No. 14: Abolish the Elderly!
How Do We Write for Gen Alpha?
A couple months ago, Jun sent me this photo of a bridge in Brooklyn:
He sent the photo because my new novel hinges on intergenerational conflict and it inspired several questions that still haunt me.
What made a kid climb to a precarious spot to paint this message?
What was the last straw for him?
What does ‘abolish’ mean in this context? (eek!)
Who’s included in the ‘elderly’?
And most importantly: is this his battle cry or a collective one?
Let’s start with a basic fact.
Every young generation thinks older people don’t get it.
In 10th grade, I wrote a passionate journal entry about Madonna for my English class, pouring out my soul about how I snuck-bought a copy of Erotica from Spec Records despite the “Explicit” sticker on it… how for the goody two-shoes I was, that album opened up another side of myself, rebellious and subversive… how I saw a kindred spirit in Madonna: at once artistically restless and uninhibited but also a taut, controlled businesswoman… how writing about my connection to her in a class journal felt illicit and vulnerable and thrilling…
My teacher responded in the margins: “She’s terrible. What do you see in her?”
OMG. I just told you!
(For the rest of that year, my journal entries were dull movie reviews and complaints of how I had too much homework.)
Truth was: no one over the age of 35 at that point understood Madonna. Most thought she was a bad influence and should put more clothes on. Even the Pope tried to excommunicate her. (She responded to him by taking a Jewish name and making the Kaballah trendy.)
Part of liking Madonna, of course, was flashing a middle finger at the older folks who thought they knew better. This was part of the pleasures of being young. Bucking the system. Staking claim to culture. Declaring a psychic war on elders and planting a flag for the future.
But I’m guessing that whoever painted ABOLISH THE ELDERLY on a Brooklyn bridge in 2024 wasn’t doing it because of abiding love for Benson Boone and Chappelle Roan.
I don’t remember us resenting older generations with the intensity of today’s youth — who look squarely at the earth they’ve inherited and blame elders for the state of it. With good reason. Capitalism took precedence over the planet. Short-term thinking over long-term planning. Exploiting over saving.
Not all youth have this view, of course. But with Trump running against Biden (sigh) and four more years of gerontocracy, I suspect the rivalry between generations will only heighten — especially as the birth rate continues to decline globally, and the elderly command not just the lion’s share of resources, but also insist on staying in leadership into their 80s and 90s, since evolving medicine will keep them fit that long and longer.
The result is this kind of amorphous, dark-edged young cynicism that’s metastasizing into a state of being. As if the young are living in an apocalypse of zombies who are slowly devouring the earth while expecting next gens to endure this dystopia, stop their whining, and “wait their turn” to zombie-gorge in their old age, like every generation has before.
But I think there’s something more to it.
Something that also affects the way we talk to youth, write for youth, and protect ourselves — those who are no longer young — from becoming obsolete or out of touch.
My partner lives in a small town in Missouri, where he’s noticed a change in the way businesses are run. Once upon a time, every business was a small business, and whoever ran the shop was the town “expert” in that field. You needed your tractor fixed — you went to the tractor guy. Your tomatoes weren’t growing? You went to the seeds woman and showed her your limp buds. Your car sputtering? You waited in line to talk to the auto mechanic who was treated with the same reverence as the town chaplain. Point being: everyone was an expert in their specific area and their knowledge was valued because no one else had it, since that knowledge was ripened by age and buttressed by experience.
I remember feeling the same, even though I grew up in the chaos of Miami. The local, old bookseller — very, very old — knew exactly what books I’d like (he became Mr. Deauville in The School for Good and Evil). My tennis teacher was 72 years-old and was the first to use the two-handed backhand on the professional tour and told us stories about playing Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon. The owner of my family’s favorite restaurant, Pino’s, was in his 70s and sick with a terminal disease, but still knew how to source the best buffalo mozzarella directly from Naples, Italy. Aging meant wisdom, experience, expertise.
