UP
Boden
Strangely good these days
Zoopla and Rightmove
Better than sex
Food
OBSESSED. When your buckwheat risotto says more about you than your vintage Prada
Witness the fitness
The Iron Man entry form is the new trophy wife; sleeveless dresses the status symbol of acceptable upper-arm tone
Paaarty!
The skills are honed
Our kids
A confetti canon of love on permanent explosion
Home economics
What you used to spend on shoes, you now spend on mid-century modern furniture
Wise, but not smug
Yep – we know stuff now. But we still want to know more
Cool
Still like it. Love it actually
DOWN
Hangovers
Crucifying. And getting worse
Luxury labels
So new money. Unless it’s Gucci. Or Balenciaga. Do keep up
Having it all
Overrated
Smartphones
Remember that time when we used to go places with people and do things? Walk along the street without bumping into people? No, me neither
Botox denial
Don’t get left behind, pruneface
God
Who?
Parenting
Torturous, difficult, exhausting, boring, life-limiting, endless
Money
Suddenly, irritatingly, an issue
Weight
Hmm. Getting a little harder to shift …
Music
Rubbish now. How are you meant to find anything good in this sea of overchoice? No, I do not want another fricking app
Time
Just gone
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