A Question My Children Probably Won’t Ask
There’s a scene that exists in films. The child, half-grown, sits across the dinner table and asks the father what it was like back then. What it was like to grow up in that other world. The father looks into the middle distance then comes back and transmits his strange ancient wisdom.
When the time comes, our children probably won’t ask us. Not because they won’t be curious, but because the question has no natural shape in a life where the answer is already there. They will probably be more likely to ask their AI companion or watch a forty-second video edit set to a song I used to skip than ask me what the nineties felt like.
But if they did ask. If one of them, on some future evening, said, ‘What was it like back then?’ I’d start by saying that there was no device in my pocket holding open the possibility of connection. No evolving profiles or message histories translating me into a legible shape for other people. Separateness was the basic condition of being. When I went home, my bedroom had a door that shut, and nothing on the other side of it could reach me unless it knocked.
I remember being eighteen, in my first year at university, closing my bedroom door and switching off my first mobile phone. Not a smartphone. A small grey Sony that could send texts and make calls. The act of pressing the button until the tiny two-tone screen died was something I did all the time. I’m not available now. I’m going to listen to music, or read, or write, just be a person in a room. Turning the phone off meant: I want to return to baseline reality now. Separate.
I don’t think my children will ever switch their phones off the way I did back then. Not because they will be worse at being people but because the gesture will have no meaning. You can’t refuse a thing that has become the weather.
The question of whether I mattered was something I asked myself when I was on my own. It pushed me inward. That teenage crisis of meaning hasn’t gone anywhere. The question is now put to the screen in the presence of everyone. It wears different faces depending on the platform. It is routed through a status economy, where it is priced by attention.
When I was young there was still a thing called selling out. It was taken seriously. You could ruin an artist by pointing at them and saying those words. I was supposed to have an inside, a small stubborn thing, and the world wanted to buy it. My job was to say no. To stand separate and pure, in a state of truth untainted by market influence.
These days, the idea of selling out sounds like a folk belief from a vanished tribe. Sell out to whom. Out of what. The inside that used to be protected has been turned inside out. The project of the self is no longer to guard and develop a private core against the market. It is to render the core legible to the market as efficiently as possible. The people who do this best are called honest. The three-hour unedited podcast is the new sincerity. Nothing is edited out and this, somehow, is taken as proof of a real person on the other side of it.
Back then, the market was the thing we were supposed to resist in order to become ourselves. Now the market is the thing we are supposed to give ourselves to in order to measure ourselves.
What I would want to say to my children, if they ever asked, is this. Back then, there was a gap. Between you and the world. The gap was the thing. You had to cross the gap or you disappeared. I remember hearing Pixies for the first time and feeling like it was a transmission from another planet. My planet. I bought a CD and listened to it alone in my room and the distance it had travelled was part of its meaning. I had to go out and find people who liked it too. The finding was slow and physical. It involved making the wrong friends, bumping heads, wandering from tribe to tribe. The sense of oddity this involved, being in the wrong place with the wrong people, built a stance. A way of relating to who and what I loved.
No one disappears now. That was the old risk. If you didn’t cross the gap, you vanished. The gap is still there, but crossing it has got harder, because you don’t have to try, and trying doesn’t work the way it used to. Your friends and the world are in your pocket, just waiting to be accessed. Every culture and every person is available, instantly, in a feed. But nothing holds for long enough to become a shared centre, because the ground moves to the next piece of content before anyone has finished standing on the last one. You can find people who share a sliver of what you like. It is harder to find people who stand in the same relation to the whole thing as you do.
Finding my people didn’t mean finding people who liked Doolittle. The content shifted back then too. It meant finding people who understood, without saying it, that the music was almost beside the point. What the social groups I liked being part of shared was a posture toward the market, toward the culture, toward being alive in the world. The content was barterable. The stance wasn’t. That was what held groups together. I don’t know whether those groupings still form. I hope they do. Somewhere there must be teenagers who refuse to post on principle, who feel the whole arrangement as a kind of theft.
My children will have a cultural fluency I can’t imagine. They'll be at home in a kind of layered presence I would find exhausting, knowing which version of themselves to show on which platform without thinking about it. They’ll laugh at me for switching off my phone when I want to write with a pen on paper. But if one of them does ask, some evening. If the question of what it used to be like finds its shape and comes out. I’d tell them about skateboarding to the promenade without a plan. Hoping to see friends but sometimes seeing no one. Explain that some nights it was just me, the sea and my skateboard. A feeling of being small in front of a thing that didn’t know I was there. I’d tell them that when you were alone nobody could reach you and this was not a problem to be solved. It was where the self lived.
And then, if they were still listening, I’d ask them what it feels like when they turn off their phones. What’s there when the signal stops?