Zoomers: Millennials are now being confronted by a younger generation, but they should not be derided as we were – Laura Waddell

As an elder Millennial, a generation much maligned for the alleged crimes of taking selfies, taking ethical stands in the workplace, and splashing cash on avocado toast instead of mortgages, I’m now confronted with those who make me feel old.

A new young generation are making their presence felt (Picture: Gina Wetzler/Getty Images)

Gen Z, or Zoomers, in all their audacious online-ness, now take most of the flack. Congratulations to them: we millennials have passed the baton. They are now responsible, according to online grumps and opinion writers, for all the moral failings of the era.

There is a tendency to infantilise new generations: baby-faced to those of us who babysat them. But Zoomers, roughly defined as being born after 1997, are not only teenagers, although some of them are. They are now in the workplace. They are the promising new things. They’re driving fashions. They occupy the space that we once did, and for that reason alone we should be empathic, not envious.

It’s not to say I understand everything Zoomers do and like. If I can broadly generalise here, we have many stylistic differences. I roll my eyes when they decry skinny jeans, which, by the way, are coming back in fashion faster than they thought – the cycle of fast fashion and online shopping speeding up the process. Styles popular at the high school disco of my day are for sale again: it’s disorienting. It happens to us all.

All of their clothes seem to have holes in them, cut-outs snaking up the back. Rather than seeing this as sexy and cool, I’ve reached the mature age of wanting my money’s worth of fabric (forgetting, conveniently, the in-their-day scandalous slips of things that I wore out and about myself). They have a fashion for parting their hair straight down the middle; they seem to think it looks neat, I think it looks fussy, evocative of grandfathers, little plastic combs and Brylcreem. I read the other day that some of them don’t think trainer socks – those that cut off below the ankle – look ‘cute’. Well, I’m keeping mine.

But I do worry about their sense of self. They have grown up online, influenced by social media in adolescence, entering an adulthood where everyone is performing, all of the time, for the external validation of a camera: a noisy, tough and difficult-to-resist environment. Young people want to express themselves, find community, get a foothold in life. How they achieve this may differ generationally, but some motivations are eternal.

From the media onslaught aimed at Millennials, I learned that I don’t want to treat those younger than me with scorn, suspicion, and condescension, the way we have often been spoken of. It’s the way of history for the young to look critically at those who’ve come before as they forge their own way in life; naturally, they sometimes take for granted strides towards modernity made before their arrival on this Earth, and opportunities that have opened for them because of predecessors paving the way.

But kicking down has never made much sense to me. Why sneer at young people trying to make their way in a hard world? If my generation has so struggled to get onto the property ladder, I wonder what hope those younger have.