Be it boobs or fertility, younger people will always think they know best – so, says our style expert, older people are bound to find the next generation self-entitled and arrogant

I’m a millennial. Why do older people hate me so much?

Charlotte, by email

Because you ruin everything, Charlotte. This is literally a scientific fact (possibly not literally, possibly not scientific, possibly not a fact). You ruined cereal (allegedly), marmalade and fabric softener, by deciding that life was too short for all of the above, and now you’re ruining breasts. Yes, breasts!

According to the scientific folks over at, er, PornHub, 18- to 24-year-olds are 19% less likely to Google “show me hot boooobz” than their elders. Especially, it turns out, their elders in the 55- to 64-year-old bracket who are 17% more likely to be looking at breasts online than doing pretty much anything else, as far as I can tell. No one has yet confirmed that perhaps accidentally discovering their parents’ browsing history is what has put millennials off breasts, but no one has confirmed it isn’t that either. So let’s go with that theory.

And just look at the tragic after-effects of this development: the number of Hooters’ restaurants declined by a cleavage-deflating 7% between 2012 and 2016. “Part of Hooters’ struggles are tied to the sales slump that is hitting most sit-down casual dining chains. However, a lack of interest in waitresses’ cleavage likely isn’t helping,” tuts Business Insider. Wait, but I thought people went to Hooters for the food?

Tch, young people! What’s wrong with you, too busy spreading avocado on artisanal toast beneath industrial lighting to eye up some waitress’s cleavage while eating a fatty burger? Whatever happened to old-fashioned values?

Anyway, despite ruining everything, I must reassure you, Charlotte, and say I’m more surprised by all the articles asking why older people are irritated with millennials than the fact of the irritation itself. Older people have always found youngsters irritating, self-entitled and arrogant, because young people are irritating, self-entitled and arrogant. That’s part of the joy of being young, and part of the compensation of getting older is you can snuggle on down in your smug eiderdown of condescension about The Youth Today. Young people insist they’ve discovered something new, old people tell them they discovered it 30 years ago, and on and on it goes. The circle of life! Hakuna matata!

I was thinking of this the other week when I came across an article written by a millennial titled “Millennials on motherhood”, which made the shocking revelation that twentysomething women today are aware of something called “fertility”. This, of course, puts them in sharp contrast to all women before them who blithely assumed they could have babies when they were 80. As is de rigueur for this genre of journalism, there is the usual doomy talk about “the women we work with, who, though now in the influential positions at work we one day want, woke up at 39 and realised they had forgotten to have children. Whoops.” And this is true, because women in their 40s are actually Roy Lichtenstein cartoons as opposed to people who grew up in the 1990s.

“We’re the most switched-on to our bodies that young women ever have been. Contraception has been a talking point since we were 11,” the article further reveals, which really is quite a shocker. After all, I didn’t learn about menstrual cycles, ovulation and contraception until I was 48, when I crawled out of my cave and a 25-year-old explained a few things to me.

Articles about how women in the previous generation got everything wrong when it came to combining careers and families, and the new generation definitely won’t make those mistakes, is the journalistic rite of passage – equivalent to insisting you’ll never be like your saddo parents. As heritage artist Justin Timberlake once said, what goes around comes around, kiddos.

And this is all as it should be. I was reminded of this recently while re-reading Joan Didion’s 1979 book The White Album. In her essay on The Women’s Movement, she writes about the various debates in feminism (is it patronising to women to suggest catcalling is offensive? Can housework ever be fulfilling?) – debates that I remember pondering ever so seriously at university in 1998, certain I had discovered a new issue. Sorry, Joan. I was a young person.

But here’s the really annoying thing about young people: in many ways, they are better than you were when you were their age. No, really, they are. Just because time marches ever forward, they are more aware of things like LGBT rights than you ever were, and are growing up in a world where people are at least insisting on a wider interpretation of, for example, beauty. So instead of drooling over waitresses in tight T-shirts in Hooters, millennials can watch Charli XCX’s delightful Boys video. Now, I am not a millennial but I am completely obsessed with this video and am filled with envy for a generation that gets to grow up with this in its pop culture. Imagine being a teenager today and watching a music video in which the likes of Riz Ahmed, Stormzy, Jack Antonoff, Tinie Tempah and dozens more are celebrated for their happy boyish beauty. This is a truly solid building block to have in your formative years. And really, what on earth could a place like Hooters say to this generation, other than: “Try the coffee store next door, you’ll find it far less depressing”?

So, in conclusion, don’t feel attacked, young people: older people were always grumpy with the younger generation. And to all the 55- to 64-year-olds out there? Maybe give all that boob Googling a rest, OK? Take a tip from your kids on this.

Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com.

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