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Whatever happened to the chavs?
In the 2000s, they were a common sight in English towns and cities. To this day, thereâs no consensus as to where the word came from â but it was gleefully adopted as a pejorative term for working class young people, especially those assumed to be ill-educated, welfare-dependent and criminally-inclined. It also referred to a distinctive youth sub-culture â with a dress code heavy on tracksuit bottoms, baseball caps and gold chains.
Though not that different from other street fashions of the decade (or indeed this one), the particular details marked out the wearer as a chav. In some ways, it was an anti-fashion, capable of absorbing upmarket brands (most infamously the Burberry check) and taking them all the way down.
The style was also a statement, in this case from a group that knew it wasnât wanted, but which refused to be invisible â or to be excluded from the debt-fuelled âgood timesâ prior to the financial crisis.
Perhaps seeing an unvarnished image of itself, the cultural elite kicked down. Social satirists were merciless in their mockery. By the time the backlash to the backlash set in â for instance, with the publication of Owen Jonesâ Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, in 2011 â it was too late. Chavdom was on its way out.
Itâs not that marginalised youngsters have disappeared from our streets, but the distinct sub-culture is dead â swept away not just by the tide of contempt, but also by a generational shift.
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The 2000s were when the Millennials took over â and that was always going to bring about changes. The mimetic nature of a smartphone-centred youth culture leaves less room for the distinct (and, at times, mutually hostile) youth sub-cultures of previous decades. No equivalent of Mods versus Rockers for this lot â or even Oasis versus Blur.
Though class distinctions are far from being absent or unnoticed among todayâs young, thereâs little appetite to make them more visible than they have to be. Nor does the rebellious impulse to immitate the outsider â and thereby scandalise the olds â express itself along class lines anymore. Indeed, the working class and especially the white working class, has never been less fashionable â whether culturally or politically.
Millennials strike me as being untroubled by middle-class guilt. Itâs not that they use the actual words âmiddle classâ with any more enthusiasm than older generations of Brits, but, then, thatâs not necessary when youâve got euphemisms like âknowledge workerâ, âcreative industriesâ and âworking with people.â Being career-orientated is not uncool if itâs a cool career. Ambitious Millennials donât just want material success, they want it served with a generous topping of personal fulfilment (and donât forget the peer recognition sprinkles).
In pursuing their goals, ambitious Millennials carry two bits of deeply implanted programming. The first is that this is what you deserve because youâre special â a wizard in a world of Muggles. The second is that, in spite of the above, the competition is fierce, so youâre going to have to work hard to get it.
But what if you donât get it? Or what if you do, but the price is just too high? That is the question â one which brings me to Anne Helen Petersen and her remarkable and much-debated Buzzfeed essay âHow Millennials Became the Burnout Generationâ.
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Petersen asks âwhy am I burned out?â and offers the following answer:
âBecause Iâve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it â explicitly and implicitly â since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which itâs become hard for us.â
Letâs deal with the obvious objection to this thesis â i.e. in what way is âworking all the timeâ specific to the Millennial generation? A lot of middle-aged people, especially women, would say âwait until youâve got children or ageing relatives or both; wait until youâre combining the responsibilities of home with the duties of middle or senior management â then youâll know what hard work is!â
Except this would be to miss Petersenâs point, which is that todayâs young people are under pressures that the GenXers and Baby Boomers did not face at the same stage in life:
âFinancially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. â
The hollowing out of middle income occupations, the decline in home ownership and differentials in family breakdown mean that there is a âcoming apartâ of western societies â an ever-widening divide between the upper end and lower end of the income scale, with an ever more uncertain and insecure buffer zone between them. The âroom at the topâ assumptions of the easy years of capitalism have been replaced with what appears to be a zero-sum game.
To some extent, thatâs a delusion, because for all the dysfunctions of âlate capitalismâ (as itâs optimistically called), living standards now are higher, and personal freedoms greater, than in the post-war golden age. But at the same time the stakes have been raised: comfortable mediocrity, even if attainable, isnât good enough anymore â your work, and the lifestyle you buy with it, has to be meaningful (or, at least, look that way through a social media lens). Those sort of jobs, though probably more plentiful than at any time in history, are concentrated in fewer places (the global cities in particular) and demand exceeds supply.
Petersen describes an never ending process of âoptimisationâ that Millennials must go through in order to make it in a hyper-competive economy. This, she says, began in their earliest years:
âRunning around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined.â
Itâs interesting how many of the coming-of-age dramas of the Millennial era are about young people testing themselves â both in competition against one another and against hostile powers in the outside world. Prime examples include Harry Potter, of course, but also the Hunger Games and Divergent series. I donât know to what extent, if any, these were created as allegories of the present, but itâs no surprise that themes of specialness, preparation and selection resonate with a Millennial audience. Certainly, thereâs a generational gulf between the larking-about of St Trinianâs and Grange Hill and the serious, self-discovery of Hogwarts.
