Generation wars: Inside Britain's increasingly bitter age divide

But what sets the generations against each other? From Brexit to pop culture, it seems the age gap means we just cannot agree about anything anymore. Why? What is it that defines each generation? What makes them tick?

Baby boomers

EVERY day the battle between the generations seems to rage harder than ever. Baby boomers are demonised, millennials mocked, and poor old Generation X is stuck in the middle.

But what sets the generations against each other? From Brexit to pop culture, it seems the age gap means we just cannot agree about anything anymore. Why? What is it that defines each generation? What makes them tick?

Baby boomers

Being a baby boomer used to be cool. They’re from the sixties, after all. But the glamour has faded on the post-war generation.

“Ok, boomer” is now the go-to insult for the older generation – it’s like saying “shut up grandad”. Baby boomers are seen as racist, sexist, homophobic. They’re accused of enabling Trump and Brexit. They’re the targets of MeToo. They’re accused of getting everything for free, and then pulling up the ladder. They’re enjoying old age with gold-plated pensions while their children and grandchildren struggle.

But that’s not all true, is it? Not everyone born in the baby boom between the end of the war and the arrival of the Beatles is rich, greedy, selfish or bigoted – in fact, far from it. This was the generation which marched against Vietnam and the bomb, and fought for civil rights and women’s lib. There are plenty of poor pensioners around today as well.

And let’s be fair. Baby boomers had it tough. In Britain, many were born into post-war rationing. The world was grey. Kids expected to be beaten by parents and teachers. Most left school to work at 15. There was really no such thing as youth culture until the fifties.

Then it all changed with Rock and Roll. For the first time in history, parents and children began to live separate lives. Elvis was sex. The Beatles freedom. The Rolling Stones rebellion. Deference and class collapsed in the face of the Permissive Society. The pill arrived. Abortion and homosexuality were legalised. Hanging abolished. The world threw off its shackles.

The working class became a powerful cultural force for the first time. Think of those angry “kitchen sink” plays, books and films like A Taste Of Honey, Look Back In Anger, and Room At The Top.

Baby Boomers lived in a state of constant revolution. Everything changed all the time – especially technology. Landing on the Moon was perhaps the world’s greatest scientific achievement. Baby boomers invented the Space Age.

But change can be violent, and baby boomers were surrounded with suffering from thalidomide to Cambodia. They were soaked in the fear and paranoia of the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Cambridge Spy Ring. This was the age of assassination – two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X – and scandals like Profumo and Watergate.

It was also, until the 1970s, the era of full employment. By the mid-70s, the rug had been pulled from under baby boomers as they were starting to have children themselves. It scared them. Power cuts, strikes, three-day weeks – the boomers enjoyed kicking up their heels when times were good, but once the economy tanked many quickly turned conservative ushering in the Thatcher/Reagan era. Those who didn’t tilt right, rejected everything with Punk.

Their middle years matched the rising prosperity of the 1990s. Baby boomers began thinking about retirement around the same time that the world was told we had come to “the end of history”. The Cold War was over, liberal democracy was triumphant, there was peace in Ulster, the divisions of Thatcherism and Reaganomics were over.

Then it all ended on September 11, 2001. If you were one of the first baby boomers born, then you were in your mid to late-50s when the War on Terror began. Soon came the financial crash, and the refugee crisis. Internet disruption trashed jobs. Social media spread new social norms. There was MeToo, Trans rights.

A new world was being forged and it was one many baby boomers didn’t like or have control over anymore.

Pretty soon the baby boomers did what they do best – they caused a revolution. Though this time, the revolution was about retreating into the past, not forward into the present. Brexit and Trump would have been impossible without the older generation. In many ways, we still live in a boomer world.

Popular name: Michael or Mary

Likely to say: Me, myself and I.

Theme tune: (I can’t get no) Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones

What they teach us: The personal is political.

Generation X

BORN between 1965 and 1980, Generation X was the last generation to truly grow up as children. This generation played outside, walked to school, lived in a world of three TV channels and no mobile phones, and did all the things kids were meant to do – then they hit adulthood and changed the rules.

While Gen Xers grew up experiencing all the rough and tumble the world had to offer, their children – millennials and Generation Z – were wrapped in cotton wool. Why?

People tend to react against their childhood. Before the term Generation X was coined, children of the 70s were known as “latchkey kids” – their parents were working and youngsters let themselves into their houses alone after school.

Gen Xers often feel hard done by when it comes to their individualistic parents. “Mum and dad were never there,” seems to be the generational moan. Parents in the 70s and 80s liked to party. Divorce rates rose. “Parental guidance” wasn’t the overriding theme in the lives of young Gen Xers.

So when Gen X grew up, they redefined what it meant to be a parent. They took the role seriously. Of course, this has been blamed for creating a millennial generation which is pampered and cosseted.

But Gen X doesn’t just pamper its children – it wants to be friends with them. And that’s revolutionary. Until Gen X, children were children, not friends.

This change has its roots in the generic Gen X childhood. Again, before the term Generation X was coined, kids of this era were also known as “the MTV Generation”. Launched in 1981, MTV symbolised the disposable pop culture that defined the time and its youth.

Gen X grew up with a childlike quality which it never quite lost – and so finds common ground with its own children. Think of men in their forties still playing computer games. There’s also an adulation of childhood which often turns to nostalgia – just look at the Netflix show Stranger Things beloved by Gen X and millennials alike.

Gen X is also obsessed with “cool”. “Slacker culture” became a central part of Gen X sensibilities in adulthood. The goal was to be smart, funny, cynical and laid-back. Gen X didn’t want to be uptight and money-obsessed like their parents – old hippies now voting for Thatcher and Reagan.

