Introduction
In the summer of 1991 I was waitressing at Pizza Hut on Bournemouth High Street. It was before I went up to university, and I was living at home, saving everything I could to go backpacking around some third world country. In the background R.E.M.’s ‘Shiny Happy People’ was playing, as was the KLF’s ‘Last Train to Trancentral’. The Soviet Union was breaking up, Operation Desert Storm had come to an end, and Sega had released Sonic the Hedgehog. Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web project, but not many people noticed. It was also raining rather a lot.
Those waitressing wages were not great, nor were the tips, but they were enough to fund an adventure around India, where my money would go far and my experiences would be all my own. Well, mine and all the other thousands of backpackers shacked up beside me in the Lonely Planet hostels. Once there, I would live in tie-dye trousers, wonder at the extraordinary cacophony of religions, dance at full moon parties, drink a lot of chai latte and inevitably buy some dodgy drapes.
That summer I was also reading Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X. Only recently published, it was already something of a hit. In the book, Coupland portrayed our generation as a listless, directionless, cynical bunch of slackers who drifted from one McJob to the next in search of a thrill. It perfectly encapsulated my life at the time, as I saw no inconsistency between serving the Four Cheese pizza to a bunch of post-pub Bournemouth lads and studying Ancient Greek at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. That was me, that was us.
So what has happened to Generation X? Have we been forgotten? If you check your emails and Facebook feeds, your Google alerts and hashtags, you will see that most conversation now is about this group of people called Millennials. Millennials, we are reminded constantly, work hard, are annoyingly entitled, love an artisanal coffee and a skinny jean, and are changing the culture, reshaping society and rewriting the rule book of living.
Or everyone goes on about Boomers. How they’ve got all the money and all the houses and really are only just getting started, because everyone lives for hundreds of years now, and their big, fat final-salary pensions mean they have decades of Saga holidays ahead. Not cruises – no one goes on cruises any more, that’s so Pensioners from the Last Century. Boomers go wolf trekking in Eritrea and swipe right on silver Tinder. Pass the Châteauneuf, old girl!
Where are Generation X in all this? The generation also nicknamed ‘Middle Youth’ because we were young and cool for so long, and so good at it no one could beat us at our game. No one, that is, till those pesky digital natives came along, who were suddenly so much better at the internet and stuff, and the Recession hit, which turned the tables, and quite a few of us have kids now, which makes the pursuit of cool and youth look a tiny bit tragic. And tragic is the ultimate Middle Youth crime.
But, I would argue (particularly as I am one) – Generation X are still cool! Cool not just by a hierarchy of self-expression ranked through our fashion, music, design and friend choices. The important thing about our coolness is our irony. We fully embrace irony, in as much as we see things exactly for what they are, and we stand just a little apart from them. It makes us more knowing, and we value that. We can even do it about ourselves – we laugh at our own Middle Youthness. The only slightly self-aware Millennial is Lena Dunham. But we are Caitlin Moran, Tina Fey, Sharon Horgan, Simon Pegg, Amy Poehler and Sheryl Sandberg.
(Okay, maybe not Sandberg. One doesn’t imagine a whole lot of irony going down there. For those of you who have never read Lean In because the thought of it makes you feel tired: I am told it is a very good female tract on living and not bossy at all. I myself have ordered several copies on the internet. They are stacked, like intellectual trophies, next to my bed with all the other books I should read and don’t because I’m too busy being TATT (tired all the time) or more likely, leaning in, checking my Instagram feed. By the way, it was a Millennial who invented Instagram. Kevin Systrom. He was 26 years old.)
It is not just irony that has distinguished us, but our liberalism. Britain today is a very different place to the country we inherited 25 years ago. Yes, many people have grumbled about ‘political correctness’ along the way, but the facts are we currently have a female prime minister and female leaders of the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. The US voted a black president into the White House and narrowly missed voting in a woman; senior political party members, heads of business and Church are now openly gay. Race, sexuality and gender politics have come a long way, thanks to us.
We have also placed a much higher value on emotional intelligence and happiness – everyone you know might be retraining as a psychotherapist, but that has given us the tools to be better behaved to our loved ones, to know ourselves a little more.
We have advanced the idea that looking after ourselves extends not just to the emotional, but the physical too. Okay, so dancing all night wasn’t quite the fitness training we wanted it to be, but we all do triathlons, bike rides and bootcamps now. We try and eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, we know sugar is bad, we check our breasts for lumps and men even know where their prostate is (if they haven’t actually found it yet).
