We lay our scene at my mother’s house a few days ago. It was a rare sunny forecast and by four o’clock she had done, dried and taken in the 17 washes she had earmarked for the day, and it was time to fold down the whirligig the washing had dried on once more and put its cover back on it.
But the cover, faithful servant for many years, finally reached the end of its life of toil, and tore as she did so. No matter. She went to the cupboard where she keeps the replacement whirligig covers and put a new one on.
I watched, as I so often watch my mother, in awe, admiration and not a little fear. Because – think of me as your Peter Hall or Nicholas Hytner for a moment – let’s unpack that scene a little, shall we?
There are the loads of washing primed and ready to go and the close eye kept on the weather forecast. She triangulates via app, daily newspaper report and the evening news, like a Swat team synchronising watches.
There is the fact that she has a working whirligig – unrusted, a snug hole in the ground to slot it into, precluding precarity and wobble. There is the existence of both the cover and its regular deployment (hence no rust). And of course there is not just the cover but the replacement, not just ready and waiting but ready and waiting in a known, assigned spot in a known, assigned cupboard. Along with one more, which she has calculated should – now she has turned 80 – see her out.
In short, it was a feat of organisation in several forms and orders of magnitude greater than I have ever managed or will ever manage. And this is despite having grown up with it, witnessing day after day of maximal efficiency and time and motion expertise. I should have been as primed and ready to go off on my own journey as any (rigorously categorised and separated) load of maternal laundry.
Ours is an extreme example but it points to a wider general truth that has only become more undeniable as I have aged. Our parents are better at life than we are or will ever be. Probably the “at life” is actually redundant. They are just better. More skilled, more disciplined, more farsighted, more practical, more sensible, less lazy, more self-sufficient – more of everything good, less of everything bad.
How does that work? Or rather – how is that going to work out? In both the mathematical sense and in the sense of clinging on to the idea of human progress as an essentially linear endeavour? Is life actually more difficult these days? Or is the internet applying the anti-evolutionary pressure people (often our parents, actually) always warned it would, so we become functionally no more than giant thumbs? Are there courses I can take to mitigate whatever this is?
Can we start buttonholing old people to ask for Life (and Defrosting the Freezer) advice like I do young people when I’m baffled by technology? And how did we manage to become a generation useless at modern life and everything else? Would it be quicker and simpler to reset everything by having a war?
At the risk of sounding self-serving, I think we can argue that while life itself might not be more difficult these days, it is more difficult to organise. The tramlines that once helped keep all of society running smoothly are now ill-maintained at best, and a tangled mass of iron and rubble at worst.
There is virtually no such thing as a regular, 9-to-5 job. Most people don’t know what time they’ll be home. And when they are, they will still be connected to the office via email, messages and bosses with no boundaries. It is no longer generally possible to have one parent stay at home with children and earn nothing – if you want a family and a house big enough to put them in, two incomes are vital.
That the second one then goes on childcare while you wait for a promotion to put you in the black again is another thing previous generations didn’t have to reckon with. The daily calculations and recalculations of who is doing precisely what and when does not make for smooth passage through the day, the week, the months or the years.
There is simply a degree of chaos that is not of your making and that you must just fight against as best you can. And watch Marie Kondo’s decluttering programmes in the evenings or scroll though Insta reels of people’s perfect pantries as you lie exhausted on the sofa, ordering ever more niche storage solutions from Amazon as if they will solve your problems.
Which brings us to The Internet. Which pernicious little invention takes our natural inclination towards the path of least resistance, the instinct to expend as little energy as possible in reaching our goals and runs with it.
Largely towards obesity and cardiovascular disease, as we sign up for Deliveroo, call Ubers, book handymen and generally outsource everything we can until pretty soon we can do nothing for ourselves, from cooking a meal to sewing on a button to unblocking a toilet.
Between the sloth engendered and encouraged by technology and the increasingly fragmented muddle of professional life, I can see our parents being the last fully adult generation. We are perpetual children now. Perhaps we voted Labour in because we know that the nanny state is exactly what we need if we are to survive.