Under all the glitter and shine, the cult of youth is a truly rotten business

Arthur Krystal ends his 2019 New Yorker article on ageing with a citation from the Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever … In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” This is followed by the suggestion that “no young person could have written that”.

I dare to disagree.

Today’s uniquely solipsistic culture has propagated an enhanced perception of transience among people of all ages, including the very young. On a mass scale, this phenomenon has crystallised in the guise of viral posts by people as young as 18 claiming they feel too old to be on TikTok, and cosmetic trends like facial fillers specifically targeted to late millennials and early members of Gen Z. On a personal scale, at the age of 24 years old I can already testify, in spite of my best efforts to “seize the day”, to the sorrow of perceiving the passage of time with terrifying acuity.

Lockdown has only intensified this perception. We have been confined to tightly fixed routines for months on end, obsessively counting down the days left to our return to society. We have found that time progresses inexorably even as we are stilled in the midst of its flow, our lives on hold, dangling off like coats from a rack. Especially to those of us who didn’t manage to publish a bestseller or to come up with ground-breaking business ideas, the last year has felt like a year lost. And to the young, in whom has been embedded the rhetoric of one’s twenties as the best years of one’s life, the years of prime, discovery and fun, to be faced with a reality (the reality of a shrunk job market, an interruption in all social relations, a housing crisis) way below expectations is to feel cheated, and to feel the Fear Of Missing Out – not on a friend’s birthday party, but on the party of life.

I’ve made a mental bucket list of things I’d like to do before I’m 50. To write a novel or two. To direct a season at the Globe. To read the whole of Balzac’s Comedie. To love and be loved time and time again. I was made to believe that anything is possible as long as one deeply believes they can achieve it. I was made to look deep into the well of opportunities and fish them out one by one, and put them in a bucket. What I was not told is that each opportunity is also a memento mori, a reminder that I may not live long enough to catch it. Being far from having met the expected milestones – a permanent job by 23, living on my own by 25 – makes fantasising about several possible futures not that fun anymore.

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Last summer, a simple truism by a well-meaning waiter directed to my mother (”But she is no longer a child” – the all too sensible message being that she should stop worrying over me), made me wince with displeasure. With no longer being a child comes accountability for where I am in life – at a cafe being bought breakfast by my mum, yet to be employed, yet to have figured out exactly where I wish to be.

One too many things terrify me about old age. My shrinking brain and ossified creative capacities, for one. Where do writers go to take refuge when they grow old and can no longer write? Then there’s the question of memory. If we are what we remember, who will memory loss turn me into? For all the questions I wish I could ask, I still don't dare to do so. Why, then, if I’m comfortable with suspense, am I writing about the subject at all? Probably because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it, and I feel that the thing I don’t understand about it – that is, the very fact of not understanding – is significant.

In 19th-century Russia, noblemen as old as 40 were too busy journeying the Old World as flippant bachelors to be concerned with fears of this kind. Marrying and settling down were commitments they were happy to postpone as much as possible in favour of cultivating their knowledge of men and continents. But even more inconceivable today is the picture, painted in Stefan Zweig’s autobiographical account of life under the Austro-Hungarian empire, of age lending the most advantage, advantage which the young Austro-Hungarians hoping to advance in their positions could only earn through deception – from taking concoctions for accelerated beard growth, to wearing gold spectacles even when not needing them, and walking at a leisurely pace to embody the desired solemnity.

In today’s society, old people simply disappear.

It is 2015 and I am still a student at my high school in Milano. I am a typically troubled and troublesome teenager, but not too cool to say no when asked to join the lot of old ladies living in our building on Thursday aperitivo. At first, I only show up for the free wine and focaccia; not too much time passes, however, before Thursday becomes a day to look forward to. Our chats are trivial but spirited. Campari is a favourite drink among the older women: Graziella drinks it with lots of ice and a splash of prosecco, Lina prefers to have it liscio. It tastes bitter, but is the colours of autumn.

I get along particularly well with Marisa. She is tall but quiet, unstrings her history in pills. Her lightly potted hands are full of grace, and her skirts rustle and swish when she moves around. One day, she shows up bearing gifts. A crystal vase, an owl-shaped brooch. This is too much, I protest but am quickly shushed. She wouldn’t want any of it to end up in the wrong hands. I wonder why she doesn’t simply store her things in a safe, if she’s so afraid that thieves may find them, but don’t ask. My favourite gift is a blue kimono with stylised orchids entwining all around it. It is very long, and rustles and swishes when I move around.

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One day, Marisa suddenly stops showing up. We knock on neighbours’ doors and ask her friends, but nobody knows anything. Eventually, the truth comes from the doorman: Marisa’s step-son, the wicked protagonist of some of her sparse confessions, has taken her away to a care home, though we don’t know which one.

Thursday aperitivo dies a quiet death.

