We are superheroes compared to our young adult children

Getting older is meant to be limiting. You’re meant to feel like you’ve taken your foot off the accelerator a bit, while the younger generation speed past you in the fast lane, one finger on the wheel, one arm around the passenger, slurping from a bottle of vodka. 

That’s the way it’s always been and yet none of this is our experience. We’re moderating our habits, avoiding curries at night, bending our knees when we pick up heavy objects and so forth – but the young adults are not playing their part. The drinking, the risk-taking, the lust for parties and clubs and each other that used to define being young but old enough to vote, all of it’s in decline. And to cap it all, according to new stats, Gen Z are no longer interested in learning to drive. 

Forty years ago, passing your driving test was a crucial rite of passage. You had to drive to prove you were no longer a child and in order not to be dependent on adults. Driving was the gateway to adulthood and adult freedoms; you couldn’t wait to get your test because it meant you were on your way. To this day, on the rare occasions I find myself in the backseat of a car being given a lift, I get flashbacks to that awkward age when you relied on your parents to drive you everywhere (“You’ve never mentioned a Sally From School before…”) but bitterly resented them flogging miles across the country in the dead of night. “I can’t wait to get my test” was the great cry of our youth – now Gen Z don’t see the point. 

Anyway. It’s not just the driving, is it? We are superheroes compared to our young adult children in many respects. We can drive! All of us. And we can use a stick shift, at a push we might be able to change a tyre, but that’s just one example of something we can do that they can’t. 

Light a fire 

(without using a whole box of firelighters). We can chop kindling if necessary. We can recite random passages (usually hymns we sang in assembly). We can find our way around without satnav, memorise routes and read an actual map. We can use a library and might even enjoy going to a library, and we can write a letter, address an envelope and put a stamp on it. YAs can write but they may only have addressed an envelope once in their lives and they don’t know where the stamp goes (test this if in doubt).

Make a white sauce 

They don’t want white sauce, they want a poke bowl or a salad featuring quinoa and harissa. And we can make marmalade, and once did, but YAs don’t care about marmalade, let alone making it. Try and interest them in homemade sloe gin and you’ll be wasting your time on account of the unhygienic methods involved and also because they’re not excited about alcohol. Can they make a decent martini? No. If there’s a chicken carcass lying about we will automatically make soup out of it, whereas most young people think our generation’s habit of repurposing leftovers is slightly disgusting and a hangover from postwar rationing, caught from our parents. They’ll throw away things that would make you gasp: a perfectly good sausage, for example. A slightly bruised apple. 

Iron 

And polish shoes as well as silver, and wood and brass, none of which they have any use for. You may remember Kiwi polish ceased trading in the UK last year because the YAs can’t. In theory we can sew: we can put on a button, put up a hem, darn an elbow and sew the stuffing in the turkey. They can’t. If they were in a plane crash in the Andes they’d be in trouble is all we’re saying. And if the satellites go down one day, God help them.