Like most Irish households back then, my parents had a sittingroom that they never used; the eating and telly-watching all happened in the kitchen. So, I used the sittingroom. Or more specifically, between the ages of 13 to 16, I migrated into it.
My mother would ask, suspiciously: what are you doing in here? As my teenage hormones demanded, I would always reply: nothing. Which made her even more suspicious.
What I was doing was what I appeared to be doing. In those days, I fancied myself as an artist. I would draw or paint and listen to music: which, until I got a pair of headphones, they would repeatedly ask me to turn down. The music appalled them. It was noise, performed by people who couldn’t sing.
It was a pretty natural part of growing up. I was moving away from my parents and becoming an individual; I was developing my own way of seeing the world: one which, I gradually came to realise, was radically different from that of my parents. I knew that the kind of life I was starting to imagine for myself would be completely alien to them.
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That continued after I finished school and moved to Dublin. When I was a bit more grown up and eventually had children of my own, we had more areas of common interest. But even then I was aware that there were some things I didn’t tell them.
None of this is meant to demonstrate that I had a terrible relationship with my parents. I don’t think I did. We were different sorts of people, and that’s not uncommon in families. More to the point, there was a large generational difference between us. When I left home I was running towards the future, towards the version of Ireland we live in now, more or less. Whenever I went to visit them, it felt like travelling back in time.
The term “generation gap” was actually coined for someone like me: Baby Boomers who rejected much of their parents’ mores. There was a distinct difference – though, of course, that’s a generalisation, as many of them ended up exactly like their parents.
Every young or youngish person likes to fancy that they are part of a tribe unique in history
That idea of differences between generations has not only persisted, it has blown up to be routinely depicted as some sort of scientific truth. In my family there are Millennials, members of Generation Z, while Daughter No 4 is Generation Alpha (2011-2025, if you didn’t know). The old Boomer says: I don’t see much difference between them. I don’t see much difference between them and me.
Of course, they have grown up in a different period of history. They are all digital natives, and the perils of climate change will have a profound effect on their future lives. But that doesn’t mean that people older than them are still using rotary phones or are oblivious to the fate of the planet. My experience of being, say, 25, will be different from theirs: but that gap is far less now than it was between me and my parents at that age. My kids – and I don’t think I’m unique in this – are quite open about their lives to me. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t be, but what they tell me is predicated on an assumption that it’s not foreign to my own experiences.
But that doesn’t prevent countless po-faced revelations about Millennials and Gen Z in the media: what they like and don’t like, how little or how much sex they have, how adaptable they are, how delicate they are, how politically committed they are, how politically uncommitted they are: as if they are extraterrestrials, freshly beamed down to our world.
Of course, every young or youngish person likes to fancy that they are part of a tribe unique in history. And there are many who like to promote that idea. Usually, they’re trying to sell you something.