We were the first to make food a mainstream cultural art form, to democratise fashion, to insist on a soundtrack, to recraft our living spaces, to search meaningfully for spirituality outside the confines of the Church, to fuel the proliferation of art, television, restaurants and nightclubs. Our love of rave went on to inspire the hip hotel trend of dressing every lobby like a chillout room, while our love of travelling has fuelled a truly globalised culture in food, fashion and design.
Our social fixes are charities like Comic Relief, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, War Child, Smart Works: organisations that actively seek to redress the inequalities in the world. This is what we care about the most. Fired by youth and entitlement, in its early years of power Generation X set out to create a world that did not judge you for your colour, your nationality, who you fancied or what sex you were. It is your values, your ideas and your thoughts that distinguish you instead.
And now, that world is beginning to look a little shaky. The year 2016 brought democratic earthquakes in the shape of Brexit and Trump that look like they may be undermining much of the progress we made and fought to achieve. And we are no longer young. We are, more or less, in our forties. And being in your forties certainly makes you look in the mirror and reflect. So this seems a timely moment for something of a calibration. Where have we come from (good times!), and where are we going (uncertain ones)? It’s hard to have a moment in front of the mirror these days that doesn’t feel tinged with nostalgia. For instance, it is rare you go ‘Look – wrinkles. What fabulous proof that I am so wise from experience and laughing so hard.’ Mostly it’s ‘Wrinkles – you bastards. Why is the Protect and Perfect not working?’ And you reach for another green juice.
The rebellion we felt in our adolescence and early youth is still there, but what are we going to do with it now? Have we really shaped society in the way we all wanted and, now we are in positions of power, how are we going to lay things down for ourselves and our children in the future?
Are we riven by midlife crisis or are we, in fact, only just coming of age? Excitingly, our best could be yet to come. As the designer Alice Temperley puts it: ‘I’ve got to the point where I feel I’ve grown up. Where I realise what’s wrong and what’s right and what’s important in life. I’ve worked hard to get to this point and now I feel poised to take it to the next stage.’
Danny Goffey, the musician once of Supergrass and now Vangoffey (Sample song: ‘Trials of the Modern Man’), points out it was not Coupland who coined the term ‘Generation X’ but Billy Idol, the musician from Middlesex who used the name for his punk band in the Seventies. Idol had sourced the title from one of his mother’s books, a study by two English journalists on Mod subculture in the Sixties. The interviews detailed a culture of promiscuous and anti-establishment youth, something Coupland saw as characterising the kids he was describing in his novel. Generation X is the child of the sixties, the child of punk. These movements before us evolved us, their values sit deep inside us.
Nowadays demographers commonly assign the X generation to those born between the Sixties and early Eighties; those after are known as Generation Y, or Millennials, and our kids are to be known as Generation Z, or Centennials (born after the turn of the century). Meanwhile our parents are the postwar generation, or Baby Boomers, born in the aftermath of the shattering devastation in the middle of the last century. Theirs has been a life of relative peace and prosperity, and they have benefited from enormous capital growth and social investment. The gap now between their experience and those of Millennials is perfectly illustrated in average income – despite being retired, Boomers have a higher income than the average working Millennial. Meanwhile it is the Millennials (and of course X-ers) who are paying those Boomers their income in the form of pensions.
What makes X-ers really interesting, though, is that we had the Nineties. The last decade before the internet hit, before smartphones connected us to everything, at every moment; the time when further education was free, housing was just about affordable, and, crucially, when wave after wave of youth culture crashed on our shores, each new wave a brilliant reaction to the one that went before. Oh kids, you missed out there. And Boomers – sorry you were too busy working to really enjoy them.
The Nineties were an adventure in cool. Out of grunge – a literal rejection of everything that came before it – came heroin chic (yes, drugs are cool – even the bad bits!), Britpop, logo-mania, Paul Smith, the Inspiral Carpets, John Galliano, Soho House, Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss, the Gallaghers, Quaglino’s, The Word, Blur, Marc Jacobs, Marco Pierre White, the Turner Prize, Loaded magazine, pickled sharks, rave, Liam ’n’ Patsy, Helmut Lang, superclubs, the Wonderbra, The Big Breakfast, Trainspotting, Chris Evans, Pulp, the Spice Girls, Tate Modern – I could go on.
In one short summer – let’s take 1997 – Tony Blair was elected, the Prodigy released The Fat of the Land, Oasis dropped Be Here Now and Diana died. That was in just four months, like the arc of a single night: the build, the high, the comedown. We were crowned Cool Britannia, because right then and there, there was nowhere else in the world culturally more exciting.
