Unlike the rest of Oxfordshire, I wasn’t at Truck Festival this past weekend, but this piece apparently appeared in the festival newspaper (yes, really) on Sunday, so, yeah.

I find everything stressful. Including things that are relaxing and enjoyable to other people. Like listening to live music, for instance.

It’s fine if I can sit down. But at a festival, say, when a band is up on stage and a large army audience is thrashing around me like a school of unruly fish, I become consumed by this thought: I don’t know what to do with my hands.

I also don’t know what to do with my feet. Or my head. Or my fingers or my toes or my hair, for that matter. So while the band plays, I just stand there and clutch my heavy handbag (I obviously have to bring two books minimum to a gig, don’t you?) and feel self-conscious.

Do you know what it’s like to be self-conscious? It feels like everyone can see inside you. They can see your blood pumping in your veins, and they disapprove of it.

So I go to gigs, and everyone watches me, even the band, and I don’t move. At all. Because I can’t move. Because I don’t know what to do with my hands and I’m not drunk enough not to care what I look like. In fact I’m not even holding a drink, because if I try to hold a drink I end up spilling it when some carefree girl* bumps into me.

It never used to matter. In my early gig-going days I was too busy trying to avoid getting elbowed in the face by wannabe punk-rock boys with blue hair, red zits and Dickies shorts to have much time to worry about what I looked like (if I was concerned about what I looked like, I wouldn’t have dyed my hair maroon).

But later, when I’d outgrown the maroon hair, I realized this: I never know what to do with myself. I don’t know what to do with myself at parties or in the pub or when I meet someone I know in the street. I certainly don’t know what to do with myself when I have the option to move all of my limbs, unfettered by the need to maintain dignity (because, let’s face it, there is not a single dignified thing about a festival).

So I stand there. Eventually maybe I tap my foot. I like the foot tap: it implies I have a sense of rhythm, that I’m really appreciating the music. But my hands are resolutely limp and until someone tells me WHAT THE HELL TO DO WITH THEM they will remain so.

Now stop staring at me and go listen to some music.

*Oh, you know exactly the sort of girl I mean. She flaps her arms haphazardly and manages to look like Martha Graham; she’s been drinking heavily since last night but her heavy mascara hasn’t run yet and she’s just so cool, she doesn’t give a shit what she looks like and she looks great.

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Oh wow, another article about entitlement! This one from the Sunday Times Style Magazine, so I can’t link to it. I can tell you what it looks like, though. I studied it pretty closely over poussin and an elderflower pressé at my local. A young model-type in a pleated skirt and too-big saddle shoes stands looking confident next to the headline: “Because I’m worth it”. “Celebrity culture, parenting, easy credit and technology have combined to produce a generation that expects it all – on a plate,” we learn. “Kate Spicer investigates the new entitlement.”

Well, thank goodness! It’s about bloody time somebody investigated! Because, you know, I’ve been sitting here on the edge of my seat, thinking, gee whiz, it’s been, like, TWO DAYS since someone last wrote an article slamming my generation, and, well, who knows what sort of amazing new insight we’re gonna get this time.

Sadly the piece doesn’t quite deliver. It opens with a description of “Entitlement Top Trumps”, a game editors apparently invented at fashion week to amuse themselves when the outfits didn’t sufficiently scratch their itch for the outrageous, and never really goes any deeper.

An example: the girl who shows up late to her first day of work in hot pants and a rude t-shirt and promptly insults the company she’s working for. Later her father calls in to apologise on her behalf (overly-involved parents are often cited as a major flaw of my generation) and the girl keeps her job.

Why? It’s not like, “in an era when university students are no longer guaranteed a job on graduation, and 2.5 million are unemployed,” there’s no one else out there to hire.

