Generation A: the young Londoners helping to shape the world one GIF at a time

That’s ‘A’ for acceleration, achievement and attitude. Robert Colvile celebrates a new generation. 
Robert Colvile5 March 2016

Last year, at the age of 34, I got a job at BuzzFeed. To call it a culture shock was an understatement: this was a firm that not only catered to twenty-somethings, but was largely staffed by them. This was an office where branded hoodies outnumbered suits and ties, where the meeting rooms were named after types of biscuit. Much of the time, I felt more like an anthropologist than a line manager.

Gradually, I learned the ropes: I was shown how to make GIFs, where memes came from, what emoticons meant. I learned to distinguish between Snapchat and Tumblr, Yik Yak and WhatsApp. I picked up the names of the Goggleboxers, and that Drake was the most important musician on the planet.

The most obvious difference, however, was less tangible: it was the speed at which everyone moved. In my new book The Great Acceleration, I write about how technology is increasing the pace of life. But the way my colleagues bounced between social networks and chat windows, jokes and thoughts still left me dazzled. They didn’t even bother to talk to each other: questions and quips would be fired across the internal chat system, with waves of laughter as the latest link made its way round.

Yes, these kids were terrifying — terrifyingly funny, terrifyingly smart, terrifyingly talented and enthusiastic. They swam in the digital sea, while the rest of us just paddled. Yet when we talked about the topics we should cover, they always brought up big issues of fairness and social justice: what it was like to be homeless, or discriminated against, or a refugee.

Young London

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It’s not just my personal experience that suggests that the new generation of Londoners — those born between 1989 and 1996 — are shaping up to be something special. The more you look at the statistics — rather than listening to their parents’ grumbles — the more impressive they seem. They don’t drink as much. They don’t smoke. They work hard. They’re more tolerant. And they’re actually pretty happy.

That’s all the more striking when you consider the two big factors that have shaped their lives: technology and the economy. For example, it’s unsurprising that those in their early twenties should be interested in the wider world, because they haven’t had a choice. They came of age right as the world fell apart and know better than anyone how uncertain the future is.

It’s equally unsurprising that they should be comfortable with technology. ‘This is the first generation that’s grown up never knowing a world without the internet and social media,’ says the writer and former teacher Chloe Combi, who interviewed more than 2,000 people born between 1995 and 2001 for her book Generation Z. ‘I don’t think you can underestimate how influential that is.’

The result is a generation of born multitaskers. ‘It’s really fast-paced,’ agrees Charlotte, 25, from Beckenham. ‘It’s insane how people can be watching Netflix, talking on their phone, texting, messaging, all at the same time.’

This might be alarming — terrifying — to older generations, but is it so bad? There are reams of research showing that watching TV is unequivocally awful for you; at least when you’re tweeting, you’re actively engaged. Indeed, the data shows that what young people are mostly using the internet for when they’re shut up in their bedrooms is communicating with their friends and, in particular, making (and breaking) arrangements to meet up in person. As Howard Gardner and Katie Davis say in their book The App Generation, what they care about is the friendships, not the devices.

There’s another good thing about the internet: it helps young people learn to be themselves. The social psychologist Aleks Krotoski has written about how they use it to play with identity — to experiment with different personae, and ultimately to be more content with themselves. Inevitably, this slides into offline life: just as these young people want to define their own identities, they will also defend others’ right to do the same.

‘This is a generation that likes to define itself along traditional lines far less,’ says Combi. ‘It’s very post-patriarchal, very post- a lot of things.’ In the office, for example, twenty-somethings are diligent workers. But studies show they’re much less willing to put up with doing things the same old way, if they’re not getting anything out of it. Having watched their parents grind themselves into the ground, they’re in no mood to do the same. As The Economist says, surveys of young workers reveal ‘their demands to be treated meritocratically, their appetite for responsibility and their unwillingness to hang around if they do not get what they want’.

Of course, this focus on personal fulfilment and instant gratification has its downside, not least when it comes to communication. ‘If people aren’t texting you back, you feel very anxious and take it personally,’ says Charlotte. On social media, people feel they have to put forward perfect versions of themselves, even though they get intimidated when others do so. Sarah, a 25-year-old from Kentish Town, remembers being told by a friend that her Instagram wasn’t up to scratch: ‘You’re not portraying how you want to show yourself.’

In other words, it’s not enough to be funny or beautiful, you have to prove it — constantly. The result, according to experts, is a weird combination of self-obsession and fragility. Levels of narcissism have soared among young people, but so have stress and anxiety. While general levels of happiness are rising, a recent study of British twenty-somethings found that 86 per cent were worried about their lives; other research shows that these digital natives tend to have wider but shallower friendships.

