The Gen Zer had an epiphany after three shifts at the pub: “It’s not us who suck; it’s you Gen Xers.” Delighted that my mentoring of him to get a part-time job had resulted in such astute political analysis, I asked him to continue.
“There are grown men who ask for their vegetables not to touch their meat… who wear grey hoodies for lunch in the pub with their elderly parents who are always turned out smart, the old men always wear ties… and then there are these dud parents who sit on their phones letting their children ignore everyone on their rubber iPads. Honestly, I can tell now just by looking at someone if they’re gluten free. What a bunch of losers.” (Or words to that effect.)
I’d been encouraging this particular Gen Zer out of what I lazily assumed was a typical Gen Z funk. I tutted along with everyone else at the recent survey that said only 11% of them could be bothered to fight for their country. But his insights made me fully appreciate that it is not Gen Z at fault, but we feeble folk who have raised them.
He had not finished: “And now I see these useless grown Gen Xers everywhere… I saw one the other day wearing one of those fluorescent safety dog walking harness things in broad daylight. What was he frightened of? No wonder you lot went along with all that trans bullshit, you’d all lost your bottle.” (Or words to that effect.)
Of course he’s right. Kemi said as much on her recent Triggernometry podcast appearance. She explained how a whole generation of politicians had lost their courage, and as a result a whole lot of nonsense engulfed our country. I think it began with Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband in 2014 when they looked entirely ashamed of themselves in those dreary beige ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirts. Pathetic, was the general muttered response.
“I wonder where they are now, those t-shirts?” asks my husband. He’s loading the dishwasher wearing a particularly threadbare ‘Farmers’ Weekly’ t-shirt from the early 2000s. “Do you think they’ve still got them in the bottom drawer and wear them when they’re slopping around on a Sunday night? Or maybe their wives have nicked them for pyjamas…”
This spirit of hopeless surrender to whatever was the popular cause of the time trickled down from the dispiriting heights of the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, to ordinary school teachers, corporate bods and cowed folk trying to earn a living. They all donned figurative t-shirts of submission: “Yes,” they agreed wearily, living in fear of HR or their teenage daughters, “I’ll teach the gender stuff from Mermaids in life skills… I’m happy to head up the ‘Bring Your Whole Self to Work Week’… I’ll attend the unconscious bias training course… Yes, I’ll get myself tested for adult ADHD.” The Gen Zer had accurately identified these types in the pub as they continue to shuffle around defeated and fearful, unable to dress or eat properly.
The vast majority of Generation X did not believe that anyone could change sex, that the world is ‘burning’, that bad mental health is something worth exploring as a lifestyle option, that they’re racist, that masculinity is toxic, and so on. And yet we could not find the courage to stand up to those who did and, as a result, we did a grave injustice to our undeserving children – and ourselves. In our capitulation to this nonsense, we Gen Xers are certainly responsible for significant damage to the millennials and a significant portion of Gen Zers. It is truly appalling that almost an estimated 13.2% (946,000) of all people aged 16 to 24 years in the UK were not in education, employment or training (NEET) in July to September 2024.
However, the vast majority of Gen Zers have somehow survived the education system and culture that inflicted these reductive and diminishing ideologies on them. The vast majority of Gen Zers are in work or studying. The majority of Gen Zers I know and work with are thriving. The boys study furiously but also do weights, martial arts, gardening, fishing and other wholesome activities, the girls also study furiously, go to the gym, dance, volunteer. Both sexes work part-time when they can and are socialising: the sauna scene in London is particularly encouraging. They are eating meat and investigating emigrating to Poland.
Whichever party can apologise and appeal to these promising young people is the one that will win the next election.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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Not a fan of all this Gen stuff. Common sense is (and isn’t) distributed across the ages. Meetiings of minds can (and can’t) span multi-decades.
Political deficit of common sense getting worse. Nothing formulated by Generation Micro-Managerial Leadership ever survives contact with reality. Hence the mess called the NHS.
Had infested the corporate world too, when I dropped through the trapdoor some time ago. Told years later that “Culture Jam” week died the usual silent death. Initiatives, Initiatives, Initiatives.
Non-essential tasks the bane of the working world. Better not get myself re-started on OPAL Timecards…
Agree. It’s just another way of dividing people into arbitrary groups, telling them that they must be a certain way because they were born between a particular set of dates, and encouraging them to blame another group born between a different set of dates for just about anything that’s gone wrong.
It never seems to occur to them either that if they had been born at a different time with different experiences and influences then they might be different too, for better or worse.