But it comes down to this: we all know what makes good (trainwreck) television – shock, horror, drama, immaturity, stunts. Bad behaviour is rewarded, good behaviour is just boring. And it strikes me that these things are now as valued in the workplace (and in print media) as they are on screen. Employers and reporters alike get off on being able to gripe to each other about the disgraceful antics of their twentysomething employees and counterparts (I’m just guessing here, it’s not like I’ve ever seen this happen, but if “Entitlement Top Trumps” is anything to go by, I’m not necessarily wrong). And they won’t fire hot-pant-meddling-parents girl because she’s much more interesting to gripe about than a hard(ish) working kid who mostly does what he’s told. “OMG SHE LIT UP A JOINT AND TOOK HER TOP OFF AND SHOOK HER TITS AT ME AND THEN HER DADDY CAME IN AND TOLD US ALL TO STOP BEING SO HARD ON HIS PRINCESS” is way more fun (in the sense that watching Big Brother or X-Factor is “fun”) than, “uh, yeah, my intern looked really tired today but then he had a pretty good idea in the meeting.”

Of course, what makes good TV, by extension, makes “good” journalism, too. The same story is told over and over again, from the same angle. Wow, we find ourselves thinking. This generation sure is full of crazies. And we’re not entirely wrong to think this: Spicer references a 2007 study by Jean Twenge which concluded that “college students today are more narcissistic and self-centered than a generation ago,” and I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t think my generation had been royally but unintentionally fucked by all the preschool teachers and therapists and family friends and graduation speakers who told us, unequivocally, that we could be anything we wanted when we grew up. I’d also be lying if I told you I didn’t honestly expect, when I earned my first degree, and then my second, that it would be a hell of a lot easier than it’s turned out to be.

There is truth in these accusations of entitlement. But there is also insincerity – and inconsistency – in the way they are presented. Part of what concerns me is the seemingly schizophrenic attitude towards twentysomethings – “fired up with a new spirit of entrepreneurship”! but also “the most obnoxious, self-entitled, lazy and willfully ignorant generation ever to pollute the surface of the earth” – that the mainstream media seems to have.

That entrepreneurial spirit is fuelled by our narcissism and sense of entitlement. And that narcissism and sense of entitlement is only reinforced by the attention we get for being so attention-seeking. And for as long as attention-seeking is what we want to watch, it’s what we’re going to get.

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I don’t really know if I want to write about this.

Or maybe I know that I don’t really want to write about it, but I can’t help myself because I’m so self-absorbed (and because I want another excuse to think about Facebook! Because I’m under the age of 30 and therefore FACEBOOK IS THE ONLY THING THAT REALLY MATTERS, besides myself).

But here goes:

In March 3rd’s “Why Is This News?”, Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr address a recent study that shows that Facebook is helping to boost millennials’ self-esteem.

And yes, it’s a slightly ridiculous study and yes, there are probably better uses of the time and resources that went into conducting it (overthrowing corrupt governments, curing diseases, “helping organize protests for democracy”, which is obviously what all the hallowed entrepreneurs of the world are concerned with doing – solving “hard problems using technology” – though funnily enough, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is an entrepreneur, too). But it strikes me that any interesting analysis in this segment has been sadly buried beneath the glib jokes about how unemployable and narcissistic are people born after 1980.

Which makes me wonder: do they think that nobody born after 1980 knows about TechCrunch? (I guess they do think this, because it isn’t FACEBOOK!). Or that our self-esteem is so high that we’ll just shrug off the accusation that we’re becoming “more insufferable” and “more entitled” with a LOL and a quick profile update?

Lacy does make a few attempts at balance – “obviously we’re not saying everyone in this generation is like this” – but the overwhelming impression is that she and Carr are just enjoying taking the piss (“certainly the press release as far as I can tell is spelled correctly and uses the correct grammar, so, you know, there’s definitely a non-millenial hand at work here,” Carr quips). And it’s possible that what actually annoys me is not at all what they’re saying, but the fact that I admire Lacy’s work, and in that weird and irrational way that you want to think that all the famous people you admire would like you, as a person, I like to think she would like me, and now I’m worried that she never could because I was born in 1987. Which is obviously both stupid and self-absorbed.

