In 2010 I wrote a boo-hoo feature for this magazine about intergenerational unfairness – unaffordable houses, expensive education, crap jobs and diminished pensions. It created a modest stir: it was quoted in the Irish parliament, cited by other writers, and I was invited to discuss it on radio programmes, as well as Newsnight (I made zero impact – “For fuck’s sake, speak Hanks,” a mate texted me), Daily Politics (I didn’t get a mug) and Press TV (I declined). Now, with economic recoveries all round, the Observer wanted an update.

So, take your mind back to January 2010, a unique period in which we weren’t as rich as we wanted to be and Labour’s leader was unpopular with voters. About eight months after I wrote that piece, I went for broke in my career, which took less time than I expected. My pregnant wife and I were living in London but decided to move back to our native northeast – to be near family, for her to start a new job, for me to write a book, and so we could afford to rent a flat that was habitable by humans, as well as rodents and fungi.

After we moved, my wife had a baby and I got a job. I was earning under £20,000 a year

We arrived in Newcastle. My wife had a baby. She wanted to buy a house, but I was making £6,000 a year freelancing (three days a week; two days’ childcare) and writing a book, so we didn’t have enough. “Dear mortgage guy, lend me money, I’m on chapter six.” It was obvious to my mum that we were struggling, because every time I spoke to her I told her we were struggling. She offered me money frequently, but I always said no, because I didn’t want to be one of those people. But one day I took my son to Newcastle library to read about uppity ducks when my phone rang. It was my mum, offering a loan.

“Andrew, I can give you £500,” she said.

I said no, like always, but then she offered again and that was it: I tried to say yes, but I couldn’t because I was crying in the library, like a weirdo. My son looked at me, puzzled. I had cried about being broke before (it’s overwhelming), but this time I wasn’t crying due to stress, I was crying because my panic had transformed into gratitude, relief and love – my mum loved me and was going to take care of me. I was 32 years old.

That’s when the shakedown began. My mum had also offered me enough for a house deposit in the past. I’d always said no, but having said yes once, saying yes again was easy. I kept thinking of people I knew who’d grown up with more middle-class parents who had been helped out with their deposits. It seemed normal. So I asked my mum if the offer was still open. She said it was. Then she bought a conservatory and said it wasn’t. Then she said it was. Wary of another flip-flop, my wife arranged a mortgage.

‘Dear mortgage guy, lend me money, I’m on chapter six’: Andrew Hankinson at home in Newcastle. Photograph: Alex Telfer/The Observer

My mum gave us a £12,000 deposit, plus £2,000 to pay off my credit card, and my wife and I bought a house in a middle-class suburb of Newcastle for £150,000. Just after we moved in, my wife had a second baby and I got a job at a local magazine, working four days a week, with a day off for childcare. It was paid work, but I was earning under £20,000 a year. After considering my future, I decided I’d like more money in it. So I contacted a university lecturer about teaching, took their advice and enrolled on a Masters.

Meanwhile my book was published. It did OK. Some magazine editors liked it and asked me to write for them, but I had to say no to assignments, because I had a day job. So, after finishing my Masters, I quit. Now I’m back to book stuff and being a difficult-to-commission freelancer: “Can I spend a week in a stable to write a feature from the point of view of a racehorse?” (An idea I pitched before the posh badger guy did his thing, by the way.)

We have come of age to a job market of broken dreams, just like it said on our toilet wall when I was a kid

Things are tight, as you’d expect from a writer, but I haven’t borrowed from my mum since the deposit (until this week, in which I had to ask for £2,000 to cover a tricky period of PhD applications and a tax bill). Meanwhile, my wife had another baby (more child benefit – yeah, one of those families), so we moved to a bigger house in a less posh suburb, but our bins are still emptied on the same day as some very nice houses. All of which is great, except I did nothing to earn any of this. I didn’t merit it. I just had the right mum.

“With the Brexit vote, the old declared war on the young, and the young should respond by giving them the middle finger,” says economist Danny Blanchflower. I called him because he’s one of the people I spoke to in 2010, when he predicted a “lost generation” scarred by unemployment and low wages. The day before we speak I see Andrew Neil teasing him on Twitter about his gloomy predictions. Statistics suggest that gloom is over: youth unemployment is about 12%, its lowest since 2004 (compared with 22.5% in late 2011); self-employment is up, and people are shopping.

Rejoice! Except people working in those shops are on zero-hours contracts and many young people swapped unemployment for days spent emailing into the threadbare abyss that is the gig economy. As monetary policy committee member Michael Saunders said in a speech on the labour market in January: “Some people may prefer flexible work structures or seek to reinvent their career through self-employment. But, given that on average these less secure forms of work are also less well-paid, the expansion of contingent work probably also reflects the erosion of secure and well-paid jobs from technological gains and greater emphasis on cost control.” Young humans cost too much.

Unrejoice! About half of recent graduates are in nongraduate jobs, real wages have stagnated and, according to Blanchflower, this was Britain’s slowest recovery for 300 years, throughout which young people have been climbing the mountain of austerity, only to discover it wasn’t a mountain, it was one of those stair machines you get in gyms, and young people will be on it forever, and they’ve had to borrow money to pay for it. As Blanchflower puts it: “You’ve been recovering for seven years and you still feel shit. Everyone tells you: ‘Oh, it’s great,’ but you don’t feel great.”

