Generation Z, aged between 15 and 30, have much to teach the world, but so do their preceding generations
It hit me as I was listening to a Radio 4 podcast which brought together Nick Robinson and David Willetts, Amol Rajan and Nadia Whittome. The Times had commissioned research into Generation Z, the tranche of Britons born between 1996 and 2011, which coincides exactly with the Labour government which helped America kill Saddam Hussein, allowed bankers to get involved with credit default swaps then rescued their industry because it was too big to fail.
Meanwhile, these kids, who are today approaching their 15th, 21st or 30th birthdays, have grown up with broadband and mobile internet, the answers to any question at the tips of their hyperactive fingers. Never has any generation of young person been more aware of the world around them, and never so prone to mis- and disinformation. There’s a reason the BBC hired Marianna Spring, a 1996 baby, to investigate this phenomenon, even as the Corporation loses audience and listener share to Netflix, TikTok and the podcast.
I started to think about the generations before Gen Z. I was born in 1988, which makes me akin to Amol Rajan (b. 1983): a Millennial, a tranche now in our late-thirties and mid-forties, perhaps looking at secondary schools for our kids and watching their parents enjoy the fruits of working hard for 50 years. Our parents are either Baby Boomers, who are children of the 1960s, or Gen X-ers, kids of the 1970s.
Respectively the Boomers, like my mum (b. 1961) and dad (b. 1958), grew up with three channels on TV and innovative pop and rock music on the BBC’s fab new pop station Radio 1; they also had to knock on their friends’ doors or ring the house phone to see if they were in, and had to go to a physical library to research their homework, which they wrote down on paper.
The Gen X-ers could at least use word processors while they watched Duran Duran and Michael Jackson music videos on MTV or, if their parents did not have cable TV, Channel 4’s groovy show The Tube, hosted by the dynamic Paula Yates. When it came to going out and having fun, while their Boomer parents headed to Northern Soul or punk clubs, the Gen X kids went to illegal raves in fields around the new M25 motorway (which, since it opened in 1986, is actually a Millennial).
Back to that discussion on Radio 4, which for all its youth-targeting is still a station most enjoyed by Boomers over 60. Labour MP Nadia Whittome, a former ‘Baby of the House’ who was elected at the age of 23 in 2019 to serve the Nottingham East constituency, was complaining about the lack of inheritance for her generation, who are on the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z. They were teenagers while the Cameron-Clegg Coalition cut back on public expenditure in a necessary but awful programme of austerity.
In 2016, there was a vote where not enough of the electorate wanted to stay within the European Union, some of whom believed the promises of sovereignty from that man in the blazer who led the UK Independence Party. In 2020, a lethal pandemic disrupted their education and forced them on to their tablets, laptops and phones even more than they were used to being on them. We now have a hyperconnected generation who are taught on tablets, which must have destroyed the photocopier market, and for whom science, technology, maths and engineering seem to outrank music, drama, and classical and foreign languages.
I gravitated towards the latter category, a humanities student who attacks questions by considering pros and cons, benefits and burdens, and tries to come down on one side of the fence. My history teacher Mr Brown, when he wasn’t delivering sermons off the top of his head that we had to capture in note form, would insist that we could not sit on the fence when arguing, for instance, if discovery was greater than development when it came to the history of medicine. I can add up and convert fractions into percentages, but I can’t use a logbook or do any form of engineering.
However, ask me to have a go at translating a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid into English and explain what’s going on, and I can still just about manage. My classical education focussed on the Golden Age of Athens – Socratic dialogues, military tactics and the dramatic innovation of a third lead character – and the Roman world of Caesars and love poetry. Catullus came up with the epigram ‘Odi et amo’ (I hate and I love), which GCSE Latin students appreciate when they aren’t looking up all the naughty words the Roman poet used.
My favourite epigram comes from my main man Marcus Tullius Cicero, about whom my classics professor at Edinburgh Dr Dominic Berry is a world expert; he literally wrote the book on Cicero, the lawyer and writer who came up with the epigram ‘O Tempora, O Mores’. This can be translated in thousands of ways: ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ is basically what it means, if we want to bring another modern poet into things.
And this neatly returns me to my argument: a 20-year-old today scrolls through TikTok the way I scrolled through Facebook or Myspace; or the way my 50-year-old cousin sat for hours watching afternoon TV; or the way my mum and dad tried to find some privacy with radio and pop music when they weren’t watching TV with their mum and dad. My grandparents, who were born between the 1920s and 1940s, came of age in a time before TV, when you had to go outside or, significantly for them, go to synagogue or youth clubs to socialise with other people.
This is what made me pause the Radio 4 discussion. My grandma Sandra is my only living grandparent, a spry and wily octogenarian who became a mum before she was 20. When she was growing up in leafy Chislehurst in Kent, she had to go up to Piccadilly to dance and mingle with men, who would mark her card and offer her a dance to the music of the day, some of which was being pioneered down the road in various Soho coffee houses and trad jazz clubs.
It was at the Pigalle that she met Malcolm, a 25-year-old from Manchester, and within a year they were married. It is more amazing that Sandra and Malcolm did not meet at the local synagogue, or because they had mutual friends; their daughter Nicky moved down from Hull to Stanmore for school, and she met Alex Brick, who was a few years her senior but was besotted by her charm, intelligence and beauty. They married, and now I’m writing this piece lamenting the decline of the Congregation Generation.
The Internet is an amazing leap in technology, but you cannot see, hear, smell, touch or taste someone you meet on there. We cannot recork the bottle or put the lid on the jar, but we can at least acknowledge the benefits of encountering someone in three dimensions. The Zennials, including my nephew Hugo (b. 2023) whose parents were on the same Philosophy course at UCL, have a chance to bring congregation back to their generation.