[James]

I came across the following article and thought it was interesting in the context of some of comments I see on here... about whether peoples' attitudes to things get more conservative as they get older. Or will the attitudes and views of the younger generation today eventually replace those of older people?

I would say more the former - people, in some ways, get more conservative with a small-c as they get older.

Once I was a young radical, with all the right opinions. Now I am Auntie Disgusting

Grace Dent

My generation thought they would never grow old. But staying abreast of memes cannot stop the march of time

Sat 19 Oct 2019 09.00 BST


My gut reaction to modern eyebrows, that look like Bert from Sesame Street, marks me out as very definitely decrepit. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

One day you’re kicking against the pricks, and the next day you are the prick. I hate to break this to all you young, taut-skinned shaggers with very earnest, watertight opinions, but there is a best-before date on thinking the right things. Or simply understanding what the hell is going on.

The first time I realised that generation X, my crowd, had fully became Uncle or Auntie Disgusting at family gatherings came as I was airing my very old-fashioned attitude to allergies. I believe allergies exist, yes. But, like many people in their mid-40s, I just don’t believe that quite so many people truly have them.

Here we have the generation gap writ large in one EpiPen-wielding sentence. “Oh, everyone ate nuts everywhere in the 70s,” I’ve heard myself say. “Did we die? No, we didn’t. And if you’re that allergic to nuts, would you not just stay at home?”


Clearly, I accept now, after much gasping and weeping from generation Y relatives, that my opinions are problematic and that I’m essentially gaslighting the sick (and, in some cases, dead), while proposing house arrest for those with inconvenient medical conditions. And all this, largely, because I do not care for those small bags of pretzels on aeroplanes, dispensed because the nuts are on lockdown.

Until recently, or it seems recent, I was the cool, young, radical thinker at any mixed-aged Dent family gathering, arriving armed with my dos and don’ts of what was fine to believe. I didn’t think this would ever stop. I suppose many generation Xers believed that access to the internet, which still feels like a spangly modern invention, would keep us all for ever young. The generation gap would never set in. We’d all stay high as kites on the new in-jokes and trending topics. We’d feast on this easy access to shifting slang and fresh ways of thinking.

But nature is a bitch. Memes, it turns out, cannot stop the march of time. For example, years of staring endlessly at Twitter or BuzzFeed cannot change my gut reaction to modern eyebrows, which marks me out as very definitely decrepit. You know: those thick, painted-on brows that all teenage girls love, that look like Bert from Sesame Street.

“Magic Marker brows, pfft, they’re all the rage,” I heard myself say recently, shaking my head at a passing 17-year-old. She had delicate fawn-like features, hair like spun gold and two big black stripes across her lower forehead like floating punctuation. And in that millisecond, I knew the generation gap between me and this girl was not a few tiptoes, but a vast, horrific chasm.

Just as my mother, who was in her late 40s in the 1980s, would sigh at my hair – dyed an ugly burgundy using a Silvikrin wash-in, wash-out toner sachet – and suggest I wasn’t “making the best of myself”, so, too, did I find myself in Topshop last week staring sadly at a mannequin dressed as a sort of dystopian Bavarian cowherder.

There should be someone in Hobbs, stationed by the shift frocks, dispensing cuddles to women who find themselves in this situation. “It’s OK, it’s just the natural order,” they might say. “Even Asos stops helping and just becomes your enemy, eventually.”

Of course, it is language, or our misuse of it, that is the most embarrassing thing. It’s not easy to be part of a Thatcher-fighting, Nelson Mandela-freeing generation who were always, always right – only to now find ourselves out of touch, forever misspeaking and on the verge of cancellation.

Suddenly, we find ourselves both supportive of the battle for trans recognition, but struggling with the grammar. I noted last month that the singer Sam Smith would from now on be using the pronouns they/them. I am happy for them, and I understand fully why they want that.

Still, the very next time I read a news story about Sam that informs me they attended a party, my eyes will spin around and around the paragraph, like Mr Bean reading a Spaghetti House menu, looking for the other person with whom they attended the party.

And that, my young friends, is the generation gap. Some people are cruel and thoughtless, some people are definitely phobic, others are just stymied by the march of time, left behind by words and ways of thinking. One thing I’m looking forward to about growing really incredibly ancient will be watching today’s young, cool, always correct generation Ys begin to sprout grey hairs and tie themselves in knots over their outdated language and attitudes – particularly as they will have lived their entire lives publicly, all of it permanently screengrabbed.

Particularly as they have always been so insistent that any error committed by the older generations should mean complete removal from public life. I shall enjoy this at home, behind my laptop, with a gin and tonic and a large bag of peanuts. It will be the only place you’ll be able to eat nuts, then, down to damn health and safety. Oh. There I go again.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...tie-disgusting