Jilted is a book written by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik. Who are talking about the uncertain and opportunity-poor lives of their generation. Well, almost. Messers Howker and Malik are 29 and work for the Sunday Times, Prospect and the Spectator - which pretty much puts them in the cosmopolitan elite of British journalists. Turns out they're married as well, so you know they aren't sofa-surfing. The book is part calling-card - they want political careers - and part self-congratulation - they don't live like that anymore. But I don't want to discuss them. I want to talk about what they don't understand.
Their complaint is that people born after 1979 - the Jilted Generation - are having an unjustly hard time setting up an adult life. They start with significant debts from paying for a university education that actually isn't worth that much, will barely inherit anything from their parents - whose longevity will use up most of the estate - and will never be able to retire as their pensions will be worthless. Actually, that describes much of my life: the only reason I have a house is that I bought a run-down property in a part of Middlesex most famous for its Young Offenders prison. A pleasant property in Richmond or Chelsea always has been utterly beyond my means. Which doesn't mean that the Jilted Generation should suck it up because I did. I can't afford to buy my house now - not on the same earnings multiple I bought it. I have no idea how young people are supposed to make the life my parents made. Maybe the answer is that you're not supposed to make that kind of life: you're supposed to make other kinds.
Howker and Malik have a conception that there is One True Way for an adult life. It means living in a decent house, working for a sustained period of time in an industry or profession in which one can build a reputation and without immanent fear of redundancy, and of course, marriage and children. It means playing a role in a community - based on where they live, or around children's schools, good causes or some professional activity. It means some kind of political engagement, if only at a local level. They get ideas like this from Richard Sennett, who was doubtless a good man, but whose ideas are pure fantasy for all their grave and sober expression. Which is also where they get the idea that there is only One True Adult Life, and anyone who isn't living it is deficient in moral fibre, especially the kind needed to stand long periods of mediocrity and generalised ennui. It's an idea which had its heyday when the largest employer was the State, which owned and operated the railways, the telephones and post office, the electricity, gas and water industries, the coal mines, the roads, some dockyards and steel works, a chunk of the car industry, was one of the largest customers for house building and office construction, as well, of course as running the Police, schools, hospitals, Army, Navy and Air Force and all the other functions of local and national government. You think the public sector is large now - in the 1950's it was gigantic. All over the world it was gigantic. And it could support the kind of life that Howker and Malik and Sennett regard as the One True Life.
Once upon a 1950's their idea of the One True Life was an adult life. That is, parenthood and adulthood went together, partly because the prevailing ideas of child-raising were consistent with both states. When those ideas changed, adulthood and parenthood were free to diverge and did. My generation looked at its parents and asked: "where's the upside in this whole 'being an adult' thing?" Adults didn't seem to be having much fun and they didn't seem to have many privileges that were worth the wait. As an adult with grey-haired gravitas, I have certain advantages over the young people I work alongside, but only because I have spent my life developing and acquiring a culture, knowledge, an understanding of the human condition and workplace politics, and many years ago, a whole new body by weight-training. Parenting seems to me to arrest the parents' development at the age they had their first child and turn many of them into controlling risk-avoiders who crave stability, rather than independent, risk-taking adults who can cope with ambiguity and change. In the 2010's, parents need to live in Disneyland, while adults want to live in Soho. This is because the prevailing ideas of child-raising force parents to behave in a non-adult manner: for many parents, children are valuable possessions rather than apprentice people. As valuable possessions, nothing must be done that threatens their value, or, of course, brings the sniffer dogs of child services into their lives. Hence the helicopter parents, the traffic-jammed suburban streets during school terms, and the overweight computer-gamers of popular mythology. And, of course, as valued possessions, everything must be done to show them off, hence the risible sight of parents jogging with their prams, the yowling babies in cafes and restaurants, crying children dragged round the Saturday shops in prams and yelling toddlers keeping hundreds of people in an airplane cabins awake for an entire long-haul flight.
The sheer monetary cost of the old idea of adulthood, plus the use of effective contraception, the changing role of women in the workforce, and the far greater opportunities for finding interest in work, culture, travel and sports, mean that many people simply don't want, and now don't need, to fake it anymore. The 1950's were a pretty dull time, and pace the Sennetts of this world, there is no virtue in the fact or toleration of dullness. Whatever synonyms they use for it.
In the next part, I'm going to talk about why the One True Adult Life is neither One, nor True, nor Adult and certainly not a Life
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