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When I was a fresh young thing, I remember grumbling about the baby boomers. They loomed menacingly over my generation, mainly because they’d seemingly landed all the good jobs, bought what was left of the cheap housing then upped our rents, and made us pay for the tertiary education they’d had for free. The feeling was mutual. The boomer lot disliked us for our Gen X slacker ways.
Now, I see my own contemporaries making it tough for the younger generations below. Every day there’s fresh criticism of the young’uns, berating them for being glued to their mobile devices, taking selfies, preening, sexting, posing. The consensus seems to be that they’re pathologically self-absorbed and need help.
In light of all this negativity, perhaps we should cast our minds back to our glory days. Put aside the well-worn rose-coloured glasses and potentially a little booze-addled memories and recall the sheer joy of heading to the local shops after school, to eat bad fried food and to pick up the freshly developed photos that had been taken at a party over the weekend.
As if our generation didn’t obsess over every single picture? And were always secretly chuffed if we weren’t the one with the closed eyes, teeth braces showing, or had a bad perm. If we could have had a second, third or 50th go at most of the horrid pics that inevitably ended up stuck up on Gran’s wall for eternity, we would have. We were just as self-obsessed, vain and hormone-fuelled. It’s biological. We simply didn’t have the means to document it.
I was certainly self-absorbed as a teen. The amount of time I spent examining my skin, hair, music, whatever my obsession was that week would now be deemed to be at a Kardashian level. I can’t be more thankful that my visual history is not filled with short films about how Patrick Swayze’s partner in Dirty Dancing should have been me.
Fortunately, this absence of a digital footprint (the closest thing to any kind of footprint we had was the Hang Ten logo sewn in to our sweatshirts), means we look back at our experience as if we were far more engaged with the world around us. Yeah right.
Following the recent nude photo scandal, online chatter suggests the rise of the “sext” illustrates that young people are unable to use their imagination and lack a firm grasp of basic language. This argument is irrelevant to a generation of kids who haven’t spent years racing to answer the home phone when it rings, because mostly, people get called direct on their own mobiles.
They don’t need the skills required to have that awkward conversation with Aunty Janice or Uncle Barry before handing the phone over to Mum. This doesn’t mean they’re any less intelligent or lacking in a rigorous intellectual life. They just don’t do talking like we did. Pictures do the job just as well.
Naked photos are not a new phenomenon either. Let’s not forget the Polaroid camera was the gateway to the original home nude portrait, created without the risk of the creepy guy at the photo shop keeping an extra copy in his drawer under the counter of you in your smalls.
I know many a child who was damaged by finding pics involving their parents looking like hairy human versions of the pencil-drawn couple in The Joy Of Sex. One friend found a batch of incriminating pics, held together with a scrunchie, amongst the recipes her mum had cut out and saved from Women’s Day magazine. The poor woman’s never been able to look at an apricot chicken recipe again.
So, speak up you glorious young things! Call out this constant obsessing and criticising of how you live. It’s become as obsessive as the selfie itself. And there’s every chance some of us are just a little grumpy because there are only so many times we can blame the lighting in our own pics.
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