What will our generation be remembered for? Every generation has a thing. The Pre War Generation had, well, the war and a very stoic attitude as a result of it. Baby Boomers had the sexual revolution, free love and Woodstock; they lived through the Cold War and saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. Generation X, too young to have fought in a war but old enough to benefit from a free education, they had the boom of the 1980s, they were yuppies and post-industrial ravers enjoying New Order, Underworld and The Stone Roses.
If this millennial generation are going to be remembered for our music, then we’ll be remembered for being pretty boring. In 2011 the Guardian’s Peter Robinson hailed the arrival of a new era in British music: he called it ‘The New Boring, a ballad-friendly tedial wave destroying everything in its path.’Robinson saw the popularity of the likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran as proof that a somnambulant tsunami had swept over mainstream pop culture. Adele, he wrote, ‘must, sadly, accept and wear the Queen Of Boring Crown. It is a crown made of SOLID BEIGE.’ The generation before us had raucous BritPop, we’ve got manicured and manufactured pop.
Ours is not a cohort defined by lads and ladettes having it large, drinking larger and getting into fights with one another. If our generation will be remembered for our past times then perhaps we will be characterised by the rise of wellness, clean eating and athleisure. Middle class millennial life is the space where exercise and hanging out with mates intersect, where green juice and vodka come together, where seemingly oxymoronic concepts like almond milk thrive.
Youth culture once calcified around the image of a young women sitting on a bench, her ankles weak over her stilettoes, her head in her hands as she dealt with the effects of too many Apple Sourz. But the ‘Booze Britain’ everyone was so worried about is, apparently, no more. In 2013, the average person over 15 consumed 9.4 litres of alcohol. That’s 19 per cent less than 2004. According to the most recent research from NatCen drug use is also down, as is smoking.
Nightclubs, the hub of youth culture British youth culture from Disco to Punk, New Wave to Drum and Bass, are also closing. In 2005 the UK had 3,144 clubs. In 2015 there were only 1,733. The number of places where you can lose, find and lose yourself again is dwindling, meanwhile Netflix subscriptions and home delivery food services seem to be multiplying.
The films about this generation are also boring. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good but they contain none of the drama, high jinx or adventuring that characterises films about other eras. Take Greta Gerwig and Noa Baumbach’s Frances Ha or more recent film Mistress America. The most contentious thing that happens in Frances Ha is when her best friend gets engaged to a guy she doesn’t like because he’s ‘too corporate’, in Mistress America getting too drunk on red wine (probably organic) at a dinner party is the film’s depiction of youthful rebellion. Compare that to films of eras gone by: Trainspotting or *Cruel Intentions. *
Sex, traditionally young people’s favourite past time, one they loved so much that entire curriculums were devised to stop them from doing it, has also been put on the endangered list. Millennials are having less sex than our parents did at our age. One study found that almost half of twentysomethings have not had sex at all in the last year. What happened to sex? Did we replace it with Pokémon Go? Are we all too busy working multiple jobs to pay the rent? With potential sexual partners being, quite literally at our finger tips thanks to technical innovations like Tinder, you’d think we’d be getting off with one another more than ever. Did we get bored of sex or are we too boring to do it?
We have been called the Ab Fab Generation, the real life Saffies to our boozing, smoking, splif-wielding parents. Depressing as it is to admit this: I too have become boring. I stay in on Friday nights, I have replaced booze binges with camomile tea and Stranger Things, all-nighters with early morning gardening sessions (not that I technically have a garden. I have potted plants), dancing in clubs to music with no words to live streamlining DJs on the Internet and Sunday pub sessions with long walks which I monitor via the health app on my iPhone. My mother goes out more than I do.
Why? In part the explanation is a financial one. My rent demands the majority of my income, everything else feels like an extravagance. Having fun feels wasteful. Perhaps this is understandable, regardless of whether it’s anti-Brexit spin or not the future had never looked less bright for the under 35s than it does now.Not a day goes by without an article about how we're being completely screwed over economically.
However, that’s only part of the story. The second half of this incredibly boring tale is all about fatigue. All day we are bombarded by culture, flashing images on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Do this, watch that, go there, eat that, did you hear it? Who can keep up. Rather than feeling the FOMO that is supposedly plaguing millennials I find myself feeling like I’m being bombarded, checking my phone is like being forced to stand in the centre of Times Square for hours on end. The last thing I want to do on a Friday night after spending the week staring at multiple screens is stand in a dark club, where flashing lights flood my retina and bass rattles through my brain. It’s exhausting, whereas staying in is restorative.
Rachel*, 27, agrees. 'Increasingly I find myself thinking at social gatherings how much I'd rather be at home watching TV, on my own. I left my best friend's birthday last Friday to go home and read a book. I didn't even like the book that much, it wasn't a very good book.’ The book may not have lived up to expectations but, nonetheless, she says ‘lying in bed with the book, I felt fucking incredible. Like Jo from Little Women or Rory Gilmore before she dropped out of Yale. Like a mixture of zen and really fucking smug about all the money I wasn't spending and all the drugs I wasn't snorting and all the conversations I didn't have to force myself to have. It was awesome.’
It seems that staying really has become the new going out. Sarah, 29, is in a book club, ‘I actually founded it’ she tells me. ‘I think we all value investing in ourselves today – having hobbies and being healthy. Plus, we are all knackered. All of my friends work a lot, I also think we just feel less inspired by going out – there’s nothing new happening, not that I know of anyway.’ She adds that she mainly fills her time with exercise, reading, Netflix, dinner parties and, of course, the book club. She does get out and get on it sometimes but it’s rare, ‘I prefer nights out if they are rare and I guess if I feel like I deserve them. I would rather have one really wicked night out every three or four weeks and keep it mellow the rest of the time.’
Maybe this really is the new boring? As much as I want to decimate it, to condemn our generation for not trying hard enough to push things forward by hacking away at the coal face of culture in the corner of dark clubs in the early hours or lament the loss of youth as we know it. ‘We are all so lame!’, I want to shout before (reluctantly) dragging myself to some sort of dance music night which will go onto 4am. Instead, I find myself heaving a sigh of relief. I’m not sure I have the energy to fight that fight. I need to chill out this weekend.
They say youth is wasted on the young, we seem to be proving them right. But, at least we have a sense of humour: a young generation living as though we’re retired, despite the fact that we might never be able to. Maybe that's how we'll be remembered: the premature pensioners, minus the pensions.
*Names have been changed
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.