Róisín Ingle: The olds. The youngs. The middles. We’re all just muddling through

“The youngs.” That’s how novelist Zadie Smith describes younger people. Smith was once a fine example of “the youngs” of yore. Her first book White Teeth was published to great acclaim when she was just 24. Now she is 47. “The youngs!” she declared enthusiastically to a Vogue reporter last month during an interview in a London graveyard to promote her new novel, The Fraud. As a parent of teenage “youngs” and as a former young person myself back in the day, the expression stayed with me.

“The youngs” is a much better descriptor than that other more derogatory phrase “the youth of today”, which smacks of people giving out about The Beatles and their long hair which wasn’t even that long when you think about it now. Nobody has ever said “the youth of today” in a way that sounded like it was going to be followed up by a compliment. Ditto “kids these days”.

“The youngs” is different, though. It is hopeful and optimistic, uplifting even. Smith said she wouldn’t have written her last four novels without “the youngs”. She was talking about how without them, she’d have got most of her information and her sense of the world from a certain radio station and four newspapers, which is “not healthy”. “Sometimes I infuriated them,” she said of the young students she taught at New York University. “I’m sure some of them infuriated me, but it was always nutritious. That’s the best way I can put it.”

[ The Fraud by Zadie Smith: unlike anything you’ll read this year ]

It really is the best way to put it. Being an aul’ one around younger people can sometimes be infuriating but it is always nutritious and often hilarious. I can’t stop thinking about something someone told me recently about a young woman, an intern at a multinational company. This woman, one of “the youngs”, had checked her weather app that day and realised that it was going to rain. On this particular day, the young woman had forgotten to bring her umbrella to work. So she asked her much older manager if she could go home early, to avoid the anticipated downpour. Oh, “the youngs”!

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It’s a joy and a privilege to share my home with two of the teenage “youngs”. They are a far better class of teenager than I ever was. For starters, they like and accept themselves much more than I did when I was that age, which makes me happy. They may read fewer books than my teenage self but then they take a lot more showers. My Gen Z-ers go about the place smelling permanently of vanilla and marshmallows and unicorns. They have skincare routines.

We had jobs. No one’s ever had a job before. Then we had babies and it was as if no one had ever had a baby. And now we are having the menopause and you are going to hear about it

—  Zadie Smith on self-absorbed Gen X-ers

Not being the patient type and being too quick to react, I am finding this teenage parenting era challenging. But it’s also quite entertaining to have a front seat while the teenage “youngs” discover how funny, infuriating and unpredictable other people can be. One of the teenagers is brilliant at navigating bus routes, heading off all over the city to her various extracurricular activities and assignations. She was on the bus the other day and came home appalled by the behaviour of one of her fellow passengers. “Can you believe this?” she asked, up to high doh. “The bus was empty, there were seats all around me, but this woman got on and decided to sit down beside me. She stood there waiting while I moved my bag off the seat so she could sit down. What is wrong with people?” Ah, “the youngs”. They have so much to discover about the relentless wrongness of humans.

I haven’t read The Fraud yet but I’ve read every other interview Zadie Smith has done because she’s one of those people with endlessly interesting perspectives. In another interview she spoke less often about “the youngs” and focused more on us Generation X-ers, the middles. She said that we are “incredibly self-involved” and she has a point when you think of the amount of navel-gazing we’ve done about being human in many, many non-fiction books and longform articles over recent years.

“We had jobs. No one’s ever had a job before,” Smith said. “Then we had babies and it was as if no one had ever had a baby. And now we are having the menopause and you are going to hear about it. There’s something very wrong with a generation that can’t stop thinking that we’re the first people in the world to ever experience anything.”

Ah, the middles! Oh, the youngs! “I feel old,” I texted a friend recently when I couldn’t quite muster up enough outrage for the latest thing “the youngs” had got themselves in a tizzy about. “That’s as it should be,” my friend texted back. “They are creating a new world, as we did. Leave them at it.”

It all made me think about how “the olds”, “the youngs” and “the middles”, the whole lot of us, are just muddling through. We’re all as nutritious and infuriating and funny as each other. That’s the biggest common denominator, I think. Like that young intern who forgot her umbrella. Her much older manager did not laugh in her face when she requested to leave work so as to miss the rain, which is what I thought for sure would happen. The manager let the young woman go home early. I’ve been thinking about this ever since.