I appreciate that “My Generation” is a bit presumptuous about the age of the reader, but since I’m likely the only person who’ll ever read this, I’ll assume it’s accurate.
This one isn’t very funny. It isn’t plotted out, it’ll just be long, rambly, and probably unable to accurately put the point it tries to make across. But that’s ok. It’ll come out how it comes out.
The queen died. I’ve heard a few good jokes about it, but I don’t really want to make any myself. What I find odd is people’s reaction. Everyone posting photos of the queen, her birthday and her death day. All the same format too, like they couldn’t be arsed to open MS-paint and do it them self. The queen’s life is worth a post, but only as long as it’s someone else’s. To be fair, “this is worth it but only as long as it’s someone else’s” was the attitude of monarchs of old so why not adopt it now?
I find it so ridiculous. She’s a stranger, a seemingly friendly one, but still, it’s not exactly worth your “condolences”. Equally I hate the people trying to “well actually” the people who it affected. She died, people are mourning, both those who should be and those who shouldn’t. I’m sure you have complaints about the royals, but criticising the old bat isn’t going to change any of what you dislike.
And that’s what hit me. All these posts annoy me be cause what’ll it do? It’s not like Prince Charles is going to see your copy/paste Instagram story, and if he were to get around to your page to see if you’d offered a kind word, it wouldn’t be in the 24 hours that your story is available for.
Equally, complaining about the royal families isn’t going to change anything. The pompous, unhumble ones will remain as such, and it’s not like complaining on Twitter is going to change Prince Andrew’s list of previous holiday destinations.
We live in a world that most young people know is likely ending in their lifetime, or at least cross the line of no return. Most young people look at the 70 different ways the world will end and don’t know what to do, and so arrive in my position. Apathy. It isn’t an apathy because we genuinely don’t care, it’s trained. Learned. It’s because if we cared about anything, we’d have to care about more, and then we’d all be even more miserable.
I remember I was talking to a friend of mine, a marine biology student, and he was talking about his Uni trip to some coral reefs in Egypt. He told me about the fact that he didn’t see any sharks in the coral reef, and how worrying it’s that because Sharks are an important part of the ecosystem.
I was mid-way through playing Destiny 2 so I wasn’t really paying too much attention, and he said something I’m not likely to forget for a while. He said “that doesn’t worry you as much as it should”. He said it in an almost accusatory way, like he was really saying “why doesn’t that terrify you? What’s this if not a call to action, dick!?”.
But how can I be terrified? How can I be worried? Oh no, the sharks are dying. As are the forests, and the air is choking us, the Earth is having colder winters and hotter summers, everyone is flooding and simultaneously cooking, like a Bake-Off-failing pastry. I look outside my window and can hear the fell voice of Mary Berry on the wind telling me how burned it is and criticising the soggy bottom.
The sharks are going to die, maybe we’ve already crossed that line. Maybe there’s no going back to a functional Earth. What can I do about it? I’m no shark breeder, I can’t pump shark aphrodisiacs into the Red Sea my whole life, toss copies of shark porn books into the waters so the shark middle-age mums can look at there husbands with a new-found gleam in their eyes and a sudden horn on their mind.
I think that this perception is shared by many in my generation. My sister recently stopped being vegetarian and when I asked her why, she said (I’m paraphrasing) “because it’s not like it changed anything. May as well just eat what I want”. I told my friend about that, and he said that it’s called maturing.
Is that what maturing is? Losing the fire, the passion, the desire to make the world a better place because you know it won’t work?
We’ll grow up into a world that we couldn’t fix before we grew up, and 99% of us still won’t be able to change it because we don’t have a job that directly puts us in a place to do so.
You get the occasional Greta Thunberg who goes from regular Joe to super-activist overnight, but that was 4 years ago and it changed bugger all. Her school strikes gave a whole lot of students an excuse not to go to school and feel morally righteous while doing so, and if there’s one thing university has made me hate it’s morally righteous people. But since something like 60% of emissions are from the US and China, what’s a bunch of English children going to do to lower that?
So I look at the people who are genuinely upset at the death of the Queen and of course they mourn. My generation is one of people who have no control over things that are going to destroy them and have to find a way to just get on with things. We’re all screwed and yet we stay at each others throats over things like race, sex, a host of things, because we want something to change, we want to be the catalyst for the thing that fixes the world, and then we “mature”.
We realise there is no catalyst. We can’t fix the world, a bunch of indirect assassins, invisible and ever-present will stay in the shadows and get us eventually, and we grow apathetic. Until, something we can think directly affects us arrives, like the Queen’s death, a figure so many attached to being good, the concept of being British, and she’s gone now. A symbol of the unchanging march of time that is taking and never returning to the way it was.
So we weep. We mourn. Or we have a go at the Queen, “why are you crying, don’t you know she’s an unelected head of state? She needed to go anyway.” We do something that we think can make us feel some of that passion we lost when we grew up, or lament at that passion’s absence.
Or you end up like me. My trained apathy turned to real. The same happiness you always had on a good day, but dark days sending you into a stoic quiet where you sit and think peacefully about the inevitability of everything collapsing around you. A conflicting desire to have children and the knowledge you’d never be able to protect them from the world they’d inherit swirling around your head like a washing machine, the noise of it cancelling all else out.
My parents grew up in a world of the Cuban Missile crisis barely in their wingmirror, the Chernobyl disaster, and they assume that these disasters mean that “we’ve always been in positions like this and we’re going to forever. It doesn’t mean any of them will ever finish us off”.
Both of these examples are flashy road signs to the apocalypse, but now we’re on a dark dirt road toward its driveway. The road signs are familiar to the past ones but there’s a calm, knowing voice in the back of the car saying that it won’t be so flashy when the end really comes, and it’ll appear in the headlights like a real road sign. No loud bangs, no sudden noise, it’ll just become visible, get closer, and then we drive past.
No matter what area of study you go into at University you’re going to come out knowing another way the world will end in your lifetime. Be it sharks, AI, or a thousand creeping deaths that will rise from the ocean like Cthulhu, and there’s nothing you can do about them. There’s only so much room in your head, so try not to care, but you know that it’s coming.
When someone tells you about something that they see as a call to action they learned on their course, it’s just another thing to do nothing about. When something happens that you can pretend directly affects you, break, let it all out. The people complaining about it, getting angry at the things that the Queen said or did in the past will learn their trained apathy eventually.
Hopefully the world will reach a point where my generation has it in us to care about issues again, but given the way the world is, given what put us in this state to begin with, I personally don’t see that in the near future, and I’m right then the far future definitely wont bloody fix it.
We’re a broken generation of people angry about everything, and then there’s the rest of us. Defeated by time. Waiting for something to happen so we can just keep stoically marching along, but in something that will be more stable in its instability. We’d rather the hurricane hit us than wait any longer in the eye.
The only things I care strongly about now are films, music, the things that are directly affecting me now, in the moment. The future is a dark shadow, one that will grow and grow, but there’s little I can do, so I may as well chat shit about Thor: Love and Thunder.
I think if The Who were to write an accurate song about “My Generation” now, it’d be someone trying to play their instrument, failing the chords, but keeping going until their defeated voice asks if it can give up yet.