If you’ve ever read a Bret Easton Ellis novel – and it doesn’t have to be any one in particular – you’ll be aware of the characters he presents. From Clay in Less than Zero to Sean Bateman in The Rules of Attraction, Ellis’ protagonists are that of the culturally coherent, the emotionally vapid and the financially fiscal. They are young, liberal and experimental, fuelled by drugs, decadence and a suburbia-addled dissatisfaction. In 2016, this could be a neat, if not blanket, outline of today’s modern young adult.
Over the years, the lines that blurred ‘real life’ with ‘youthful abandon’ have curtailed in a quite gruesome fashion – the bacchanalian urges that are instilled in us insist that we hit Friday until it’s a bloated, bloodied corpse which won’t arise until the Saturday night sesh. However, as we get older, these hangovers are expanding – days, rather than hours, can be missed as today’s generation fight and grapple between a life on the ‘sesh’ and the world of 9-5 clock-punching.
But does our generation need to grow up? In a world of rigorous loan systems, expensive houses and stifling congestion, the notion of buying a car at 18 and buying a house in one’s twenties is now a bygone premise – stuffed into the 1990s with Blur bootlegs and Rick Witter’s stolen shoes. Today’s young adults can function without their own vehicle, and with renting no longer seen as ‘throwing money away’, this escape from the trappings and direct debits of adult life means that the sesh can be prolonged; we can be ‘on it’ until we decide to have a baby (and even then that probably won’t be fulfilled until we’re edging closer to 40).
The contrast between a teenager and, say, a 25-year-old is no longer as stark as it was several years ago. Chalk it up to quarter-life crises or a fear of settling down, but people in their twenties are equally as aghast and confused as those who are struggling to fill out their UCAS forms. If anything, it’s a greater fear – a 25-year-old has been beaten mentally into thinking that, by now, they should be dressing for comfort over style, cutting off their shoulder-length hair and murmuring with appreciation when Coldplay announce a new record. The sesh would be drug-free, except for maybe some MDMA at Green Man (a festival which, by now, you don’t enjoy as much as the one closer to home) or a cheeky blunt of Dutch hash at your friend’s housewarming party (and even then you’re more partial to the communal lager).
The idea of our generation – from the giddy 18-year-olds that are cutting shapes on an indie dancefloor, to the 23-year-olds who are fresh out of university and spending their office hours tracking down dealers – being able to grow up and accept adulthood is becoming more and more ludicrous. Our twenties have shifted – what we had to do in our twenties is now more than acceptable in our thirties. Kids, a house, a job – this is something to do when you get your first crow’s feet, not when you’re hitting 25. Twentysomethings now have a hall pass, a blank cheque for carnage, a middle-finger to our forefathers who saw such hedonism simply as a part of teenage tantrums.
Let’s hypothesise that, at age 30, a slew of us are semi-retired from the sesh – our jobs have become something we take pride in; we revile at the feeling of post-comedown depression and we’ve got a car that can get us to Shoreditch for those occasional weekend sojourns. How would we act? I’m not sure I can even comprehend being 30, being responsible and, even more scary, being responsible for someone else. When I was 16, I’d laugh and say: “Maybe I’ll have kids when I’m…25, 26”, now I’m getting nearer to those ages, I laugh and say: “Oh, at least 30. At least”. What’s to say when I’m 30, I’ll chuckle and retort: “I’ll be a father at 40 and not one day before”?
We’ll be liberal, we’ll be hungry and we’ll be disappointed. I already have such traits instilled in me from a generation that has ushered in incomprehensible wars against already-savaged countries, an anti-feminist flaunt that still threatens the credibility of our fairer sex and a recent Brexit vote that saw the older generation – and some younger ones, too – cackle at us from behind the sheath of their England flag. Will we project such disappointments onto our kids? In my Fiat 500 – moderate, affordable, enough to get me by – will I be adjusting my rear-view mirror as Swim Deep and Jaws blare out (“this was good music, kids. Believe me”, I’ll say, embarrassing them with my dad tastes)? Will I be ruing the country by reminding them that when I was younger, we had a chance to stay in the EU? Will I take them to the zoo and weep over the memory of Harambe?
It’s a scary premise that our generation, reared on transitory memes and broken dreams, could produce spawn of our own. It’s almost as if ‘Generation Z’ exists in a vacuum; as though when we turn 30 we’ll be cancelled like the gym membership we took out when we turned 18.
Words by Sam Lambeth