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For me, though, the most interesting point is not that young people have artificially high self-esteem and think it’s their right to spend all day at work on Facebook. It’s actually one that Carr brings up towards the end of the dialogue: “The way you used to get self-esteem was by achieving something, like, you would be the fastest runner, or the best entrepreneur, or the, you know, cleverest mathematician. Now you just have to tell people, you have to be the best at telling people those things.”

I have rarely heard a truer thing said, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a generational issue. I’ve been told by people young and old that the best way to get ahead (whatever that means) nowadays is to shout about yourself. I’ve been told, in fact, that I need to spend more time shouting, and less time doing (I think the commonly used phrase is, “put yourself out there!”). If you want to be a writer, for instance, you have to aggressively market yourself. You have to be the best at telling people about yourself, not necessarily the best at doing what you do. Because there’s so much noise already. Which makes sense, I guess? IT’S SO LOUD OUT THERE SO I’M JUST GOING TO KEEP RAISING MY VOICE UNTIL SOMEONE HEARS ME!!!!!!!! And people do, amazingly, get heard above the din. So it works, in a way.

But the idea that achievement has been devalued is an interesting one, and it’s perhaps supported by Carr’s suggestion that nobody can find any good millennial employees (“Mike [Arrington] was saying…the struggle he’s having to find a new executive assistant…the floods of resumes that come in, and it’s all like not good candidates, sub-par candidates. My parents, you know, recruit for their business, and they can’t find…in this entire generation…”).

Carr and Lacy joke that it’s because millennials can’t spell their own names correctly, but I wonder if it’s actually because all achievements look the same on paper, and if some are artificial, they may as well all be.

Take FACEBOOK!, which is really just a form of social resume-building, a record of relationships, interactions and social circles (“sets”, to use the archaic but still accurate terminology of Charles Ryder). Those of us who were at university when FACEBOOK! emerged learned (along with how to discuss politics with a hangover and the best places on campus for a midday nap) how to claim social achievement without necessarily having to feel it. At first it was a novelty – you could literally see how many people you were connected to! (A number which was not always, by the way, a self-esteem boost, especially when you compared yourself to the blonde sorority girls whose friend count always seemed to exceed the 1,000 mark). But the word “friend” set us up for failure; not every 1,071 of the sorority girl’s friends were actually friends, just like not every achievement listed on a millennial’s resume actually means anything. Plenty of us have a university degree (or two, or three). Plenty of us made photocopies and coffee for congresspeople or CEOs. Plenty of us played sports or starred in plays or started our own bands or our own companies or our own revolutions. And now it’s mostly just noise.

And this is a problem. Because while it may, as Lacy suggests, actually help clear the field for those hard-working millenials who can spell (“if you’re one of the people…who’s still working really hard…what an advantage you have in this workforce,” Lacy says), it also indicates that of all the things we generally are, as a generation – selfish, narcissistic, Facebook-obsessed, insufferable – what’s impacted us the most is our skill at and susceptibility to advertising. We’ve actually been seduced by our own spin, even if no one else has.

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All of which leads me to believe that we need to reframe the discussion about millenials. I actually wrote about this once before, in response to another Paul Carr piece. I didn’t publish what I wrote, mostly because my rage subsided so quickly that I could hardly muster the energy to finish the last sentence. Over the course of writing about Carr’s suggestion that millennials are “the most obnoxious, self-entitled, lazy and willfully ignorant generation ever to pollute the surface of the earth,” I discovered that I wasn’t actually angry about this assertion because it was unfair (or even particularly untrue): I was angry because the piece never reached its full potential. The really good stuff – a citation of a study that showed how “millennials as a whole ‘have unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback’”, for instance – was left largely unexplored, stifled by all the accusations and funny little quips.

So I guess what bothers me most is not what’s said about millennials – it’s what isn’t said, it’s what’s not said because everyone is too busy being so damn funny. Yes, let’s talk about the fact that achievement has been redefined. Let’s talk about the fact that Facebook has basically ruined any chance my generation ever had of being taken seriously, because even though we’re not the only ones who use Facebook anymore, we made it what it is. Let’s talk about the idea of constructing identities online. But let’s talk about it in a different way.

