It was the best career decision I ever made. At the time, the clients I freelanced for were mostly around my age, which was a bit strange as previously we’d been colleagues, whereas now I had voluntarily downgraded myself.
I work because I love it, I quite need the money and I hate seeing formerly young, talented, energetic people transformed into dreary old bores grumbling predictably away about Rachel Reeves, small boats and “the woke brigade”.
This can lead to funny moments, culturally interesting moments, and awkward ones.
My children are two, five and seven - it's time for the sex talk
Read MoreI was back a month later and they proudly presented me with a box of a thousand cards. They were beautiful, high quality, with the company’s logo, their US address and my email all correct. They even got my UK mobile number set out properly, which I wasn’t expecting.
Surprisingly, as it turned out, the cards have been rather admired – and the story of how they came to be supersized goes down well with fellow boomers, who will then tell their own stories of confusions between us last-man-standing baby boomers and Gen Z.
I was explaining this to a young journalist at one of more intellectual newspapers. “Sorry,” she said, “Red Army? Is that something like a band?”
Yet on the other hand, I feel she really should have known what the Red Army was. If I have one gripe with Gen Z, it’s that their general knowledge tends to be severely lacking. This isn’t just my old-fart observation. I ran into an eminent acquaintance of my age the other day, who in his non-retirement owns a rather scholarly current affairs magazine. As it’s run on a shoestring, all the employees are recent graduates.
“They’re much cleverer than us,” he said, “More analytical, more academically rigorous, more liberal, more empathetic, all the good stuff. But they know absolutely nothing. Without their outboard brains, their phones and their laptops, they barely know their own names.”
This is not being entirely dismissive, even if their youthful punctiliousness over pronouns and the like are, to us boomers, just a silly passing fashion fad. More seriously, the extent to which Gen Z have internalised the big ethical norms – the complete extirpation from their world view of racism, sexism, classism and almost every other bad-ism, is one of the wonders of the modern world.
Accordingly, I find my Gen Z bosses a lot more friendly, accommodating and easier to deal with than my middle-aged bosses were when I was in my twenties and thirties.
Gen Z has been brought up in a far kinder milieu. If I were being full-on cynical dinosaur, I’d say they grow up skiving and avoiding anything inconvenient to their blessed work-life balance, so are naturally tolerant of other skivers, but I honestly don’t think that’s it. They are just gentler people.
There’s a weird thing recently where instead of saying “Could you possibly do me a note on X?”, they’ll write, “May you please do me a note on X?” as if they’re praying. I’ve had instance after instance of this ugly, tortuous usage and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a de facto part of the language like the dreaded, “I would of done it but I didn’t.”
I think this unsteadiness with literacy, in truth, may be the reason Gen Z-ers are so much happier communicating on WhatsApp/Slack or any phone-based platform than email, and are quite contemptuous of email – even though email is to my mind so much better. I think they are aware they are in a lot of instances not hugely literate, hence awkward with anything fuller than a text.
I find they reply to emails as and when they fancy. If someone answers an email promptly, it’s a sure sign they’re not young. This is probably because of the enormous traffic of online communications back and forth that they have day and night. But I regularly find Gen Z-ers failing to reply even to emails which are to their benefit.
Friends who hire young people say they’re often more interested at interview in the benefits and perks than what the job will entail. When they get there, one small creative agency owner says, “It’s as if they feel they’re doing you a favour coming in to work. And that work is often remarkably sloppy.”
Another Gen Z thing is the way they will avoid phone calls and opt to interact online rather than speak to people; even a chatbot seems preferable to them than a person. They don’t even seem to talk to each other at work much, possibly because they are in touch all the time with their own “friendship group” – an authentic Gen Z term.
Yet despite these misgivings, the phenomenon of the young, and possibly slightly knowledge-lacking, boss is far from a deal breaker for me. I’d rather be in the race any day with these smart, refreshingly liberal and good-hearted people calling the shots than grousing powerlessly with my contemporaries from the sidelines about what they’d do to that Sadiq Khan if they had half a chance.
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