Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties and early Noughties (first identified by the clinical psychologist Oliver James) was a virulent, socially transmitted disease most of us subliminally hankered to catch. ‘
Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties and early Noughties (first identified by the clinical psychologist Oliver James) was a virulent, socially transmitted disease most of us subliminally hankered to catch. ‘Bring it on’, was the nation’s great battle cry as we loaded the guns of avarice with alacrity; conveniently forgetting that the bullets of greed have a nasty habit of ricocheting back into society.
We self-harmed with abandon; fast finding ourselves addicted to life’s little luxuries. Nouveau Labour’s manifesto was very clear: it encouraged free-market capitalism thus turning us all — to a greater or lesser extent — into nouveau-riche wannabes. It’s hardly surprising we now find ourselves morally corrupt and left with a dystopian legacy of self-inflicted despair. No gain without pain. Like an unapologetic chain-smoker who wakes up one morning perplexed he can no longer breathe, I’m afraid the time has now come for us to accept culpability. Alas, there’s no spoonful of sugar to help the nasty-tasting medicine go down. It’s gone — along with everything else.
This sorry state of affairs didn’t just happen. We enabled it to happen. We all gaily bought the metaphoric T-shirt and most of us were happy to be seen out wearing it. Ultimately the actual provenance and price tag of the garment proved irrelevant. It didn’t matter if it was wrestled from the sale rack at Primark or FedEx’d from Chanel — either way it was just another aspirational item of clothing we confused ‘wanting’ with ‘needing’. Like the transitory relief that accompanies most quick-fix panaceas, the ‘spend, spend, spend’ high never lasts. We’ve all overdosed on excess and now we’re left blubbing at the thought of having our stomachs pumped. This government has led us up a fiscal dead-end, yet there’s no point denying we played follow-the-leader, irrespective of our political allegiance. We all got sucked in to over-extending, over-spending, over-borrowing, over-loading, over-consuming, and unnecessarily upgrading our lives; placing too high a value on money, property, celebrity, possessions and hedonistic pursuits. It’s not just the Labour party that’s over; the party itself has ground to a halt.
In retrospect we grown-ups have behaved appallingly — we recklessly danced until dawn, emptied the drinks cabinet, chugged down the happy pills and then trashed the joint, leaving our poor kids to clear up the almighty detritus. Generation X have spawned Generation Ground Zero. My children are all standing on the threshold of life’s big adventure and have been given no choice but to make do and mend. They can’t afford to live on the never-never; instead they must live in the here-and-now. Probably forever. We must not allow them to assume affluenza and its associated complications are a terminal bequest. We must somehow infuse them with hope for the future and not let them be buried by apathy.
‘My generation differs from yours,’ my 22-year-old son recently reflected. ‘You could follow your passions. We don’t have that luxury. We have to concentrate on surviving.’ I don’t want him to feel like that. My great passion is optimism and I choose to believe that the deep scars we’ve left on the landscape can eventually heal.