***

Anyway, as Lacy says, “part of this is tongue-in-cheek, but this actually does really concern me.” I’m off to go post a link to this on my Facebook page.

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Every year is the same and every year I think it is different. The blackened trees stand defenseless against a pale sky and the parks are wet and the fog at night lies heavy, suppresses my breathing. The streets are littered with the pieces of plastic and cardboard that the wind stole one rebellious morning and even the shop window displays are bleakly ambiguous: jewel coloured party dresses (for a spring wedding!), bare shoulders, boots, murky raincoats that can’t decide whether to be warm or to be whimsical.

The whole world is brown and made of stone. One Saturday we decide to walk into town because it is sunny and warmer than usual, but there is a wind blowing, and if you sit outside for too long your fingertips start to go numb, so you have to keep moving: through the ceaseless throngs of tourists, the packs of Big Beautiful Blonde Undergraduates, the sporty types in shorts and college sweatshirts carrying lacrosse sticks or sacks of hockey gear. I start to hate them all. They look smug, though I only think they look smug because they look happy. The funny thing is that I probably look happy too, because I am happy, if I don’t think about them; I am in town buying underwear which is something I have been needing to do for a long time, and later the Man and I will go and buy a toilet brush together, and some coathangers, just before nightfall, in the dewey evening, and it will be one of the most strangely intimate moments we have ever had. But right now, in town, watching the parade, I say to the Man: everybody else is dressed better than I am, and what I actually mean is, I’m cold, let’s go into the Covered Market and buy some cheese. But that’s the other trick of This Time of Year: the way it steals the words you want to say and makes you say something else entirely.

I always think that at This Time of Year it would be possible to think that no one really lives in Oxford, that it’s just people passing through. Some of them, like the school group from Spain that cross the street as an unruly army, will be gone in a few days, while others, like the three friends meeting for a sandwich outside the Radcliffe Camera, will be gone in a few years. We don’t even see anyone we know, which is unusual here, because everyone pretty much knows everyone else, in a roundabout sort of way. But everyone is in hiding, or, more likely, is too self-absorbed, too completely engrossed in the drama of early February, or is it mid February, or does it even matter, to notice each other. I know I am, but I can’t really speak for anyone else.

On the Cowley Road, construction begins on a new supermarket, directly opposite the old supermarket. At night the darkness falls tantalisingly slowly, now, and students who have drunk too much in order to feel warm again are sick on the sidewalks. Even the pubs, which gave such comfort in the tilt towards winter, with their wood fires and warm glows and pints of bitter on a Saturday afternoon with a P.G. Wodehouse novel and the falling leaves outside, are now just loud and hot, the glow too bright, the fire a reminder of the cold, not an alleviator of it.

I wear torn tights and worn-out boots, not because that’s all I have, but because that’s all I have the energy to wear. In the mirror my face has become obscured by my hair, not because I have not brushed it but because I have brushed it in just such a way that it falls like a veil. The air inside is unbearably dry; my nose hurts – my nostrils hurt, my NOSTRILS! – and my lips crack. I stop shaving my legs because my razors are all too dull and because I have ceased to be able to remember what it’s like to have bare legs, even though every night I go to sleep with bare legs, even though hardly a month ago I was in California walking on the beach in shorts and a bikini top. I force myself to forget my own proximity to these experiences for the sake of feeling grumpy.

Every year I think this is the first time in the History of EVERYTHING EVER that anyone has been miserable in late winter. Every year I think that only my body aches and only my mind is tormented by the breath of summer’s memory in my ear as I sleep. Every year I think this is the first time I have felt this way, or else I think that I have not felt this way at all, that I’ve escaped! until one night I fall asleep realising that I have felt the same way I always feel at this stupid time of year – right before my birthday, right before the beginning of the period when you are allowed to start to Hope For Spring. Just maybe in different ways. And I start to be annoyed that I have framed even good things so negatively – I want to capture the sweetness of buying a toilet brush better, I want to say how beautiful and blue the sky was as we walked down Queen’s Lane towards the bus stop and what a relief it was to be home in the late afternoon before the darkness had fallen and how we had a cup of tea and cleaned the fridge out and pulled chunks of ice away from the sides of the freezer and laughed. But even being annoyed about that is a form of negativity and I worry I’ve been poisoned by the hot dry inside air.

