Sadly, the young and the restless will have to wait for their truths to be told

Trivial Grievances: On the contradictions, myths and misery of your 30s. Bridie Jabour

A couple of years ago I read an article in the Guardian Australia opinion section which was so compelling that it made me physically enact the cliché and sit up straight in my chair.

One tends to read the Guardian slumped — or people of my age and politics do — out of a repeated disappointment that does not diminish with repetition. One returns to it again and again hoping for the hard-edged, thoroughly left, world-involved source it once was only to find that much of it (by no means all) is like an episode of mass hysterical fainting at a wellness spa. 

The article in question was in that genre, but it also had the hard edge. Its 31-year-old author said that she was unhappy and that all her friends were unhappy too — and not unhappy in a vaguely ticked-off way. Their unhappiness ran deeper and presented them with a sense that maybe life would not be able to deliver the goods as promised, at all.

The piece felt to me like a blow to the face — and I suspect to many of the half-million or so other readers it acquired in the next few days. Its force was not least because it was by the Guardian’s Australian edition opinion page editor, Bridie Jabour — hitherto best known, to me anyway, for her perfect peak-Guardian article “Don’t fat shame Clive Palmer”. But in this new piece, there was no trace of a hot take. She talked directly of what others had danced around: in their early 30s, many from a whole age cohort felt that nothing — not career success, wild life, love or parenthood — satisfied in a way that would assuage a basic unhappiness-in-the-world, a sense of time and place being out of joint, persistently, unpleasantly.

The piece was useful not merely information, but also as confirmation of what one had observed, or thought one had. From an external vantage point — Gen X, whose youth of AIDS, Thatcher-Reagan and acid rain was no barrel of laughs — so many millennials seemed so miserable, living in a space of tremulous angst that appeared to be without solace. Given climate change, cavernous inequality, the struggle for interesting work and the crappiness of a lot of it when you got there, the self-surveillance of callout culture and much more, it was no wonder. But was once just mistaken hardworking people letting off steam, and a little whininess, for a cultural crisis? Jabour’s article suggested not, and was thus of great value.

Viral articles create book contracts, which then have to be fulfilled, and thus there is Trivial Grievances, which purports to be a lengthy treatment of that millennial malaise. That it’s not, is, Jabour claims, because she found out her generation wasn’t any more or less unhappy than previous generations, and so the book became a personalised study of the contours and textures of everyday life in the millennial media class. 

The sneaking suspicion of the reader might be that a generational culture study suddenly looked daunting, and so an approach was taken of asking a few mates and a couple of stray authors what they reckoned, grabbing things coming across on the net, and adding it to what the author reckons, and there’s your book. In the process, the work drops into that less-than-useful genre, generational advocacy. Thus there is a defence of smartphone addiction and an argument that there is no difference between an experience done for itself or for an Instagram moment (p73-4), and later an excoriation of 20-something clichéd travel for the Instagram moment (p173). It’s easy, but a cop out, to blame capitalism, and saying “neoliberalism” makes you sound intellectual on p148, but on p252 believing that “money, marriage, babies” will make you happy is “a trick of capitalism”. And so on.

In between there are stories from Uber drivers, aged aunts, televised reports of tsunamis — and the author’s spending diary for a week occupies nine pages. There’s some quite sustained good stuff on black-white relations, and on the relationship between capitalism as it now is, and identity, later on. But there’s also a fair bit of vamping to fill. “Pain is pain. Suffering is suffering. If you feel bad, you feel bad” (p248). K thx bye. Ach, you don’t say that any more, do you? 

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Does this matter much? Not really, per se. Books-from-articles are usually no better than they need to be, and Jabour is a pacy, even if lightweight, writer with a journalist’s skill for punchy sentences, even if they lack content. No, the problem with the book is that it appears to have reversed the line of inquiry announced in the article — that of a specific generational condition. I’m not demanding that any book come down in the affirmative, simply that it investigate what seems a somewhat urgent question. 

When the world arranges for there to be, simultaneously, a school system that makes kids more scientifically literate than ever before, and the prospect of 3-4 degrees warming over their lifetimes, when inequality yawns so wide that millions will be confined to lives that show little progress towards security, when the market has so occupied every space of culture that there is a rending down to equivalence, and when the new technologies that make all this possible create atomising networks of self-surveillance and callout, then it’s possible that something has happened. 

Watching millennial life from a participant-semi-observant vantage, the impression is that the new forms of inteconnection leave people feeling and being far more isolated, connection far more provisional, all of it conducted in a world which appears to have exhausted the transformative potential of modernity, but removed the consolations of religion or revolutionary politics. 

But I don’t know whether that’s true, or whether it just looks that way to me because I still use a rotary dial phone. I wanted a book to investigate it, and Trivial Grievances isn’t it. There really is very little about the big stuff that might form the contours of millennials’ unhappy valley, and which have the virtue of being real: destruction of the planet, the declining prospect of security and flourishing, the assault of control and surveillance on the psychological freedom necessary to pursue happiness. 

I can understand why a lot of people don’t want to think about that daily, given the lack of ready remedy to such a condition. But a Guardian journalist should do so, and to not go there in a high-profile volume seems like a failure of nerve and, maybe, of duty. The question is whether that is simply the affliction of one writer who has written a readable-enough book, or an expression of the conflicts of Guardian-world, introduced to Australia to stir things up from the left but which seems somewhat drawn to its role as the distracting newsletter of a new elite.

Grievances may be individual, but they may also be evidence of the world coming apart. Rendering them as trivial can be a way of refusing that connection, and the demands on the powerful that arise from it.