Doomscrolling

The great thing about getting older is discovering, usually by accident, that half the things you have complained about for years were not really principles at all. They were just preferences with a hat on.

This occurred to me in the back of a car on the way to BCA Blackbushe, where Hayley and I were being taken to collect three cars. Two teenagers were in the front, chatting away. Hayley and I were in the back, both on our phones.

For years, people of our age have been told, and have often told each other, that teenagers no longer talk. They just stare at their phones. They grunt. They scroll. They communicate in fragments, symbols and little bursts of digital nonsense. Conversation, apparently, died somewhere between the invention of the smartphone and the disappearance of the Ford Cortina.

Except the teenagers in the front were talking perfectly well.

Not merely talking, either. They were properly engaged. Animated, alert, full of opinions. It just happened to be teenage car chat, which is a specialised branch of human speech best understood by those whose insurance quotes still look like punishment beatings.

Every engine, trim level, alloy wheel, acceleration figure and faintly ridiculous modification was apparently worth discussing. They had the tone of two people dealing with weighty matters. You half expected one of them to say, “Of course, the real issue with the 1.6 is torque delivery in the mid-range,” while the other nodded gravely, as if this settled the matter for all civilised people.

Meanwhile, in the back, Hayley and I were on our phones.

Not doomscrolling, I should add. That would be crude and slightly too convenient. I was researching the connection between periods of great art and periods of national wealth, because apparently I now do Renaissance economics between car collections. Hayley was arranging work appointments, because some people remain useful to society.

But from the outside, of course, we looked exactly like the thing our generation likes to complain about. Two older people, silent in the back, gazing at glowing rectangles while the young people in the front carried the conversation.

That is the funny bit. The old accusation had quietly reversed itself. The young were being sociable. The older generation were apparently lost to screens, even if one of them was studying art, wealth and patronage while being driven to a car auction, which may be the most middle-class sentence I have written this month.

It was not that they could not talk. It was that we did not particularly want to listen.

This is where a lot of generational complaint begins to look a bit suspect. When people say the young do not communicate, what they often mean is that the young do not communicate in a way that flatters the older listener. They talk to each other. They laugh at jokes we do not understand. They care deeply about things we consider absurd, which is a bit rich, frankly, given that we once had serious opinions about cassette decks, carburettors and whether a vinyl roof improved a car.

We forget this. We imagine our youthful conversations were full of wit, insight and promise. In reality, quite a lot of them were probably drivel with better hair.

So there we were, rolling towards Blackbushe. Youth in the front, talking. Age in the back, researching Renaissance patronage and organising work appointments. A complete inversion, achieved without anyone making a speech, launching a government inquiry, or writing a stern column about the collapse of civilisation.

It was almost enough to make one reflect seriously on the unfairness of generational stereotypes.

Almost.

Then one of them started on about something with a remap and a pop-and-bang exhaust, and I returned gratefully to Renaissance patronage. Most unlike me, as I have an opinion on something like that.