Youth is wasted on the young

It was the summer of 1979. My memory tells me it was sunny, but it probably wasn’t. Three months of summer holidays stretched before me and I had just started a weekend job in a pub which put money in my pocket for the first time. This allowed me to finally buy a decent bike and consign my old Czech made rust bucket to the scrap heap.

We spent that summer playing football, cycling to the beach and exploring the world of girls for the first time. We had no other option. TV was an evening activity, the closest thing to a games consol was a Space Invaders machine in the local arcade and that was beyond our financial reach. Even though the radio had been around for almost 100 years at that point, the number of channels were limited and were certainly not catering for the tastes of fourteen year old boys.

I was a relatively polite teenager, not prone to outbursts or tantrums. But if I did get upset, my Dad would be very quick to remind me of how lucky I was. That things were much tougher in his youth. The barefooted trips to school, the gruel served daily to him and his twelve siblings and the only source of entertainment coming from a rickety old radio that only seemed to work on Sunday afternoons in summer when hurling games were being played.  

My father’s life seemed to start in his early twenties when he had escaped the suffocating world of my grandparent’s house. He had lots of stories of adventure from those days but when he talked about his childhood, it was only to pinpoint the misery.

My Mother was the same. She grew up in the post World War Two ration years, when a  banana was as rare as a summer’s day over 25c. She talked mainly about privations. How we could enjoy fruit all year round, have ice cream on Sunday and experiment with exotic foods like rice or garlic.

One thing they did agree on was that their parent’s childhoods were tougher. My grandparents were born in the years before electricity had made its way into Irish homes. Going to the toilet involved a trek out into the back yard, regardless of the weather with only a candle to guard you from the ghosts of the night.

I now have a child of my own, soon to turn fourteen and starting her own journey into the murky world of puberty and teenage life. She is sitting her first set of formal exams at the moment and is troubled by anxiety. As I saw her trundle off to school this morning, weighed down by five kilos of schoolbooks, lunch and a laptop, I couldn’t help thinking that I was a lot happier at that age. And that we might be the first generation that had a happier childhood than our kids.

I’m not suggesting that everything was perfect in the Irish rural town that I grew up. When I was fourteen in 1979, the war in Northern Ireland was raging 5km up the road from my house. Thatcher had just been elected prime minister in Britain and the world economy, and Ireland was in the toilet.

But we had colour TV and a VHS player. We had football clubs, tennis in the summer, games and youth clubs after school. We walked or cycled everywhere. But the biggest thing is that we didn’t feel the need to be constantly present.

We had no phone at home when I was a teenager, so the only way of contacting me was to go to the trouble of calling down to my house and few people bothered to do that. From the point you got home from school to leaving for school the next day, you were cocooned at home with no connection to the outside world.

If I contrast this to my daughter, she lives in a world dominated by the internet. Her schooling is all done on a laptop, all the TV she watches comes from a streaming service and while we restrict the amount of time she can access her phone, she maximises the time she is allowed to look at it. We recently spent a week in Australia and we talked her into leaving her phone at home. When we returned, she turned it on and realised she had 1,100 Whatsapp messages.

Most of them were pictures of cats or memes about Taylor Swift, but I have no doubt that some the dangerous rubbish that lurks on the internet was also there.

But even if it wasn’t, she still leads a childhood that looks inwards, to screens at school and at home and at her phone as much as we allow. It might be nostalgia playing tricks with me, but I’m sure when I was her age, my life was mainly looking outwards. In daylight hours, if I wasn’t at school, my default was to be out of the house, stretching the boundaries of the town I grew up in and in particular, finding every spare piece of grass or concrete to play football on.

My daughter now walks around with all the information in the world in a small device in her pocket. But I can’t help thinking that this is incredibly sad. The world seems trapped in her pocket, whereas for me, it was out there at the far reaches of the horizon, waiting to be discovered.

No doubt she will discover this message in time. She can of course read it on that small devise in her pocket. She may challenge me and excuse me of being a grumpy old man, shaking my stick at the nearest mobile phone tower. As Paul Simon said, every generation throws its hero up the pop charts. She may well be finding that hero, just in a different way to me. I hope she is and can tell her children her children about the fun days of 2025.