And it doesnât end with school. The process of optimisation goes on to higher education (which has been deemed more necessary and made more expensive for Millennials than previous generations). Increasingly, this includes various levels of post-graduate qualification â yet another extractive opportunity for âbig diplomaâ. Petersen describes her own progress (and exploitation) through the lower echelons of academia:
âAs I continued through grad school, I accumulated more and more debt â debt that I rationalized, like so many of my generation, as the only means to achieve the end goal of 1) a âgoodâ job that would 2) be or sound cool and 3) allow me to follow my âpassion.ââ
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The post-graduate treadmill is still a minority track for Millennials, but not so the social media treadmill:
âPosting on social media⌠is a means of narrativizing our own lives⌠when we donât feel the satisfaction that weâve been told we should receive from a good job thatâs âfulfilling,â balanced with a personal life thatâs equally so, the best way to convince yourself youâre feeling it is to illustrate it for others.â
She says it also about a perceived need for constant self-promotion to potential employers. Iâm sure thatâs right, but what comes next contains a crucial misunderstanding:
âNow, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life⌠to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.â
Itâs certainly a performance, but, with some exceptions, it isnât âlaborâ (or âworkâ as Petersen also describes it). Yes, for certain vocations â writer, artist etc â there is a case for putting examples of what you can do online. But as for putting âevery component of your lifeâ online, no one demanded you do that â and most people arenât interested. If you want to share your experiences with friends and family or a particular interest with likeminded enthusiasts, then thatâs great; but if you think of such interactions as âworkâ, then do something more enjoyable with your time.
If you think that a laboriously curated online presence makes you stand out to potential employers then you may be underestimating the capacity of social media to make everyone look and sound the same. In all likelihood, you are advertising your conformity, not your individuality. That you may have âtravelled inâ (i.e. gone on holiday to) south east Asia, or wherever, is of zero fascination to someone sorting through a stack of CVs. There may be some youthful achievements that do catch a recruiterâs eye â musical proficiencies etc â but savvy employers are realising that what these most clearly signify is having pushy parents with money to spare. Ditto academic qualifications not relevant to the job.
What is relevant to the job, however, is how well you perform it. Which is why I was troubled by Petersenâs explanation for the less impressive side of the Millennial work ethic:
âThey show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that theyâre bad at work because of just how much work they do â especially when itâs performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness.â
If the overwork comes from the job itself, then that is the employerâs fault. But if the distraction is coming from outside the job â and especially the âdemandsâ of maintaining oneâs image on social media, then it is the employee and his or her screwed-up sense of priorities that is most immediately to blame. You should never be so focused on âperforming the selfâ that you fail to see where you fit in to the needs of others â especially those to whom you owe an honest dayâs work.
Even in those cases where online activity does contribute to a positive professional reputation, it is highly unlikely to be more important than the reputation you establish by making a decent fist of what youâre actually paid to do. That the gateways to entry-level employment, and thus the chance to prove yourself, are often exploited (through unpaid internships and other abuses) is disgusting, but it doesnât change the fact that diligence matters.
So, forget Twitter, Instagram or Facebook â the social network that really matters to your career is the one that forms organically whenever people of the same trade meet together to gossip about their colleagues. If you can feel your ears burning, itâs probably because theyâre sharing their own direct experience of your performance and treatment of others in the workplace. If your social media self-performance comes up at all, itâll only be to note the distance between image and reality.
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In reading Petersenâs account of the Millennial culture of optimisation â âas children, in college, onlineâ â I was struck by the thought that it wasnât optimisation at all. The dictionary definition of the word is âmaking the best or most effective use of a situation or resourceâ. But if itâs true that the process âculminates in the dominant millennial conditionâ of âburnoutâ then quite clearly it is not optimal. In fact, Iâd describe it as a process of maximisation: helicopter parents filling-up their childrenâs schedules with organised activity; eternal students racking up academic qualifications; consumers compulsively acquiring âexperiencesâ and regurgitating them online. This is life as a form filling exercise.
Petersen argues that âmany of the tasks Millennials find paralysing are one that are impossible to optimise for efficiencyâ, possibly because âthey remain stubbornly analogâ. I suspect the real problem is that, unlike the digital interactions that tech companies make so addictive, thereâs no electronically-mediated reward, no equivalent to âinbox zeroâ or the affirming recognition of a âlikeâ or âfollowâ.
To the Millennial maximiser, the more quantifiable the achievement the better. From course credits to retweets, itâs all about the points â and what do points mean? Prizes! Except that real life, real work, real achievement remains profoundly qualitative. Points do not necessarily translate into prizes. Petersen says that Millennials have internalised the idea that they should be working all the time. I donât doubt it, but a lot of the effort theyâve actually put in isnât actually work, not in any useful sense. The âpointsâ that theyâve been chasing are the reward â and often the only reward â of a series of expensive and time-consuming displacement activities.
In taking issue with some aspects of Petersenâs argument, Iâm not disagreeing with its central thrust. On the contrary, what she gets wrong serves as further illustration for what she gets right â which, fundamentally, is that Millennials have been sold a lie. In fact, a whole basket of lies.
As she says in the context of student debt, the cost isnât just financial, but also âthe psychological toll of realizing that youâd been told, and came to believe yourself, would be âworth itâ â worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization â isnâtâ.
Well, quite.
But hereâs the bitterest twist in the tale: many of the cool careers that Millennials are so ambitious to break into are with the industries most responsible for misleading them. The media, big tech and academia â these are the deceivers-in-chief. These are the guys peddling the dreams that cost so much for so little return.
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