2 weeks Ago By Heather Saul
I’m not exactly an “empath” – thank goodness. Of all the wet, weasel words which are bandied about in these language-laundering dog-days, this has to be one of the worst, up there with “ activist ” (swearing at strangers on the internet) and “community” (meeting like-minded people online who enjoy swearing at strangers on the internet). Being an empath is like having a nickname; if you apply it to yourself rather than have someone else gift you with it, you might want to check your pomposity levels.
Because the chances are you’re just a self-supplying stealth-narcissist – not “Lucky”. But something this week made me feel this exotic feeling of sorrow – “Ooo, stop it – won’t someone think of poor Gen Z! ” It was seeing the huge adverts for Jilly Cooper’s smash-hit TV show Rivals on the side of every other bus that did it, for the 80s was without doubt my favourite ever decade, when the old scolding of the past – the sexist, racist, homophobic scolding – was gone, but the new scolding yet to come. I’ve said it before; the natural emotion of the older generation towards the younger generation should be envy.
Like poor old Philip Larkin in “Annus Mirabilis” we should be thinking resentfully that they’re getting up to all sorts of stuff that never even occurred to us. But no one of my age (65) or Jilly Cooper’s age (87) wishes we were young now. We pity the young – and that says something awful about the times we live in.
Read Next Our puritanical youth face a lifetime of regret To be fair, the youngsters appear to pity themselves, too, steeped in their sobriety and anxiety , but they also appear to blame we “Boomers” – snorting the ozone layer and living in gold-plated bungalows – for the state they’re in. They can’t admit that the thing which has really ruined their lives is social media, because they’re in an abusive relationship with it, and there’s none so blind as those thus afflicted. TikTok loves me, really! X only hurts me because he cares.
I know that Insta keeps telling me I look fat – but if they won’t have me, who will? But the poor youngsters know it, in their scold-weary secret heart of hearts. Sixty per cent of Gen Z-ers recently picked the 80s as the decade they would have most liked to have lived through. It’s not just the aesthetic displayed in Stranger Things , the return of revamped 80s pop songs to the charts, the love of retro games or even the Woolworth’s Pick n’ Mix, VHS tapes, Sony Walkman cassette players, Rubik’s cubes, Blockbuster Video stores and making mix tapes listed in the poll as youngsters favourite things about the decade that cancelling forgot.
It’s the fact that you could pretty much say (and write – I penned a number one bestselling blockbuster of my own, Ambition , which rivalled Rivals in eye-watering sexual situations) what you liked back then – and the growing awareness that censuring and censoring can ruin everything from fun to civilisations. You never used to see people with purple hair on our side at free speech protests; now the rare colourful coiffures above a fresh young face is an increasingly encouraging sight. The more the merrier – literally.
When I was a teenager, the first poem I remember loving was one which I first read about in the autobiography of Joan Collins (91), a line from which she uses to sum up her life: “How sad and bad and mad it was – but then, how it was sweet!” Taken from Robert Browning’s “Confessions”, the words are those of an old man on his deathbed, intending to clear the slate, so to speak, with a visiting priest – but who ends up just remembering how wonderful the whole damn shebang was. Gen Z, if they don’t whole-heartedly embrace the 80s love of free speech as well as leg-warmers, will be reminded of their youth by the first half of the sentence – but not the second, I fear. Whereas thinking back to the end of my young years in the best decade ever – I was 30 when it closed – I can’t help thinking how lucky I was to have enjoyed the last hurrah of liberty hall.
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