In today’s society, either old people disappear all of a sudden, as Marisa did, or they do so gradually, drowned under the weight of other people’s reifying interaction with them. Which man or woman in her right mind would want to be around people talking down to her all the time, whether this is via well-meaning but soul-destroying remarks (”Can she hear?”), condescending platitudes (”As I’m sure you already know…”) or fully fledged stigmatisation (”OK boomer”)? For senior members of society, hell truly is other people. As for me, I’d pick diocesan hermitage over patronising chitchat on Sunday visitations any day.

When not dropped off to a care home in haste, old people are pressured to make for a discreet withdrawal into obscurity, first by being driven to retire before they are ready to give up on their life’s work, then by being told that their accumulated wisdom is anachronistic and useless. The ones receptive to such pressure are rewarded by being proclaimed models of “graceful ageing”, whereas its opposers are ridiculed or resented.

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I am often my 61-year-old mother's personal hell: I wonder endlessly at her radiant, smooth looks, at her youthful heart, at her adolescent music tastes. My praise of her as a living miracle is more a transferral of my anxieties to her than it is a compliment. Then I am indignant when, far from having exhausted her capacity for work, she is prevented from switching from freelancing to permanent employment from a system that would like to deny her vitality.

It is no surprise that new generations should be clutching to their youth as fervently as they do at present – attractiveness, genius and stardom are things of the young only. And yet, the so-called cult of youth has not done any great favours to the young themselves either. Increasingly younger people are sexualised both behind the screen and on the streets – with one of the most popular genres of porn featuring girls described as “barely legal teens” and “schoolgirl sluts”. In everyday life, children are catcalled, kidnapped and sexually harassed.

The glorification of young people’s greater resilience, strength and adaptability has translated into the consumptive treatment of youths, who are being financially drained even before stepping foot in the work market – this year’s graduates will come out of university with an average debt of over £50,000 – and monstrously overworked once they do. Young employees are regularly expected to work outside of contracted hours, feeling that if they don’t keep up with the always-connected culture of modern business, they may be made redundant or not qualify for a promotion. As if this wasn’t enough, over the last year Covid policies have forced young people to forfeit their welfare and livelihood in the name of old people’s safety – meanwhile, this did nothing to prevent nursing homes from turning into “death homes”, or to avoid many old people dying alone or in isolation amid delayed lockdowns.

Even before finding employment – temporary, paid peanuts – I was well familiar with the “millennial burnout” brilliantly dissected by Anne Helen Peterson in her viral article. The biggest way in which I’m impacted by burnout is in feeling unable to savour the present moment; as soon as I have filed an article, say, instead of enjoying the fruits of my labour, I feel immediately called to produce more. Now, barely one month into my short internship, I am already experiencing intense fatigue. Some may say it’s on me for having chosen to keep up my writing gigs on the side – but I’d dare anyone to enter the job market today and not yield to the pressure of the massive competition out there. If I don’t accept to work extra hours or to write a piece overnight, someone else will. The worse of it is that, even though I work more than 10 hours a day, I am guaranteed no security, no benefits, and still struggle to cope with the costs of living in London. Conditioned to perceive idleness as the enemy of the good, having nothing to do fills me with pangs of guilt, rather than appreciation for some well-deserved rest.

Whether we slave away or slack about, then, inner conflict reigns supreme. Nonetheless, our twenties are supposed to be the time of our lives. In this, too, is intrinsic yet another contradiction. Youth is, on the one hand, something that we desperately want to cherish and hold onto, as the alternative, old age, is made to be highly undesirable; on the other, it is a phase that some of us at least (the poorer among us) cannot wait to leave behind, in lieu of financial stability, professional security and increased agency.

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Under all the glitter and shine, the cult of youth is a truly rotten business. By romanticising one and ostracising the other, it glosses over the terrifying aspects of being young today and allows for only one, demeaning frame through which to view old people. Conflicts between generations should be abolished; they are nothing but counterproductive. While boomers accuse us of being lazy and attention-seeking, and we accuse them of being selfish and obtuse, our attention is being deflected from the systemic forces responsible for our mutual discontent. What we could be doing instead is direct our effort to cease the exploitation of workers and dehumanisation of people of all ages in the interest of a more enriching life for everyone. But I guess collaboration will only be possible once we relearn how to address each other with kindness. And so far, we’ve done a pretty terrible job.

It strikes me that the only way to free myself from this dread of growing old is to confront it head-on. I have resolved I will chat to as many old people as come my way. I don’t know whether it’ll be much beneficial: it may bring to the fore things I would rather not have known. Or, alternatively, it’ll lead to another cycle of Thursday aperitivos. “You think way too much,” I can hear Marisa telling me with a smile in her voice. Unknowingly, brilliantly, she envisaged the predicament of a whole generation.