As seen on Substack

It is three o’clock on Thursday when Saffie texts me asking to meet up at Blank Street for a Gen Z matcha. I know that she is feeling down because of her struggles with the job search, so I decide to lay my work aside. Without a friend to vent to, she would otherwise spend the rest of the day doomscrolling her Tik-Tok and melting her mind with extreme left propaganda about how multi-millionaire farmers should pay inheritance tax.

Saffie’s radiant mother-of-pearl eyes are already brimming with tears when I sit down opposite her. She is wearing a strappy top, with a raincoat slouching off her shoulders, giving frame to her slender clavicle.

‘Saffie,’ I say, ‘I’ve got to be honest, but you’re starting to sound like a bit of a snowflake’ 

‘Oh Hilda,’ she moans, ‘I’m just at my wits’ end with this job stuff. Not to whinge, but can you believe how easy all these old people had it back in the day?’ I curtly remind Saffie that in the 1990s interest rates were very high. Indeed, many so-called ‘boomers’ had to make do without any expensive holidays abroad, rarely eating out at restaurants and taking their caffeinated drinks in flasks instead of buying them out and about like us.

‘But Hilda,’ she continues, ‘how are people in our generation with degrees in creative writing supposed to earn a decent living when all of this artificial intelligence is automating away our jobs?’

I primly replace my cup of matcha on its saucer, my annoyance growing. Think, Hilda, think – how did Lord Roberts of Belgravia neatly dispatch the ‘Gen Z Woke Right’ at that Prosperity Institute summer drinks last week? ‘Saffie, listen,’ I begin.

She cuts me off. ‘I’ve already lost years of my youth to lockdown for a disease that didn’t really affect me,’ she wails. ‘So to now be told that there isn’t a job for me – I mean it’s a slap in the face, really!’

That’s when I lose my patience.

‘Saffie, I’ve got to be honest, but you’re starting to sound like a bit of a snowflake.’ She looks at me like a startled baby deer staring down the barrel of a huntsman’s blunderbuss. ‘We belong to the most entitled generation ever to walk the planet,’ I say. ‘We all have blue hair and want to send prisoners into teenage girls’ changing rooms! And we cancel anyone who believes in free speech because we love our safe spaces. We are nothing like our grandparents’ generation who had to fight in the war!’

Saffie gives me a quizzical look. ‘Which war?’ I throw my hands up in despair at her ignorance and storm off, abandoning her and my matcha latte with a huff.

Later, and calmer, I forgive Saffie. The truth is that neither of us was given a proper education, enslaved as we were by mobile phone algorithms during our school years. If our parents had been wise enough to send us to Michaela Community School, under the indomitable matriarch Mrs Birbalsingh, things might have turned out differently. Saffie and I would now be on seven-figure salaries, and translating Horatian odes into Homeric Greek in our spare time.

And if not a classical education, I wish I’d been lucky enough just to leave school at 16 and learn a trade. Saffie could have trained as a plumber. Or she could be waking up bright and early in the morning and collecting bins. It might not be as glamorous as being a lawyer or a TikTok star, but it is good honest work which ChatGPT will never be able to do.

Alas, I shall never know the satisfaction of a hard day of manual labour, having instead launched a writing career with regular speaking engagements and international travel, along with a lucrative book deal. But unlike most people my age, I was brave enough to say that a woman is a woman and that a man is a man, and that shagging about seven nights a week is not empowering.

Oftentimes I think I was born in the wrong generation. An old soul, in a soft, supple body.