Are happy childhoods overrated? Just ask Gen X...

In the sunny, optimistic uplands of 1996, Sheryl Crow told us that “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad”. For us late Gen X teenagers, it made absolute sense – even if, on reflection, Sheryl sounded slightly resigned when she sang it. We were, after all, a mostly happy bunch, convinced that the world was heading in the right direction and that we had a golden future ahead of us.

Compare that to the teens of today who, according to the latest World Happiness Report, are generally having a right old time of it. The UK public as a whole, benighted as we are, has fallen to 20th place in the happiness index. But when you only take account of the feelings of young adults and teenagers, things are worse still, with the UK sitting at number 30. Only oldies are loving life, it seems.

It’s not a surprise on the face of it. Gen Z and late-born millennials have been stymied by Brexit, crushed by Covid and stung by the apparent fact that they’ll never be able to buy their own home. Their mental health is on the floor, the world is burning, and all the preceding generations are relying on them to come up with a fix – even if they can barely afford to keep avocados on the table.

It seems to be a sad situation. But then again, what if youthful happiness is overrated?

Consider those jolly teens of the 1980s and nineties – the later Gen-Xers and early millennials. There we were, buoyed up by the end of the Cold War, convinced of Britain’s place at the forefront of the cultural world, heading off to uni in record numbers without a penny to pay in tuition fees. And once we’d finished our degrees in excessive drinking, we barely had time to worry about what we wanted to do with our lives, because there were plenty of jobs for all.

Look at that mob now, however, getting angsty over work emails till two in the morning, anxiously watching mortgage rates become unaffordable, turning down the heating when the kids aren’t looking, and wondering if we’ll be able to retire by the time we’re 70. Apparently, our boomer parents are going to leave us a whopping inheritance, but given they’ve all been living in serene luxury since they quit work at 60, it seems reasonable to assume that they’ll all probably outlive us anyway.

And what about those boomers who, now in their sixties and seventies, are so damned happy? What was their childhood like? They claim they were thoroughly content, naturally, and bore on endlessly about the good old days. Let’s be honest though, that’s only because they didn’t know any better in the drab 1950s. And while they might think the sixties was a decade of endless fun, most were either sad because they weren’t cool enough to go and see the Beatles, or so off their faces they can’t remember either the Fab Four or the fear they felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Those youngsters put up with rationing, bland suburbia and a global arms race, and yet entirely by dint of being in the right place at the right time, they eventually ended up with mortgage-free property empires, gold-plated pensions, and free bus travel to boot – and now half of them are off cruising.

So, when the sad souls of Gen Z feel down, maybe they can take succour from the boomers’ example. True, they might have difficult and largely unfulfilling younger years, but all it takes is a piece of economic, technological or demographic good fortune for everything to turn around.

Give it 20 years then, and things will be looking much rosier: Labour will have successfully renationalised the railways and utilities; Britain will be carbon neutral and then some; we’ll be back in a revitalised EU; and AI will have led to a global economic boom the likes of which has never been known. What’s more, all those stressed-out Gen X guys who had it good when they were 17 will have died young through overwork, and the boomer cash bonanza will be skipping its way to the younger generations.

There was another great song in the nineties that told us “Things can only get better”, which would make a good message for today’s youth. Perhaps someone should adopt it as a political slogan. It might even hold true this time.