Following on from an example of Betteridge’s law of headlines the other day, we get another from the BBC. Well, sort of…
Have young people never had it so bad?
Although this one is more cleverly worded because there’s a cunning double negative to be had. The answer of course is to remind them of generations of yore who had to endure starvation, hardship, the workhouse, conscription and war.
I’m sorry, but this meme about young ‘uns today having it hard is tosh.
The article tries to deal with the above points by cutting off the start date at fifty years ago thereby conveniently sidestepping child labour, long shifts at the cotton mill or munitions factory and the trenches. However, fifty years ago my generation lived in houses without central heating, modern gadgets, two wage earners and someone to fund us through university. Indeed, most of us didn’t go to university, we got ourselves low paid menial jobs from which to work our way up.
The current generation has grown up in a consumer society with luxuries we couldn’t dream of because most of them hadn’t been invented. As for the housing nonsense – no, it isn’t the fault of the baby boomers, because a whole generation is not a homogenous mass with a hive mind. We are individuals. And many of those individuals will be leaving their progeny with a sizeable inheritance when they shuffle off the mortal coil and many will not, because they never had it in the first place. That’s how it goes – one generation dies and leaves its worldly goods to the one following it.
And, no, we are not stealing your jobs, either.