Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy

Are we as rank as I make out, this generation – the ones born between about 1950 and 1970, the Cold War kids? It is a perverse and narcissistic conceit, that one’s own generation is exceptional in some way, usually a bad way. A similar narcissism to that which afflicts the whacko millennialists with their mad pamphlets and their mad fervour, hungry for annihilation, the end-time Christians and the strange people hunkered down in caves awaiting deliverance. And the similarly transfixed end-time ecomonkeys, waving aloft their forlorn polar bears, no less convinced that a more congenially secular annihilation is just around the corner. Every generation thinks that it is in some way the worst, or the best, or the last, or the first, has been singled out in some way – conclusions drawn from imperfect memories of how things once were, and usually addled by a treacly gallon or two of personal guilt and private misgivings. Personal guilt will undoubtedly intrude here, too, because in many ways I am typical of my generation, in my own selfishness: did I mention the divorce, the lawyers, the money, that stuff? The broken family? And this is a book drawn rather more from anecdotal evidence than from science.

It is possible, then, that this selfishness I’m talking about is actually only my own, which through some convenient psychological process I have extended to an entire generation as a long-winded attempt at exculpation. But I don’t think so. You’ve seen our balance of payments, heard about the vast ocean of personal debt, are aware that marriages don’t last very long these days, that our schools are not as highly regarded as once they were, that there is much less sense of community in your neighbourhood, a dumbed-down culture blaring out of your idiotbox, a nagging dissatisfaction and acquisitiveness at large, and probably inside your own skull. It comes from us, from me, all that stuff; our generation. You might be inclined to blame the bankers, or the politicians, or the divorce courts, or the teachers, or any one of a number of convenient social groups habitually given a kicking by the red-top press. But it’s not them, primarily. It’s us.

The next year for Christmas I got a large tinplate garage which had a manually-operated lift to take the toy cars to the top floor, and a ramp down which they exited onto the carpet. That was shit too, now I come to think of it. We never learn.

* Actually, having said that, rickets is back. According to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health there was a fourfold increase in this disease of malnourishment (basically, a lack of vitamin D) in the fifteen years leading up to 2010. Also, the Daily Mail reported in March 2013 that some bloke in San Diego got a ‘smallpox-like disease’ as a consequence of doing something jiggy with someone who had been inoculated against smallpox. But that’s probably just the Daily Mail being deranged.

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