Áilín Quinlan: ‘We can’t blame young people for giving up and heading off’

The mother of adult children was morose.

What had happened, she wanted to know, to cause young adults who had doggedly trekked through school, college and a first job, to pull away from the traditional pattern of settling down, buying a house and having children?

They all seemed to be embarking on lengthy and apparently quite challenging, not to say expensive and time-consuming, hikes in, say, Peru or New Zealand or the North American wilderness.

If not that, they were embarking on ‘gap’ years abroad, or drifting from job to job and relationship to relationship.

And some never even left home at all!

It was all posh coffee, nail bars, male grooming parlours, and weekend breaks in Amsterdam.

I harkened back to Bill Clinton galloping into the White House in 1992 on the back of the simple slogan, ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’.

But that’s not quite it either.

The truth is many of our young adults are pulling out of the well-trodden life-paths of previous generations because they haven’t a glimmer of a hope of achieving the simple, traditional markers of adulthood that we and their grandparents and their great-grandparents took for granted.

It is the economy, stupid, but it’s also down to a society hag-ridden by ferociously high expectations, exorbitant living costs, a deeply unhealthy obsession with image and appearance, and a screaming shortage of affordable accommodation, rented or bought.

People spend far too much time comparing carefully curated images posted by others with the inevitably less glamorous realities of their own day-to-day world, and they lose hope. Think back, I said, to when we were 22.

We thought back.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, a permanent job in a traditional career was the Holy Grail which automatically led to a succession of what you could call expected life markers.

Ireland in the 1980s and the early ’90s was a harsh, recession-and-nepotism-ridden place.

However, once you got a foothold in the workplace, even if you were earning a pittance, you could generally expect to be living a pretty much independent life by the age of 22 or younger.

Because in those days, even if you’d your sights set on a third-level education, you tended to enter it at the age of 18 or 17 rather than at nearly 20 years of age, which is the way it is now. Plus you didn’t stay as long.

All going well, you were out the gap with an undergraduate degree by age 20 or 21 rather than 24 or 25 or older. Staying on to do a Master’s Degree was rare as hens’ teeth.

Therefore, many of that generation, even those who opted for college, were out and earning years before this generation even pulled on their graduation gowns.

That salary may have been a pittance, but the difference was, you were earning earlier and for longer and, also, back then, a pittance stretched.

And there, right in front of you, is one of the huge differences between then and now.

We all start out at the bottom of the ladder.

But while none of us had much money then, there was always affordable rental accommodation, and we always had our own bedrooms.

Another important difference was that there was no social media so the fabulous lifestyles supposedly being enjoyed by luckier peers weren’t continually being shoved in our faces. (This, I think, had an overall positive effect on our sense of achievement in and expectation of life.)

As time ed, we generally started to earn a bit more and save a bit. Some of us got engaged and started to put a bit by for the wedding and/or the deposit on a house.

Friends who remained single a bit longer than the rest were often able, believe it or not, to take out mortgages on their own. Yes, back then, some people in mid-range jobs could do that.

True, many of us hadn’t a bob left by the time the next pay cheque came in. But we got bang for our buck in of true independence, and that is where the social contract, which we had learned from our parents and grandparents, came in.

The social contract was basically this: work hard in education, get good marks, and earn entry to a promising career. Work hard and you’d earn the reward of the accepted markers of an adult life.

It’s different now.

Many traditionally solid careers that promised un-showy but acceptable prospects can no longer offer the required financial reach to those life markers.

Mid-range salaries often don’t align with the actual cost of living in this country the way they used to. Newer, more highly paid careers do not offer automatic certainty.

Many young adults in their mid-to-late twenties now haven’t a hope of putting together the sky-craper deposit needed for a market-price house, even if they scrimp like their parents did. Many can’t even afford the rent of a room.

Instead, they discover that after 20 years or more in the education system, they’re forced to remain in the childhood home, stuck fast in what one 20-something memorably compared to a frustrating sense of teenage time-warp – and earning salaries that don’t stretch to big life landmarks, like buying and furnishing a home or having a traditional wedding.

So can you blame some of them for giving up on it all and heading off to hike the Inca Trail?

Or consoling themselves with takeaway coffees and nail parlours?