Totally agree. Let’s stay united against the common enemy.
Generation MGBGT?
I’m in no mood to ‘unite’ with someone who wants to blame me for something I’m as powerless to change as he is, just because I’m a few decades older than him. I may be only marginally younger than Nick Clegg (5 years) and Ed Miliband (3 years) but I’m not responsible for that and don’t share anything with them by virtue of wrong-birth.
I was referring to people of all generations who broadly share our views here on freedom, for want of a better term. I know some younger people who feel that their opportunities are less good than say people of my generation. I don’t know whether they are right or not, but they don’t “blame” me or anyone else necessarily, it’s just an observation.
I just don’t think talking about “generations” and trying to categorise people in that way is very helpful or relevant. I guess most of the people I know who share my mindset are not that young, but that’s because I am an old git and know mainly older people.
I agree with that. As far as I know, this generationing was invented by the counterculture people in the second half of the last century and I think it’s a serious mistake, especially considering how it works. By now, the so-called millenials have started to become the enemy and in ten years time, so-called generation Z will share the same fate. It’s basically for as long as they’re young enough to not have much of a clue about life in the real world by virtue of lack of experiences, they’re the working matter and as soon as they’ve started to learn about stuff, it’s “To the scrapheap!” Ad infinitum. No transfer of knowledge from older to younger ‘generations’ ever supposed to occur.
Climate change was already the scare story of the day when I was in my early twenties but people who nowadays fall for that are not supposed to know about this. OTOH, it’s impossible to get people to think who prefer reshuffling the prejudices which have been drilled into them instead. These can maybe some day (wildly optimistic mode) be deprogrammed and also-freed but they’re not going to be useful before this has happened.
I really thought that the combined horror and absurdity of “covid” would wake more people up. I still can’t quite fathom that it happened and that more people much earlier on didn’t smell a rat. It does seem to me to have started something though. Whether it comes to anything or whether I live to see it if it does, I really don’t know.
So true. What doesn’t seem so obvious is how few people it takes to spoil or disrupt something.
Think of a meeting, a group activity of any kind. In a small to medium sized group of people, it literally only takes one or two people to ruin something for everyone else. And that principle can be extrapolated to bigger groups and society at large.
And we also see things in those terms. This Gen Zer saw a Gen Xer walking around in a high viz vest and so the whole of GenX is pathetic and bottled it. People see a few Gen Z snowflakes getting offended about everything and that’s the whole generation lost for ever.
It is both true that when we observe these things we quickly extrapolate to the entire group very unfairly, obviously, but it’s also true that a few trans looneys colluding with a few politicians and bureaucrats is all it takes to disrupt our entire society.
I don’t know where exactly that leaves me other than agreeing with the author that there is a lot of value in standing firm. But not just GenX. Everyone. Or more accurately, the vast majority against the disruptive few.
Agreed. Never has so much been bespoilt for so many by so relatively few.
Might not take that much of a push to bring down Les Baricades mistérieuses…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeJClooBYqY
“…Concert donné à la Villa d’Este, Cernobbio, Lac de Côme, Italie (Oct. 2010).”
Lovely piano piece! Thank you, made my morning.
Rather than directly linked to date of birth, maybe it has some slight correlation to the quality of two family parenting, just asking?
Yes, that’s one of the taboo subjects in woke circles.
Whist there is a clear, obvious, common-sense link between the collapse of the family of the messed-up, depressed, anxious mental state of the younger generations or knife crime and gang violence, nobody will touch the subject with a barge pole.
Instead you’ll just hear the platitudes… what a fantastic job single parents do, etc.
Interestingly enough, one of my work colleagues lived in the US at various times.
He says the first sign of things going downhill in cities was the emergence of fatherless (mostly but not exclusively black) families, with mothers surrounded by unruly children.
While those kids were only 5 or 10 years old, they were already out of control but not yet dangerous. Ten years later when he went back to the same place, it had effectively become a no-go area.
Completely agree, Joanna. I was reflecting on the same statistic and came to the same conclusion as your Gen Zer. We, the older generations who should have been conserving the integrity and stability of our country and its institutions for future generations, have failed them through apathy and cowardice.
I forget who, but someone remarked that each generation is invaded by Barbarians – its children.
Morals, values, manners, etc are not passed in they must be taught. We as a society stopped doing that after the 1960s and let the dippy, hippy, drugs not war, anything goes, don’t work, don’t get married, don’t care generation take over.
