Snowflake generation

It’s usually best to ignore the indignant fury of the 21st-century young. We’re used to them now, these snowflakes, posing as victims (though they’re mostly middle-class), demanding ‘safe spaces’, banning books and speakers. Best to rise above them, deadhead the camellias. Attention, especially from the press, acts on entitled millennials like water on gremlins — they start proliferating and develop a taste for blood. But then sometimes they go too far. Ten days ago, the Whitney museum, on the New York bank of the Hudson, opened its biennial exhibition of contemporary American art. It’s an exciting show, full of vim and diversity.

‘Should I just have done with it and tell them they’re a bunch of tossers?’ I was on my way to speak at the Durham Union. The motion was ‘This House believes the NHS is out of date’. And, as usual, I was on the ‘wrong’ side of the debate — so why should I even bother? You know beforehand which way the vote is going to go at any university debate these days: the one which enables the snowflakes most easily to signal their virtue. But, on the spur of the moment, I decided to give Durham the benefit of the doubt. ‘I was going to be incredibly rude to you,’ I began. ‘Which you totally deserve for being a bunch of snowflakes who are going to vote against the motion because hashtag “I heart the NHS”.

Last week I was asked to give a talk about generation snowflake. This was at a breakfast organised by a recruitment company called GTI Solutions and the idea was that I would provide an urban anthropologist’s take on this new tribe for the benefit of their corporate clients, most of whom are thinking about how to recruit them and, once they’ve got them, how to keep them happy. This has given me an idea about a new consultancy service I could provide. The main challenge thrown up by employing these new graduates, it seems to me, is that they won’t be particularly good at communicating with members of other generations in the workplace.

Another week, another spate of barmy campus bans and ‘safe space’ shenanigans by a new breed of hyper--sensitive censorious youth. At Oxford University, law students are now officially notified when the content of a lecture might upset them. In Cambridge, there were calls for an Africa-themed end-of-term dinner to be cancelled just in case it caused offence to someone somewhere. It all seems beyond parody. ‘What is wrong with these thin-skinned little emperors?’ we cry. But while we can harrumph and sneer at Generation Snowflake’s antics, we miss a crucial point: we created them. First, it is important to note that young people who cry offence are not feigning hurt — generational fragility is a real phenomenon.