With the election bribes being handed out to the elderly, I keep reading how spoiled, pampered and generally feather-bedded oldies are compared with my children’s generation. Pensioners are cashing in their annuities, gorging on the capital in their houses and using their generous pension funds to take endless sunshine cruises.
When the oldies were young, things were still hunky dory. For instance, my two older daughters are at university, for which they pay sizeable fees, whereas I (at 59, a proto-oldie) was educated for free at the London School of Economics. School, particularly for my 12-year-old, can be a results-driven grind while I didn’t get homework until I was 14.
This generation lives in the shadow of the possibility of online bullying. Their years of innocence have been curtailed as pornography becomes widely available and the mainstream culture is more and more sexualised.
So my younger children are stressed and under threat, and my older children, if they have the good fortune to get a job when they finish their education, can expect short contracts and not much job security, with little prospect of owning a house in my lifetime. Terrorism stalks the world, the planet is overheating and we are all going to die, except that I’ll be dead already of old age, thus escaping the fate of being microwaved in my bed.
So it sounds as if I got the good end of the deal. All the cherries have been eaten, leaving my children with the stones. Should I feel guilty? Perhaps. But I don’t. Because on closer inspection, it turns out that my children, for all their apparent disadvantages, also have it a lot better than I did – and will, should the end of the world not be forthcoming, have it a lot better in the future.
No one hits children any more, at least not with official approval. With the arrival of the internet, boredom has almost disappeared. There is a huge amount of high-quality children’s entertainment – not only computer games, but also books and films. Much more money is spent on children than before. Foreign holidays are the norm (I didn’t leave Britain until I was 19).
I didn’t have to face the prospect of global warming, it’s true. But I did wake up in the night terrified of the atomic bomb being dropped. Immediate extinction seemed imminent – it still seems a miracle to me now that it never happened. The IRA were bombing the streets of London on a more regular basis than anything jihadis have managed. Obviously I didn’t suffer online bullying – just a punch in the face.
School lessons were boring and largely rote-learning. Clothes were ugly. TV was crap, with a few notable exceptions. Sexism was mainstream, whereas my daughters are growing up in a world where they will be more likely to get a degree and earn more than men, at least until their 30s when childbearing will drag their income down. They will still live in a sexist society, but not half as sexist as it once was – I am still amazed to remember that my first girlfriend happily took part in a wet T-shirt competition, and no one thought anything of it.
My daughters will grow up better educated, more confident and with far better prospects than any of my contemporaries. Their life expectancy will be longer than mine – perhaps more or less indefinite given advances in medicine. For all the perils they will face, they can look forward to lives of immeasurable richness, much of it driven by near-magical technologies.
So no, I don’t feel bad. I have a couple of decades left if I’m lucky, and I’m going to make the most of it, guilt free. Because apart from anything else, my children have one immense advantage over old people, despite my generationally assisted wealth. They’re not old.