I think the under 25s are getting their instruction from the few sane people who have taken to the Internet to pass on those morals and values that became “old fashioned”.
They are seeing how the older generations have sold them out.
In the UK at least, Gen X have underperformed their reputation (garnered in the US), as cynical pragmatists with no time for b/s.
Boris is an old Gen-Xer; Kemi a young Gen-Xer (like myself). Almost all of the lockdown cabinet were Gen-X.
In terms of wokery and general craziness, the Millenials have it worst I reckon. I don’t know about Gen Z, but my much younger (than me) nieces seem to have their heads screwed on the right way and are doing proper jobs.
In theory, the answer to that is “Someone please tell the generation generation guys that 1965 is long over, the remains of The Who meanwhile play charity performances for the Teenage Cancer Trust and all of this stuff is seriously stale.”
However, to people who have been (quite voluntarily) brainwashed into this eternal war of the generations (until revolution cometh!), it’s just “F.O., w***er!”
The biggest division is between those who grew up with the internet and mobile phones, and those who did not. How you were affected by the lockdowns and the impact of mass immigration will also be important.
The first iPhone was launched in 2007. Tinder was created in 2012. Handing kids smartphones is fairly recent I think, say from 2020
So if you entered the workforce in 2020, which means you were born around 2000, then:
You have to compete with all the recent arrivals (the ‘Boriswave’ of immigration) for work.
You’d also be working from home for the first couple of years due to the lockdowns.
Dating is mostly via apps (if it happens at all), which for the top 20% of men is great, but not so good for anybody else.
An entry level flat/house in London will be £500K, which means an annual interest rate of about £25K – almost impossible to pay even with a very good (say £40K) graduate starting salary, after tax has been deducted.
To be frank, I’m very grateful I am not Gen Z.
I’ve been online since about 1997 and intermittently before that time. An iPhone is just a portable general-purpose computer. It’s a pretty serious feat of human engineering, considering how large and technically feeble computers used to be only 25 years before it became a product but nothing which hasn’t principally existed since the late 1970s when graphical user interfaces were invented at Xerox. I’ve occasionally referred to smartphones as gameboys for girls in the past because of this.
Sorry to be pedantic but it is diets/foods that are gluten free, people are gluten intolerant.
It is truly appalling that almost an estimated 13.2% (946,000) of all people aged 16 to 24 years in the UK were not in education, employment or training (NEET) in July to September 2024.
That wouldn’t simply be because it’s summer hols for schools and universities?
“However, the vast majority of Gen Zers have somehow survived the education system and culture that inflicted these reductive and diminishing ideologies on them. “
Because they don’t get their information and brainwashing from the BBC and rest of the Estsblishment propaganda outlets, instead they scan myriad sources on the Internet and listen to podcasts which offer variety of commentators, opinions, debate, comments, challenges, etc.
They will have found that what they are being told by the Establishment and in schools is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – mostly a pack of lies.
This is why the government slimeballs are so desperate to control the Internet and brand everyone who challenges them Far Right, and contradictory information as mis/disinformation and… the horror!… a threat to democracy.
Exactly this. I often chat to the “young ‘uns” in the pub, and they are much more “based” than one would expect if they were judged purely by their age.
Misuse of the media and social media to push spurious / profiteering ideals is the key. The range, reach and power of communications technology has been too great to be ignored by wealthy crooks with spurious / criminal agendas. MSM, including the anything but impartial BBC, is a truly foetid beast.
I haven’t a clue what Gen X or Gen Z are. Neither do I care. But then, I have fought for my country…
When will people in this country place the blame for the state of the nation directly where it belongs…..your horribly incompetent government. I have lived here for 27 yrs and witnessed the UK’s demise. But now, to blame it on your young people or any citizen is madness. An incompetent string of governments with over 600 MPs is hardly the easy to run a “smart” government. Just the opposite. An unaccountable, derelict, leadership. Look where it has taken you britsin. Hold your government responsible and stop blaming everyone else for the failure the Uk is.
““There are grown men who ask for their vegetables not to touch their meat… who wear grey hoodies for lunch in the pub with their elderly parents who are always turned out smart, the old men always wear ties… and then there are these dud parents who sit on their phones letting their children ignore everyone on their rubber iPads. Honestly, I can tell now just by looking at someone if they’re gluten free. What a bunch of losers.” (Or words to that effect.)”
That’s no way to talk about Dale Vince…
Didn’t bother reading as I have no idea what/who Gen X, Y, Z are!