Sam Boland: Young people do not need Gen X in their social spaces

Stuck under parents’ roofs, sacrificing chunks of their formative years to covid lockdowns to keep older people alive, young people do not now need us wrinklies in their social space

Mon, 19 Aug, 2024 - 10:00

Sam Boland

To give you some idea of where this article is coming from, I had to get my daughter to put a Chappell Roan record on the Spotify machine for research purposes.

Chappell Roan is the Gen Z pop star du jour, and serves as a yardstick in a recent Irish Examiner column that has ruffled a few feathers. Last Friday, Jane Cowan wrote in her Diary of a Gen Z Student that people over a certain age shouldn’t be allowed into nightclubs. If you haven’t heard of Chappell Roan, no entry.

“Ageism,” came the predictable response from people who had forgotten their own 20-year-old self’s attitude to the middle aged. And of course, because this story involves a woman with an opinion, there were a few men on social media (who ironically are old enough to know better) with plenty of personal remarks to make about Jane.

To clarify, though we are colleagues, Jane and I have never met. I work in production, making sure there’s enough coal in the burners to keep the ship going full- steam ahead, and that job takes place in Cork. Jane is based in Dublin, along with high-falutin’ Irish Examiner folk such as political editors, whose job it is to make sure we steer clear across the ocean and don’t crash into any icebergs. Jane is also just a handful of years older than my daughter, so we wouldn’t exactly move in the same circles anyway.

However, when it comes to the subject of oldies in nightclubs, we are in inter-generational agreement. For one thing, as a Gen Xer, the idea of thrashing around a nightclub at my time of life is deeply unappealing.

If you haven’t heard of Gen Z pop star Chappell Roan, should you even be going to a nightclub?

I’m a danger to myself, for a start, what with my bad knees (earned, ironically, by wearing inappropriate footwear throughout my 20s — take heed, Jane) and failing eyesight.

I’m a danger to others as well, the disco lights reflecting brightly enough off my bald spot to blind my fellow revellers.

There’s nowhere to sit, you can’t hear what your friends are saying, your drink (which was far too expensive, by the way) is definitely getting spilled, and, worst of all, there’s all these young people roaming around expecting you to have heard of Chappell Roan.

Secondly, modern nightclubs now are just not designed for us — and that’s okay. My youth coincided with the heydays of Sir Henry’s in Cork, Termites in Limerick, The Castle in Galway — venues that could, at best, be described as ‘no frills’. As long as the tunes were good and the beer was cheap, you could overlook the grimy floor and the sweating walls. (Are these glasses rose-tinted? That’s the only colour they come in, man!)

Now, nightclubs have to serve as the perfect backdrops for the TikToks and Instagram reels that form part of Gen Z’s social life, and I hate to break it to you, my fellow wrinklies, but that style of lighting is not forgiving. As well as the liver spots and the jowls, it’ll show you for what you are — an old person in a young person’s space.

Sir Henry’s in Cork was among venues that could be described as ‘no frills’. Picture: Theresa Lucey

Is this terribly harsh on someone who just wants to have a bit of a late-night boogie? Though my memory is fading as the oul’ dementia sets in, I still remember the thrill of walking into Freakscene or Mór Disco in the mid-90s. It was the thrill of the unexpected, of the unknown. You might meet new people, hear new music, have new experiences. Life-long friends were made, bands were formed, worlds were changed. How much thrill can there be when you’ve spent 25 years walking into nightclubs and your formational experiences are long behind you?

Whose life are you trying to live — or relive?

Oldies infesting Gen Z’s nightlife is symptomatic of a broader generational concertina-ing.

It actually first affected my own generation, Gen X, in what has been called the ‘grey ceiling’, whereby Baby Boomers live longer and retire later, thus keeping upper management jobs for themselves and trapping Gen X in middle management at best.

This also causes wealth hoarding and property hoarding to such an extent that Millennials, the generation between X and Z, became the first generation in centuries to be worse off than their parents. Knock-on effects mean there are fewer public spaces, parks, and amenities for young people; as for renting or owning their own spaces, forget it.

The Irish Examiner last week profiled the Bottleworks student accommodation, where rooms start at €240 a week — 10 times what I paid for a room in my first year in college. There is nowhere for young people to go and exist together as a community unless they can pay through the nose, so if they can scrape together the €20 nightclub entry fee and enough for a €10 drink or two (for comparison, it was £4 to get into Freakscene, where bottles of Carling were £1.50), for goodness sake let’s spare them the sight of the besuited, balding architects of their plight.

Not only is this a matter of fairness, it’s also a matter of public good. Just as the grey ceiling is said to stifle innovation, the ostracisation of young people from public life neuters creativity and progression. For example, without the free art school scene of 1960s Britain, nascent Beatles and Rolling Stones would never have had time or space to create, to challenge, to change the world.

Young people challenging our behaviour and attitudes has always been where social change has come from. Stuck under their parents’ roofs, commuting for hours to college, nowhere to spend their leisure time — and having sacrificed huge chunks of their formative years to covid lockdowns to keep older people alive — Gen Z are angry at being squeezed out of the world. Middle-aged clubbers being put back in our place by a 20-year-old newspaper columnist is just the natural order reasserting itself.