There is no such roll call of cool that exists for the Noughties (Ellie Goulding, anyone?), or indeed the decade we are currently in, because instant access and transparency now conspire to make culture a pretty homogeneous mass. There are no definitive fashion trends or musical movements as everyone has access to everything everywhere and tribalism has died. Working-class culture is pretty much consigned to the scrapheap as changes to the welfare state mean there is no lifeline on which working-class artists or musicians or writers can survive and thrive. They must instead take a zero hours contract in a call centre. The Nineties, however, were the product of the disenfranchisement our generation felt during the Thatcher years, strong responses to a changing economy and society.
This was reinforced by our methods of communication: in the Nineties we physically went places to meet up, swap hairstyles and be cool, whether it was a club or a record shop or a field or a street or a store. We didn’t connect on chatrooms or on WhatsApp groups. We did it face to face, in places where we met other people who expressed themselves like us, and we exchanged ideas and hung out with each other and felt our rebellion communally. Together, in self-selected communities, we practised large-scale irreverence and cynicism of everything outside of our own group, but together we were fiercely strong and loyal.
Physically showing up to something gave our communities a validity and a value that today’s virtual communities cannot share. Nineties tribes were not just about how you looked – they were also about how you actually behaved, where you went, who you were with, what you did when you got there. You couldn’t tell lies about that, like you can now on social media – there were no filters or hashtags. Communities were something you did together, on a dancefloor or in a pub, sharing a feeling, not alone in a bedroom, staring into a screen all on your own. As a result our communities, whether that be our friendship group or our cultural tribe, were awesomely strong and meaningful to us (while they lasted). We were the new, with the big ideas and the modern outlook and the future.
Yuppies, a job for life, Thatcherism – by the Nineties they were all over; a broken dream. The crash and Black Friday put paid to that, as did the housing market and negative equity and all those redundancies. Money was for losers, with hideous values – experience was what we valued. And government? It gave us the Poll Tax and the Criminal Justice Bill. Instead, we chose the Summer of Love and ecstasy and eco protesters and Swampy. We were Greenpeace and gay culture (not everyone was gay, not yet – it took the Millennials to progress that far, but lots of us were and the rest were our best friends), and we used marketing, PR, television and festivals to take everything that was cool and below the radar and counter-cultural and make it ours. We took it and celebrated it and commoditised it and marketed it and turned it into the mainstream – our mainstream.
Our idea of family was more fluid. Weddings got bigger and bigger as getting married became less about commitment and more about making a social statement and throwing a party. Sex and sexuality loosened, Europe opened up and cheap travel blossomed – no one batted an eyelid at a weekend in Prague, a night in Paris or the NY-LON (New York–London) commute. As the Nineties wore on, our liberal values became common currency. We were changing the world by the day and fashioning it in our own image.
London began, like a gravitational field, to attract everything from around it and pull it in as it accelerated into the future. Wealth creation was moving into the capital and the cultural benefits we enjoyed from Manchester, Bristol, Stoke, Glasgow, Sheffield, Cardiff and more, were hoovered up. As Alex James, the bassist from Blur, says, ‘Although Britpop made us cringe and Cool Britannia made us want to self-harm, we were just so lucky to live in this tiny country with such a huge city in it. For the whole of my adult life, London has been the engine driving everything. At the beginning of the Nineties I arrived in London for my first term at Goldsmiths College. I’m getting out of my parents’ car with a guitar and Graham Coxon [also a member of Blur] is getting out of his parents’ car with a guitar and that was it – fasten your seat belt! It was, and still is, the place where anything can happen and dreams can come true. And they do, nightly.’
The Nineties were the launch pad for Generation X and we came out of it thinking we were pretty special. But not everything that happened turned out to be so good, and there were consequences that we are only just now beginning to realise. I’m 44, I surfed the media circus through my own career until, in 2002, I landed at the Sunday Times Style magazine where, as editor, I tracked the lifestyles of our generation for the next twelve years. Constantly on the lookout for a fresh trend, I was always baffled that it was our age group that continued to define the culture. I had grown up with The Face and Arena, two great channels to cool that did not survive the arrival of magazines like my own.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to find something unknown, or below the radar, as our generation was busy defining everything and selling it back to everyone. We quite categorically refused to make way for those coming up behind us, by giving them nothing to rebel against. The kiss of death, the goodbye to cool was if your mum thought it was good. Rock ’n’ roll, punk, gender bender, acid house and grunge were not liked by parents at all, which conferred on them instant cool. But as eternal Peter Pans, Generation X-ers have never found anything the kids have done distasteful. We share clothes now with our daughters, get breast jobs done together, even get matching tattoos. What’s the glamour in doing a line of cocaine if your dad does it? So the generation below have had to become dull, they have had no choice. They drink less, have less sex, go out less. The best they have come up with is ‘normcore’.
