are currently unimaginable, ones that haven’t even been invented yet.
The rising spectre of artificial intelligence is also emerging as a challenge. Doom-mongers threaten a world where there are no jobs, where machines will perform the functions of workers and our children will be left floating or ‘useless’, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari has it. Translators, designers, doctors: in as little as 40 years’ time the need for humans in these professions may be almost gone. How do we prepare our kids for this? They will need to be resilient, super-adaptable. They will have to know how to find their passion, how to be happy, how to flourish in an economy where they may have no function.
‘Actually I think it might be a rather utopian future,’ says Tom Hodgkinson. ‘Everyone will need a citizen’s income, and will be required to work less. Paying people not to work was the political idea The Idler had 25 years ago and one we still adhere to today.’ Rather than strapping a virtual reality headset to our face to pass the time, perhaps we can all study Aristotle and the ukulele instead.
Still, while our generation may not have had much of a plan, that has opened us up to spontaneity – we are ready for newness and change. A few years ago my parents joined my husband and our young family on our summer holiday. I had heard about a little train that went up a nearby mountain – it was locally quite celebrated. I suggested one morning that we should take this train, and so we drove to the station and boarded. It was indeed a glorious ascent, the Pyrenees soaked in August sunshine, and the dramatic peaks and crags appeared suddenly as we rounded each vertiginous corner.
We arrived at the top exhilarated. ‘What are we going to do now?’ asked my dad. I had no idea, but clearly we were in some hilltop village, so my husband loaded the baby into its pram and we wandered off to find a restaurant. Eventually we found one with some tables spilling out on to the street and we ordered the local rosé. It turned out to be a lovely afternoon. Several months later my dad pointed out that that was pretty much my approach in life. Take a trip and see what happens when you get there. Not his style at all, but one he could see had its benefits – as it had that day. What he didn’t say was: what if the restaurants had been full, or there had been no restaurants, or the wine had been awful? Then where would we have been?
But how can you make a plan until you know where you are going? With no predetermined outcomes you keep yourself open to opportunities, you are able to be nimble, spontaneous, reactive. This keeps you looking outward, looking up. I wonder now, though, if the lack of a plan might be problematic. I wonder if this next phase of our life might need more vision, more structure.
Perhaps our love of irony is a clue here. Cool, which we have been obsessed with all our lives, can only come with a healthy dose of irony, the ability to stand back and observe, dispassionately. Postmodernism, which we have so enthusiastically embraced, maintains that there is no high and low culture, only culture. You can play lawn bowls ironically and enjoy it just the same. Art is graffiti and it is classicism, great music is the Pet Shop Boys as much as it is Elgar. Irony has stopped us facing up to reality, because we are not really doing it, we are doing it ironically.
Well, now we are. The world feels a much more serious place and no one we trust is in charge. It’s time we made a plan.
So let’s:
And finally … a word on joy. It appears to have been forgotten. If there was one thing rave culture taught us, it is that you can throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care, and it is ecstasy. For a moment, for a night, you can turn to the person next to you, whoever they are, you can smile and you can feel the purity of happiness. That right there, my friends, is the reason to be alive. You can spread it to your neighbour on the dancefloor, you can show it to your child, you can smile at your boss, you can share it with your friends, you can comfort your parents with it too. Life is long and holds many terrors, but actually what are we here for, in this incredibly short space of time, if not to enjoy ourselves, marvel at the world and each other, see as much of it as we can and hand it on to our children.
In the words of Alex James, ‘Are we just going to carry on wearing skinny jeans and going mental at festivals until we’re 80? I fucking hope so.’