Each generation always had it better than the one before - until now. With the world in turmoil, our Writer at Large says it is agonising to see today’s young face a dark future
I hadn't read Philip Larkin’s poem High Windows in years until the other day. I first came across it at school. Back then, what caught my eye was the punch it delivered when Larkin used the word "f***ing" in its strictly biological sense.
That was 40 years ago. I read the poem again at the weekend after listening to Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, on Radio 4 talking about Larkin. Armitage mentioned High Windows and I thought I’d revisit it.
What hit me now about the poem wasn’t its edginess, but the sadness it stirred inside me. In High Windows, Larkin sees a young couple. He envies them. Sexually liberated in the 1960s, they have a freedom he never had when young.
Then Larkin ponders how “forty years back” he would have been envied by his parents’ generation. They were bound and constrained by religion in a way he wasn’t in his youth. The poem tells us that the old will always envy the young as freedom, prosperity and happiness march onward decade by decade. But that natural state of affairs – that hopeful progression – no longer exists. It’s dead now.
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It existed for Larkin’s parents. It existed for Larkin. It existed for our great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents. They all looked on the young – their children, us once – and envied such lives and futures. My parents looked at my generation and envied our social mobility, access to education, increased prosperity.
But such joyous parental envy no longer exists in my generation. How can we look at the future opening up for our children and think "this is better than what I had"?
When my children were born in the late 1990s, I contentedly envied the happy future I believed they would inherit. The Cold War was over, incomes were growing, democracy spreading, technology seemed to offer a future of unimaginable optimism, freedom and equality.
That’s all been smashed to smithereens. Shock after shock after shock obliterated any notion that the young will live better lives than we did. The destruction started with September 11, accelerated with Iraq, was sealed with the 2008 financial crash, and then Covid became the gravestone of any better future.
Today, when I think of my children having children of their own – something I long for – I sometimes shudder at my own wishes. What lives might they experience in the 2050s?
The New Year inevitably brings on such feelings. We think of the past and future, mortality, hopes and failures, dreams and ambitions, regrets. This year came roaring in with America’s attack on Venezuela, hammering home the hardest of truths: that the world is more unsafe than at any time since I was born.
The future our children face is one where only the strong win and the rich succeed. It’s a world of brutality and privilege.
America has made clear that rules do not apply to the strongest country on Earth – a country which wants to overturn the liberal order in Europe.
We’re in a mask-off moment. America will invade any country it choses, remove its leader from power, and take its resources. Donald Trump did not hide the fact that invading Venezuela was about oil. He threatens to annex Greenland, which would be an act of war against Denmark, a Nato ally. It is worth remembering that historians have long said democracies never go to war with other democracies.
What hope for Ukraine in this world? What will restrain Russia now Trump has acted just as Putin acted? What lessons here for China? Internationally, we’re spinning out of control. Is this what 1914 felt like? At home, we’re broken. There is a sense of mass despair about the state of Britain that is worse than the Winter of Discontent. Fifty years ago, there was a belief that change was inevitable. Today, hope is replaced by bitterness and cruelty. We edge towards a government by Reform, a party that would implode Britain should it ever crawl its way to power.
There is now regular talk of civil war in Britain. It’s absurd, yet it is also a mark of how low we have sunk. Mainland Britain has become like Northern Ireland, divided by hatred and ethnicity.
We scapegoat "the other" – the outsider, the migrant, the sexual minority – with increasing vitriol and threat.
Economically, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle-classes tremble. The vice-chancellor of King’s College London now says a degree is no longer a passport to social mobility. Unemployment is about to hit a decade high. Even middle-class young people are unable to get a mortgage. What hope for the poor?
Jobs are obliterated by artificial intelligence. Technology runs through society and human life like a metastasising cancer, destroying even the way we fall in love. Indeed, love and sex are now casualties. Who can blame the young for choosing not to have children? They can see the future that looms just as surely as you or I.
This is a counsel of despair, and I hate what I feel. But it is inescapable. What I hate most is that I feel pity – sorrow and pity – towards my own children’s generation. I want to envy the joy in their lives. I want to feel like I’m missing out on opportunities they’re experiencing. That’s the natural order.
Instead, I watch their lives become meaner and smaller, colder and darker. They don’t deserve this. The young of today didn’t create this world. Their grandparents and parents did. We did.
Is it not in the DNA of every parent to want to suffer in place of their child? If your child is sick, don’t you want to take that sickness and endure it yourself so they’re spared?
Yet we’re not doing that. With every choice we take, my generation and my parents’ generation make the lives of the young worse. There’s something monstrous about that, something deeply inhuman.
Perhaps the explanation for the state of the world lies in that monstrous inhumanity. If we‘re incapable of protecting our own children’s future, then what are we? Maybe we deserve this decay?
As Larkin also said, they f*** you up, your mum and dad.
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics
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