Movies like Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks defined the world-weary, jaded, ironic, scatological, often very un-PC, humour of Gen Xers.

Grunge and hip-hop were Gen X’s gift to the world. Hip-hop reflected an obsession with authenticity, edgy glamour and rejection of rules, while Grunge is almost the distilled essence of Gen X. Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, and Smells Like Teen Spirit – the unofficial Gen X anthem – really did represent the voice of a generation. Yuppie culture was everything Gen X wanted, but struggled, to reject.

It was a novel by Douglas Coupland which really defined this generation. Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture tapped into the soul of young people in 1991. Coupland told of a generation sickened by advertising and brands, desperately seeking authenticity in a manufactured world.

Politically, Gen X was raised amid the Cold War with the threat of nuclear holocaust – there was Vietnam, Ulster, unemployment, Aids, rioting. As a result, this generation made huge leaps forward when it came to peace, civil rights and liberty. Think the Good Friday Agreement. The legalisation of gay marriage. The end of apartheid. By and large, this generation rejected racism, sexism and homophobia.

This progressive, laid-back, globalist vision of the world backfired on Gen X in later life, though, as the neoliberalism of Blair and Clinton soured, and the terror-scarred, debt-ridden 2000s arrived. However, although Gen X has never been as fortunate financially as baby boomers, it’s still a lucky generation. In Britain, this was the last generation to get a full grant to go to university. Social mobility is therefore in Gen X’s DNA. Class is a meaningless concept.

Now middle-aged, it’s Gen Xers leading the debate about work-life balance. Gen Xers don’t want to work until they drop. They championed the rise of digital culture, led the entrepreneurial dot.com surge, they adapted and changed, faced disruption in their old jobs and found new ones. Now, these middle-aged cynics in search of authenticity are all about flexibility and fulfilment. Could Gen X be about to embrace a quieter life? Just imagine Kurt Cobain gardening.

Popular name: Jason or Jennifer

Likely to say: That’s so uncool

Theme tune: Stuck In The Middle With You, Stealers Wheel

What they teach us: Just chillax, bro

Millennials and Generation Z

Snowflakes. Safe spaces. Trigger warnings. Millennials and their younger cousins Gen Z get a hard time for their apparent emotional fragility. But let’s be honest – both groups have grown up in a horrible world that the previous generations created. No wonder they want life to be a bit nicer.

We think of all millennials as young, but demographically the youngest millennial is today 24. The oldest is in their late 30s. Generation Z – the digital natives – were born roughly between the late 90s and the late 2000s.

There are lots of similarities between millennials and Gen Z. Their defining childhood experience is September 11. Where Vietnam or the collapse of communism may be the overriding global memory for baby boomers and Gen X, both millennials and Gen Z were forged by terrorism.

The Iraq War and the 2008 financial crash meant they grew up in a world different from their parents and grandparents. Governments were no longer trusted, the world of work had become a Darwinian place of zero-hour contracts.

This generation was saddled with debt just for wanting to go to university. Its chances of getting a job for life were infinitesimal, and getting a foot on the housing ladder was like scaling Mount Everest.

Life mediated through a screen became their new reality. Social media meant millennials and Gen Z were more connected than ever, but also increasingly isolated. Dating shifted online. If there’s a symbolic image of a millennial or Gen Zer it’s a young, self-employed worker sitting alone in a coffee shop on their laptop earning their money in the digital gig economy. Isolated, but self-sufficiently industrious.

With more indulgent Gen X parents, millennials and Gen Z find it easier than previous generations to open up about their feelings. But combine this with a rise in mental health problems, most likely linked to the pervasive use of screens, and it’s easy to mistake the troubles and confusion of millennials and Gen Z as fragility.

In fact, they’re a pretty hardy bunch. They’ve grown up in an age of constant strife and disruption. In the past, change came slowly. Now a week can be as dramatic as a year. Just look at 2020. We started with Brexit, now we’re in pandemic.

Culturally, though, millennials and Gen Z are splintered. The rise of streaming services and the slow death of the physical product – like Spotify putting an end to the CD – means young people today have to navigate endless choice when it comes to the world of music, films, literature and art. Culturally, little connects them.

Youth tribes have disappeared. There’s no such thing as mods and rockers, or punks and new romantics. Youth culture expresses itself through new technology which the older generation knows little about. You won’t get many baby boomers and Gen Xers playing on TikTok.

What will happen, though, to millennials and Gen Zers as they hit middle age? Well, they’ll surely reshape the world in their own image just as their forebears did. In fact, they’re already reshaping the world. MeToo is perhaps the biggest social movement on the planet – and it’s a millennial movement. Black Lives Matter is a millennial reformation of civil rights in America. The new wave – fourth wave – of feminism is women’s lib in millennial form, and it’s not afraid to reject pioneers who came before, like Germaine Greer.

However, like all generations, today’s young people have their dark side. We need look no further than the rise of the alt-right among millennials as proof that theirs is a generation shaded in as much grey as baby boomers and Gen Xers.

Of course, it is millennials and Gen Z who will have to deal with climate change. That’s their greatest challenge – and they’re rising to it. The world is starting to see a new generation of millennial leaders emerge like Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, just 34.

Baby boomers and Gen Xers always said they would change the world for their children’s sake – unfortunately for millennials and Gen Zers, they have to do more than just talk.

The latest generation is known as Generation Alpha – the oldest among them is now just 10 years old. Perhaps, the word “alpha” gives us a hint about what we want this generation to be, to do – we want them to start over, to begin again, to rewrite the mistakes we all made before they were even born.

Popular names: Jessica or Joshua

Most likely to say: Stop the world, I want to get off

Theme tune: 99 Problems, Jay-Z

What they teach us: Be nice