Is it spring yet?

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Last Sunday the Man did that thing that people sometimes do to their backs, which pretty much puts them out of commission for a period of days, sometimes weeks. It started out innocently enough – just a strain, perhaps it’ll be better by tomorrow – but by Wednesday he was immobile, and I was trying to put his socks on but actually just tickling his toes in a way which made him laugh and then cry out in pain from laughing. And he was spending up to two hours trying to get from prone to upright and it was so painful and shocking to see that it was somehow also hysterically funny, and every ten minutes or so I would leave the room to giggle, like a child (when I was 6, my best friend broke her arm by trying to do a back handspring in my parents’ living room, and I ran into my room and laughed uncontrollably, even though I didn’t find it in the least bit funny). Although also somehow the injury had made his pelvis jut out at a funny angle, so it looked a little like he’d got stuck doing a sort of Elvis dance move, and if you didn’t think about the pain or the awkwardness, that was pretty funny, in a way.

Anyway, it hasn’t been the smoothest week, really.

So today he was feeling well enough to leave the house for the first time since Monday. We thought we’d celebrate by going down to our local pub for a roast lunch. It’s a manageable walk because it’s only about ten feet away from our house, and the food is never disappointing, and I’d spent all morning in bed, moaning about how I’d squandered the entire day already and WHAT WAS THE POINT, so I think secretly the Man was hoping I’d order myself a glass of wine and CHILL. THE. FUCK. OUT.

But instead what I did was order a bloody mary even though I wasn’t hungover and then sipped it so slowly that I’d still be sipping it if i hadn’t given up at a certain point and abandoned it on the table. The food was lovely and the Man was able to sit upright and I flipped through the Sunday Times Style magazine and wondered why we were looking at spring dresses already when it isn’t even February and every morning I wake up under a layer of frost and think it won’t ever be warm again. And I’m sorry if it’s unfashionable: I am not going to start thinking about my SPRING WARDROBE, I am going to continue stockpiling jumpers because you never know when it will be so cold that you will want to wear them all at once. (Today, for instance, I am wearing just two, but a few days ago I wore four at once.)

And actually the whole experience would probably have been lovely, except that the pub was full of pretty young people having fun.

How annoying is a bunch of pretty young people having fun when you’re not in the mood for pretty or fun? There were all these girls mincing around the pub. The sort of beautiful girls that look at you – or rather, quite deliberately don’t look at you – and assume they have right-of-way because, well, they’re prettier. Or, more accurately, they’re more expensively dressed and their skin is tan even though no one in Britain has seen the sun in about six months. And they looked what I think is called “radiant”. Even their teeth were whiter than mine, and let’s be honest: as an American, I should have the advantage there. It’s my right. They get the cute accents and the sense of style, I get the gleaming teeth.

And the most annoying thing, of course, is that actually they’re probably just as insecure as everyone else.

So these sort of pretty-Sloaney girls with serious cheekbones and wide eyes who were probably just as insecure as I am were making me feel unwelcome even though they weren’t doing anything unwelcoming, and I’d squandered the rest of the day by eating a sandwich and not finishing my bloody mary even though the day wasn’t, technically, over yet. And it was sunny and beautiful outside but not warm, and the Man’s back still hurt, even if he could put his own pants on now, and time – “like an ever-rolling stream” – just kept rolling, and I was not its master, and soon it would be evening, and soon enough night, and soon enough the weekend would be over, and pretty soon, really, it would be spring, and I would be wearing a sleeveless dress and flipping through the Sunday Times Style magazine looking at autumn-coloured knitwear and wondering why I would want to think about scarves in this glorious weather.

And back at home there was laundry to do and never quite enough time to do it.

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