Millennials

For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death it was passed on to my mother, who kept it grudgingly in her cottage even though you couldn’t get to the kitchen without banging your hip against its bow front. At some stage it was passed on to my sister, who paid a considerable sum to store it because she had no room for it in her terraced house. Some years later, I was informed that I must house this precious mahogany albatross myself. After some handwringing and sadness, lack of space forced me to pass it on to someone

‘I’m looking for a man in finance/ Trust fund/ 6’5”/ Blue eyes.’ When Megan Boni posted this ditty on her TikTok account a few months ago, it was meant as a joke. She wanted to poke fun at the wish-list mentality of single women, herself included. She couldn’t have predicted that her 19-second video would be viewed 26 million times and remixed into one of the summer’s viral hits. Women are now whispering to each other that maybe they really are looking for a man in finance, rather than an impoverished creative type still living with his parents at the age of 30. ‘Millennials felt ashamed about making money their

You know you’re getting old when your friends start going to sex parties. In our twenties, there were parties, and sometimes people would have sex at them. But they were never known as sex parties. Now we are firmly in our thirties, the phrase ‘sex party’ is creeping into everyday conversations alongside mortgage rates, nursery options and the cost of living. At a country wedding recently, I caught up with an old acquaintance. While we ate our lemon possets, I bored on about mother-hood and she bored on about sex parties. I can’t repeat what she divulged, but the conversation felt strangely familiar. It concerned racy outfits and group sex.

If I could lift one thing from younger generations, unpeel one idea from their anxious minds, it would be the notion they have to ‘work on themselves’, and that the point of life is to do this ‘work’ until they feel able to have a relationship, at which point they must grimly set about working on that. I’m not suggesting that it’s not useful to have treatment or therapy for a particular problem, but it’s as if everyone born after 1990 thinks of themselves the way 1950s man thought of his car — as something to be worked on in every spare moment, tinkered with and polished, but rarely taken

Every generation and teen subculture likes to put the boot into baby boomers like me. I’ve been physically attacked by skinheads, verbally assaulted by right-wing intellectuals and mocked by millennials. But I never thought I would be subjected to the derision and verbal lashings of Generation Z. The ‘zoomers’ — that is, people born after about 1995 — have come up with a cutting and dismissive retort for older people: ‘OK boomer.’ It all began when an elderly man posted a video on the social media app Tik-Tok denouncing the younger generation. They were, he claimed, suffering from ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ and ‘needed to grow up’. Not exactly an original

A common opinion in today’s media is that millennials have it all – flexibility in jobs, a greater freedom to travel, and all the information they need at their fingertips. However, if you dive a bit deeper into the statistics, things don’t appear to be as rosy as we first thought. Today’s young face longer commutes than those before them and are confronted by an increasingly out of reach property sector. Over the last 20 years we’ve seen nothing short of a collapse in homeownership amongst younger people. In 1995-96, sixty five percent of those with incomes in the middle twenty percent for their age owned their own home. In 2015-16

On turning 50, I realised I’d never own my own home. What bank would agree to give a mortgage to someone with no regular source of income? Even if I did somehow hold down a job, I would have just 15 years until retirement age. For a while, I was depressed. Owning your own home is the British dream. Why else would all those property shows I drool over be so popular? I won’t have anything to hand down to my kids. What sort of loser am I? Then I remembered: I live in a five-bedroom Victorian terrace in Islington, which is owned by the council. At £650 per month,

In the ‘bad old days’ – namely before the late 20th century – it was traditionally the case that the less ethical and the less green a business or sector, the better. There was, and still is, a whole cacophony of ‘sin stocks, from tobacco to oil and gas to defence and junk food. The reason for an enthusiasm for all things sinful was, and probably still is, because such businesses tended to have the most secure profits profile. After all, people will always smoke, go to war and binge eat. However, from a moral standpoint investors would be scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of a clear

The idea of working 9-5 until you receive a gold watch at age 60 is dying out fast. Millennials seem to have the biggest millstone around their neck: a survey of under-35s by Prudential found that over a third of millennials believe that, despite saving as much as they can, they are never going to save enough for a comfortable retirement. The cost of living longer in retirement is pushing the average retirement age higher, and millennials’ struggle to fill their pension pot will lead to them postponing retirement even longer. Changing generational trends could be affecting productivity in business too. Companies who look closely at their baby-boomer employees’ retirement plans are

The story of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan is an interesting one, I think, for what it tells us about the right, the left and human nature. These two youngish people — both 29, one of them a vegan, the other a vegetarian — jacked in their wonkish jobs in Washington DC in order to experience the world in all its glory. Their itinerary included dangerous areas — or at least areas deemed dangerous by western governments with an axe to grind. As Jay put it: ‘People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept

They may have perfected the sexy selfie and a nonchalance about internet porn but millennials are just not that into sex. The guilty secret behind today’s swipe-right hookup culture is not promiscuity but abstinence. Research out this week suggests that one in eight 26-year-olds have never had sex, up from one in 20 a generation ago. According to Steve McKay, professor in social research at Lincoln University, the true figure may be even higher; if those who refused to answer the question were also virgins then the number of abstainers rises to 16.4 per cent, or one in six. Last year’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles revealed a