Then and now: Michael Hankinson with the mocked up sign from seven years ago, and with the updated version. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/Observer

Back in the gloom of 2010, when I was writing about intergenerational unfairness, I also interviewed journalist Martin Bright, who founded the Creative Society (previously called New Deal of the Mind), a charity which helps young people find work in creative industries and lobbies for the self-employed. Six years later, I speak to him again and ask how things have changed for young unemployed people over the past few years. “Because the political message is that unemployment is fixed, it’s even worse to be unemployed now,” he says. “There is very little help. There is no political imperative.”

Instead, as the economy brightened, job centres hardened. “The culture of the benefits office, the old DHSS, has poisoned the job centres. Essentially you’re going there to be sanctioned, you’re going there to check that you are a job seeker, that you are on the path to finding work, and the process is so unpleasant you’d do anything not to do that.”

Devil’s advocate: but isn’t it better that young people are in low-paid service jobs rather than on benefits? “As you say, from a certain political perspective that is a good thing. You are working, you’re paying your taxes, you’re doing your bit as a member of society. The difficulty is, those jobs don’t really pay enough or have any kind of career structure or security that allows you to be a genuine participant in society or adult life.”

Young people have come of age to a job market of drudgery and broken dreams, just like it said on our toilet wall when I was a kid. “What’s very worrying,” says Bright, “is the levels of mental illness that we see.” He adds: “This is only anecdotal. This is just from the small group of people that we work with, but it is remarkable.” Precious snowflakes, depressed by their crap jobs, lack of power and a bleak future. What a quirky generation.

Or, just human. As Bright says: “In order to survive as a human being, you need to have a sense of identity.” That identity used to come from community, career or family role, but young people are still waiting to be something. “The difficulty is the transitory nature of a lot of employment in Britain at the moment, which means that people are very uncertain. You can call that a kind of snowflake attitude, but these mental illnesses are real.”

Tom is a 25-year-old friend of mine. I know he was depressed when he was unemployed, so I ask how he and his friends are doing. “It’s easier to list the friends who haven’t had troubles with anxiety and depression,” he says. I think back to when I was broke and had no hope for my future. I’d sit in bed (what a layabout) and fantasise about going to a forest in a T-shirt and jeans to lie down among the trees until everything stopped.

“This isn’t going to be a praise piece is it?” asks my mum. No Mum, it’s more of an audit. After she gives me the £2,000 I feel guilty, but less so when I interrogate her finances. It turns out she has thousands of pounds of savings (including redundancy money from being laid off by Northern Rock); she works part-time at a Marks & Spencer; she gets a state pension (she’s 66 years old); she gets a final salary pension; she gets a winter fuel payment (£200); and she gets a free bus pass, which she doesn’t use as she’s got a BMW.

Her monthly income is higher than mine, which is unsurprising, as I work for magazines and she worked for a bank, but it suggests she might not need pensioner benefits. She has no student loans (her degree was free), her house is paid for, and her pension covers living costs, yet the government acts like she’s pawning her thimble collection to keep the lights on, rather than ordering wine by the case and Facebooking from the Italian Lakes.

Shouldn’t benefits go to those without savings and pensions, who are entering a workplace increasingly absent of secure, long-term, well-paid jobs? “The future of work is going to look very different,” says Bright. “People are going to have to set themselves up as free agents. They’ve got to be able to teach themselves to do that. We all will. I mean, you do, I do, but no one’s really looking seriously at how that’s going to happen.”

Here’s a start: give self-employed under-35s free bus passes (I’m 36 by the way); give them £200 to help with start-up costs; if they need more education or training to increase their chance of getting work, let them claim it as a business expense; reduce the rate of national insurance for those who are self-employed and under 35; give self-employed men statutory paternity pay; increase the maternity allowance; and reduce student loan repayments.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to happen, as Bright explains: “Because government is locked up now with Brexit, it’s difficult to imagine ministers turning their mind to anything other than that.” Which is the other staggering thing: while young people are despairing over their pointless debt and bleak houselessness, older people have decided to dust off the old classics by being rude to our neighbours and cutting us off from trading partners.

Then there’s austerity: a manifestation of that delusion successful people have that they made it without anyone’s help. Politicians may have yapped about Olympic legacy, but the real legacy for future generations is closed libraries, neglected parks, sports centres under threat, urban green spaces built on, playground equipment no longer replaced (sorry kids), pools privatised, social care slashed, schools and hospitals squeezed, and rich people continuing to milk us for profit via the private finance initiative.

And who’s going to do anything about it? Who’s going to stand up and say, this is wrong, young people need opportunity, and future generations need communities? I ask Tom. “It feels very bleak at the moment,” he says. “It’s not just Trump, Brexit and the rest of it, though that is shit – it’s the ineffectiveness of Labour.”

Blanchflower has a suggestion. “They should say: ‘We’re going to take the money, lower taxes to ourselves, do things that help us.’ I mean, imagine, the young saying: ‘OK, we’re going to give every young person who wants to buy a house £100,000 and we’re going to cut pensions by 50%.’ That sounds radical, but that’s what you do. You just say: ‘Right, you’ve just screwed us, now we’re going to screw you.’”

Funnily enough, I didn’t mention that to my mum when I asked her for the £2,000. Not just because it would have queered my pitch, but also because I think threatening pensioners won’t work. Instead, young people should reconcile with older people, understand them and appeal to them, while also joining parties, becoming MPs and voting. They should grab power, and do it now, while politicians are weak, but quietly, and politely, and without providing a running commentary. Tell everyone you know.