So should we start worrying? Actually, many (older) commentators fret not about how broken the kids are, but how boring. Adolescents used to worship James Dean, the Sex Pistols, Eminem. Now, it’s all squeaky-clean YouTubers and nagging your parents about recycling.

Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, has described this generation as resembling Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous: sober, responsible and slightly dull. Young people are now far less likely to take drugs (with the exception of concentration aids such as Modafinil), or smoke, or drop out of school. ‘One of the strangest facts about Ab Fab Britain,’ Nelson writes, ‘is that pensioners spend more on booze than the under-30s.’

But if this generation are more serious, it’s because they didn’t have a choice. The scramble for opportunity starts at school and doesn’t let up. ‘Even when we started going through UCAS, it was extremely competitive,’ says Sarah. ‘For creative jobs, so many people now have degrees and you have to have so much experience on top of that — weeks and weeks of unpaid placements. You have to do anything that you can to get in there.’ And, as Combi points out, tuition fees mean that university is no longer a time for playing around, but a time to make yourself as marketable as possible so you can repay your debts — in a market where there’s more competition for work than ever.

Yet there is a paradox here. This generation are growing up more quickly. But once they hit their twenties, it becomes a case of hurry up and wait.

In 1997, houses in Hounslow cost 3.8 times the typical salary; in Islington it was 5.4. By 2014, those figures were 10.5 and 14.5 respectively. That means progress towards adulthood and indepen-dence, in the form of homes, marriage and children, is slower than ever.

‘When my parents were 21 and 23, they were already married, my mum was pregnant, and they’d just moved into a little maisonette that they’d bought,’ says Chris, a medical student from Leyton. ‘I’m 25, I’m nowhere near to being married, I’m nowhere near to owning my own house, I’m going to graduate with God knows how much debt. It’s overwhelming.’

For many, therefore, the twenties become a period of extended adolescence — especially if you’re back living with your parents, as Charlotte and Sarah are. ‘There’s kind of an infantilisation,’ says Charlotte. ‘I definitely feel like I’ve slipped back into teenage-y behaviours.’The housing crisis has social consequences, too. One reason young people are less keen on patriarchy and hierarchy, argues Combi, is that they are not living according to traditional structures. In fact, they will probably never have a home of their own, since rents and deposits are only affordable jointly.

‘Because everyone rents, it’s become the norm,’ says Chris. ‘Your goal shifts from saving for a deposit to hoping you can rent a nice place.’ This, alongside the endless possibilities of the internet, also changes the nature of romance. ‘I don’t think people are actively choosing to delay marriage,’ he adds. ‘But there’s more time to shop around, because everybody knows you’re not going to buy a house in your early twenties. That’s encouraged by Tinder’s design — you can always swipe right, because there’ll always be another option.’

Many of these trends apply nationwide, but they are felt with special force in London, both because of its turbo-charged property market and its status as a magnet for the most talented and ambitious not just from Britain, but from around the world.

‘London has a uniqueness,’ says Chris. ‘People will live here for rubbish pay, in horrible accom-modation, just so they can say, “I live in London, I do this rubbish job, but I hope that one day I’ll be doing something better.”

Fretting about the next generation is a habit with a very long pedigree. And there’s no doubt that the housing situation is dire. But YouGov polling still shows that people think your twenties is the best time to be in London — and nowhere is that sentiment felt more strongly than among 16- to 24-year-olds. The prospects for this generation may not be golden, but they’re shaping up to be more driven, more social, more entrepreneurial and, ultimately, more impressive than we ever were.

‘I do this Sunday radio show with a boy who started a radio station in his room at age 12, and he’s now 18 and pushing a million listeners,’ says Combi. ‘This generation are realising that they’re really going to have to make the world afresh and anew for themselves.’

We’re all familiar with the scare stories telling us that young people’s brains are being ruined by their obsession with the internet, even as their futures are being destroyed by those sky-high house prices. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, only a minority of adults believe that the young are as well-behaved or happy as they were themselves.

Yet if you ask young people themselves, a very different picture emerges. The numbers telling the Office for National Statistics that their lives are worthwhile, that their work is satisfying, that they are basically content have been rising year after year — to 82.9 per cent, 81.4 per cent and 73.4 respectively. And in London — the youngest city in the country — an overwhelming majority of those same happy, contented young people say that it’s a great place to find work, make money, make friends and fall in love.

In short, whether you call them Generation A, Generation rent or digital natives, Cameron’s children or Zuckerberg’s, the capital’s 18- to 25-year-olds are just as bright, just as sensible and just as stable as their elders — if not more so.

Robert Colvile's new book The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster is published by Bloomsbury in April

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