Why Aren't We All Radicals?

Millennials are doing worse than their parents, so why are we so invested in sprucing a broken system at the margins?

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

-Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows

“You are so lucky”, she said, with a sort of breathy intensity that made me feel as though someone was flashing a bright light in my face. I wasn’t sure how to respond. It was an accurate statement – we finally managed to buy a house last autumn, something I really thought would never happen. When I tell people around my own age, it’s aways with a touch of guilt. Until recently, I couldn’t get a mortgage. I write words for money, which is a self-evidently preposterous way to make a living, and my bank account generally reflects this absurdity. I would say that I’m not sure how we managed it, but I know exactly how. My mother died. If she hadn’t, I would not have a house. As you might imagine, that knowledge isn’t comfortable to carry around. It is certainly a source of internal friction.

Granted, I ‘own’ about three per cent of the house, but my mother’s utterly tragic, premature death from pancreatic cancer is what enabled me to pay the deposit and secure a mortgage, along with my partner’s income. Let there be no confusion on this point – I would much rather have a living mother than three per cent of my own house. She was a few years away from paying off her own mortgage when she got sick. She had to quit her two jobs and we sold the house I grew up in because she couldn’t make the repayments. I watched her decline for five months until she died one night in a hospice room while I was asleep across the street. I awoke to my phone ringing at 6:30 that the morning, barely conscious, thinking I was ready for the crisis. I was stupidly fixated on figuring out where my socks were so I could run to be with her at the end. But the end came for her while she was alone in that room, as I dreamt darkly five minutes away. They called to tell me it had already happened. I’d missed it, and she died without me. I had never felt I’d failed her so completely. A few months later, half the money from the sale of the home she loved and never fully paid off landed in my bank account. I left it there, horrified by what it symbolised, scared shitless at finding myself parentless in my mid-twenties. Alone in the world.

The system in which we live operates such that only through my mother’s death could I meet the conditions to secure a mortgage. So, when someone I was conversing with at a work breakfast told me I was lucky to own a home, I felt conflicted. Her statement expressed the frustration and covetousness of generation rent. That sense of always falling short by comparison, and suspicion that there has to be an unfair advantage at work here somewhere. She was right, of course. I am lucky to own a home, but the cost was one no one should have to pay. The system is clearly unfit for purpose and does not serve the vast majority of us.

When I was described as lucky, I wanted to both agree with and (figuratively) slap the woman who said it. My parents’ generation surveys my own with disappointed bafflement. ‘Over thirty with no car, no house, no family?’ their watery gaze bemoans. ‘Where did you go wrong?’ Millennials stare back, seething, resentful, grateful. If our parents aren’t helping us to buy homes, they’re often allowing us to live in theirs, which seems like no fun at all for them and quite a major sacrifice. It can’t be what they envisaged for us, or for themselves in their old age, but they also don’t recognise the dire economic conditions under which younger people live, or the fact that the system operates primarily to both benefit and safeguard the benefits of boomers.

The average price of a house in the UK in 1985 was just over £30k. The average age of a first-time buyer in London is now over 33. In Ireland, the median age of people buying a first home as a lone buyer is 42. For couples, it’s 34, compared to 29 in 2006. I watched comedian Stavros Halkias’ comedy special on YouTube this week (Stavros Halkias – Live at the Lodge Room). It’s great, and the ludicrously dark picture of millennial reality that Halkias relayed is the kind of depressingly relatable that a human mind can only really grasp through humour.

“I’m thirty-two… We’re fucked. We’re fucked, right? We’re the first generation that’s going to do worse than our parents statistically, which sucks. But the worst part is that our parents think it was because they were so smart.” Halkias captures the true absurdity of life as an infantilised millennial, talking about the fact that his generation (which is also mine) will continue on a downward spiral until we find ourselves gleefully telling our own adult children “You’re thirty years old. You can’t be splitting a tent with six people anymore, alright? When I was your age, I only had one roommate, and I owned my Nintendo Switch, so you’ve got a lot of growing up to do, pal.”

