TEEN-WOLF-PACK BONDING

I wonder whether perhaps I’ve been a bit harsh on the Millennials. They’re growing up on a planet that’s getting hotter and ruder and faster; a world of fundamental divisions and echo chambers, and rapidly accelerating technology, fuelling unprecedented societal changes. We’re very poorly equipped to help them: we had no smart phones, no online virtual reality, no instant access to answers or photographs or lifestyles. How can we know what it’s like? We’re the slide rules to their pocket calculators.

And it’s easy to be harsh. I should know tonight, as I’m listening to a group of young people howling like wolves in the park. This is their pack, bonding together, by the light of the full, round moon on a sweltering summer’s night. The dark masks their shyness, the clouds hide their innocence. The music drowns their thoughts and the cans and plastic bottles clutter their judgment.

I remember sitting in the Abbey Ruins. The moon was high and bright then too, covered by those swirling silvered clouds above the bare stone walls. Same moon. My friends giggled as they clinked neon bottles of Hooch and TwoDogs, plotting loudly about how to get me drunk. I didn’t understand their motives - somehow the idea that it might be ‘funny’ had consumed them, and had it been easier or cheaper they would have been more dedicated to the cause. But I was an adamant teenager, a goodie-two-shoes, often torn between worlds and feeling a hopeless failure for half-embracing both of them: sober, serious, sensible, yet still unwisely there in the gaggle, sitting on a bench of alcopops, in a late-night historical ruin.

A little more maturity and maybe I would have realised that they looked up to me for sticking to my principles and my faith. 

Perhaps too, I’d have realised that the adults I knew would have been proud of me also, for trying my best to figure out how to be ‘in the world’ but not ‘of it’. I could never have imagined that that in itself could have been a lifelong struggle for them too. Loving others without compromising is tough work.

These young people are the same: figuring out their place in the world, while sitting round a makeshift fire, amidst the blue glare of their phones in the midnight park. The darkness might hide their insecurities, but the scene is surprisingly familiar to us oldies who have to go to work in the morning.

I wonder whether we owe it to the Millennials to help them deal with that inevitable gap between their dreams and their reality. We either have to help them make it, give them those chances to be the thing, or we have to show them that contentment with failure can be a beautiful discovery and a hugely well-kept secret that’s waiting for them.

But we shouldn’t stop them from trying. And neither should we boomers and Xers (I’m a Generation X) stop trying either! As someone once said, ‘if you aim for the moon, you might miss it and hit the stars, but if you aim for nothing at all, you’re bound to hit it every time.’

Although. It has to be said that it’s also best not to do your social teen-wolf-pack bonding in a quiet residential park in the small hours of a Friday morning. Shoot the moon tomorrow, kids. Seriously. You’ve got time.