So are we, finally, in our forties, past it now? As Millennials and tech power us even faster into the future, are we going to get left behind? Many of us are embracing it, plenty of us feel paranoid about it, and some of us are being total dicks about it. One technology executive recently wrote: ‘Millennial is a nice stamp that marketers use, but it’s not necessarily about age. It’s more about looking at the things you have an affinity with, regardless of age. I’m 47, but I class myself as a Millennial because I have Millennial tendencies. I’m a lot more active on social media than my peers, for instance.’
God forbid we should be the sad dad trying to breakdance with the kids, but then how do we make sure our experience and the lessons we have learned meld productively with the passion, energy and excitement of the new youth? Millennials are not going to be able to pay us the sorts of pensions we are currently paying out to Boomers, so if that’s the case, how are we going to find the roles in society where we can work side by side and really benefit each other? How can we ensure we are not ‘bedblocking the best jobs’ (as one headline had it recently) but instead creating opportunities for all, enjoying what everyone has to offer and finding real, meaningful roles for ourselves, our parents and our youngers? What can we teach Millennials from our experiences about balancing work, life and family, job satisfaction, social cohesion, emotional stamina, physical fitness and social values?
And just as importantly, how are we going to cope with life from here on in? What’s it going to look like for us post menopause (Christ!) or when we qualify for our free bus pass? The world is in disruption – our liberalism is under attack on both sides of the Atlantic, the model for everything from fashion to news is breaking down, Christianity is in rapid decline, extremism is on the up, whole populations are on the move, happiness levels are at their lowest ever recorded – how will we emerge?
What I do know is that I will still be working to pay off my mortgage (at least I have one), with no pension to support me in my beach habit (it won’t be golf). Sometimes I put on a miniskirt and (a lot of) make-up and I can go to a club where no one can see very well and I can party all night – but then it takes me a week to recover. I know the hippest place in London to order a slider and I can name Beyoncé’s last single and the first one to leave One Direction (Zayn, my friends). I am on Snapchat (don’t use it) and still collect rare trainers, but the truth is I am also a knackered mum who gets her kicks from surfing the specials on Ocado and shouting at the neighbours to keep the noise down.
Occasionally I’ll book a weekend away, but I’ll look forward to it not for the sex, but the sleep. I still go to Ibiza but these days it’s the yoga teacher’s number I have on Favourites. I have Mary Beard and Madonna’s unauthorised biography on my bedside table. (Mary Beard is filed under Sheryl Sandberg. Madonna’s biog is well thumbed.) I have even begun to order soup for starters.
I live life in between young and old. I am neither Boomer nor Millennial. I am still an absolutely cynical witch who likes to do naughty things and wants to burn down the establishment – except, I am the establishment now. From government ministers to CEOs, the family GP to my kids’ headmistress – they are all my age. Once the rulebreakers, now we are the rulemakers. Like a zombie, I teach my kids to be good and recite their times tables and respect their teachers and work hard so they can go to university and get a good job. For what? – as I might have asked 25 years ago.
So are we just a bunch of directionless cynics who have now hit middle age and feel a bit sad and conformist? Do we know what we’re doing next, or are we not sure, as all the exciting stuff seems to have migrated to either side of us? How have we retained our rulebreaking and innovation, how have we changed the world and how are going to go on changing it? Did we free ourselves from the daily grind as we always hoped we would, or just create a new cage to live in? And do appearances – the threads, the ’do, the language, the who, the what and the where – really still matter?
Here’s my evidence. You decide.*
* Rule Number 1 of a features journalist: it takes three examples to make a trend. And once you’ve got a trend, you’ve got a feature. Features journalism is based entirely on subjectivity and three randomly encountered examples. For the purposes of this book I have interviewed slightly more than three people, but I am claiming equal subjectivity – mine, and theirs. Any time you get distracted, just turn to the Appendix where you can learn fun things about the handful of people I talked to. It’s nice, easy reading – what we features journalists would call a ‘sidebar’.