Instead of radically questioning the system in which we live, we absorb the criticism of our parents’ generation so wonderfully exemplified by Halkias relaying (always unsolicited) advice from Boomer parents on finding a job as a Millennial (“Well did you look him in the eye and shake his hand?”). Rather than truly rejecting the idea that it is acceptable to queue in a London or Dublin street with fifty other people to view a one bedroom flat featuring a limescale-corroded shower in the kitchen, only to be outbid for it in a demoralising auction while you eyeball the ceiling mould, we just accept the maladjusted reality in which we live. We seem too flattened to resist it and too cynical to imagine possible alternative ways of living. If you can find a place to rent, you’ll quietly, obediently pay the average £1650 in monthly rent (it’s almost €2000 if you live in Dublin) because the alternative is to be refused a mortgage by a bank who bases its refusal on an estimation that you definitely can’t afford the £1000 monthly mortgage repayment. It’s not surprising that we talk about all this less than we should – we’re too busy trying to make rent, and the depth of the renting trap is enough to pitch you into despair if you focus on it.

We are doing worse than our parents by most metrics. When I consider this, I begin to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the lack of… to put it mildly… revolutionary fervour. Few would argue that the system isn’t terminally failing – just consider the incommensurability of extrinsic markers of wellbeing and ‘the good life’, a concept that Plato and Aristotle used as a metric for an actualised life lived well. The good life is much deeper than merely having the bare minimum we need or even being happy (though the former is necessary for the latter). It’s a set of conditions that maximise our human potential for flourishing. If, for the sake of argument, we do just focus on basics like the ability to a family, own a car (independence and freedom of movement in the modern world) and have a secure home, things look grim. The average age of Irish first-time mothers is now 31.6 – an astonishing figure considering the virulent history of Irish people’s wanderlust and national fertility. Every other person I meet here in London seems to have some Irish relative within two generations that they need to tell me about, and I just can’t grasp those numbers. My parents were both born into Irish families with four siblings each. Five children or more were absolutely standard for their generation. You might argue that their parents had no choice about the oversized families they had, and you’d be right, but I’d suggest that lack of choice is lack of choice. Ending up with more kids than you wanted due to conditions outside your control is no worse in principle than ending up with fewer for the same reasons.

For some people in their thirties and forties, getting out of their parents’ spare room just isn’t a possibility, and let’s face it – most of us do not have the constitution to thrive in life when forced to sleep in a room next to their mother’s unused exercise bike. Worse – and even less conducive to thriving – is my generation’s awareness that people in this position, while completely understandably miserable, are lucky, relatively speaking. They are fortunate to have a parental safety net in a climate which necessitates either parental money or parental property in order to secure a place to live. They are ‘lucky’ that their parent died with a house. When you have nowhere else to live, the cramped time capsule of a childhood bedroom in which you once indulged in adolescent fantasies about what your liberated adulthood would look like is something you should be thankful for. Not to mention the parents who are currently downstairs muttering to one another about how Richard and Joan’s son just bought a house, and their daughter is a dentist now, and questioning which deficiency of character has resulted in things going so terribly wrong for you. They kindly tolerate you living in their house even though none of you really understand one another anymore, while you ruminate resentfully on the fact that they bought this house in the mid-90s for £2000 and a jar of dried beans. Your joints sometimes hurt when you wake up because you’re actually pretty old now. Teenagers around the neighbourhood incite either fear or pity in you, and then you recall that you hide from your parents in your room just like they do and are in for exactly the same disapproval and interrogation if you come home drunk.

We are pretty obviously (as Halkias phrases it) “fucked, right?” Yet our daily discourse and diet of media are largely overwhelmed by conversations that seem more than a little trivial in comparison to the systemic putrefaction that keeps life so small for so many people. Even the people who are lucky enough to be able to pay obscene rents, even if it is with difficulty. Skyrocketing homelessness rates clarify that there are many people who can’t – those are the people without the parental safety net, and it’s infinitely worse for them. What’s going on? Why are the same people who are so clearly systemically disadvantaged so happy to be distracted by nonsense? Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. A trial deciding whether one of two famous narcissists besmirched the other. Why are we reading (and writing) articles about Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout either representing hope and breaking the chains of the everyman, or confirming that we live in an irredeemably necrotic plutocracy? Why are we debating the morality of Partygate versus Beergate when the two political parties and leaders involved ultimately have such similar views, and both represent tacit endorsement of the system that sees even university educated adults in their mid-thirties living in their parents’ box room and struggling to pay off university loans? Millennials exhibit such faith in a system that so patently does not represent their interests. They consistently push to amend it at the margins rather than kick the whole thing down despite a general acceptance that sprucing a broken system cannot fix it. We are the cynical generation – too weary to advocate for destruction and too jaded to believe what we destroy might be replaced by something better. We might be right, but the anger is there. What are we channelling it into? He might have been a pedant, but Deleuze had a point when he said “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”