And despite being ornery and arrogant and oblivious, me and all my fellow youth needed to respect and revere these elders because we had none of this wisdom, experience and expertise. There was a silent exchange. The old puts up with the young. The young puts up with the old. And in this tentative detente, knowledge of how to live is passed between.
Two things changed that in the last 15-20 years.
Phones.
Consolidation.
Phones make everyone an expert now. Any problem is Googled or YouTubed away. Reservoirs of knowledge belongs to the young as much as the old. Reddit solves your car, health, garden, relationship, and anything else you want to crowdsource. Meanwhile, the old doctor in town, once coveted for his experience, is considered behind the times.
Many small-town experts are gone, then. Not just because of declining value. But because corporate America came for them too, snapping up their businesses, folding them into giant empires in every possible realm of life — so little by little, instead of young new bucks dreaming of opening their own shops, striving to be The Man… now they all end up working for The Man.
Is there any wonder, then, that young people look so warily at elders?
At the same time, elders suffer the dooming realization that the technology their generation created, the progress they pursued at all cost… is slowly making them obsolete.
Hard times for the young. Hard times for the old.
My new book is about all this, transposed to an arena you’ll least expect. But to pull it off, I need to be able to inhabit my young characters, while also not passing judgment on them or the older generation they’re up against.
This requires immersion and commitment. The kind that lets me use a novel to be an objective, third-party referee. To be successful, I’ve had to look for opportunities to listen — not talk — to my intended audience over the past year, sitting down with teenagers and 20-something in a variety of contexts, asking them to reveal their fears, desires, hopes, disillusionments. I discuss this in more detail on my recent episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast. For the last 10 years, I was the Fairy Tale Guy. For the next 10 years, I’d like to be more of a Coach Alpha, both on and off the page, working to help the next gen trade cynicism for the recognition of their immense, superhuman powers to do better than generations before.
On the page, though, this starts with language. Teenagers can instantly spot when you’re writing down to them as an adult — my niece calls it “PEAK CRINGE” and if I even start speaking a sentence to her with “You need to…”, she gives me that flat-lipped “You’re Old” look. Oddly enough, in fantasy, you can get away with earnestness much more. The School for Good and Evil is chock-full of melodrama, oversharing, and bleeding-heart moments, but it’s part of the Grand Guignol excess of the SGE experiment, and I suspect the series is more popular than ever these days because it gives readers a space to ditch the cynicism and be unabashedly emotional in today’s world where emotions are… well, cringe.
The new novel, meanwhile, is first-person with a male protagonist, set in a contemporary world, in other words: very, very different. This means spending a lot of time texting my partner’s nephews, assimilating their speech patterns; interrogating my hitting partners from local college tennis teams on current social cues; and trying to get to the bottom of how today’s gen is burying their emotions. Because that’s the best way to understand teenagers of any generation — not through the expression of their spiking dopamines and volcanos of feelings, but through the sublimation of them.
More on this to come when I can show off some passages and sentences and get into some close analysis, but for now, I think I’ve left enough breadcrumbs of where this is all headed…
Now it’s your turn: how do you write for youth and not be cringe?
Speaking of cringe, am I the only one who is nervous for Joe Alwyn? If the biggest star in the world was about to drop an album that sounded like it was all about me… I’d find the nearest space station to hide on. Hmm. We might need to talk about this some more.
Until next week…
I am BEYOND nervous for Joe 😭😭😭 as excited as I am to hear the album, I hope we as a fandom can remember not to jump to conclusions when we don’t know the whole story, and also that every story has two sides.
I agree with what you said, hard times for both the old and youngs nowadays haha.
Compared to fantasy, people can relate so much more to what is being said in a real world setting. Could that affect the way we perceive how scenes play out? For me, I'm nit-picky at details in a contemporary setting because it's easier to see them (maybe even see myself doing similar things to the characters), but less so with fantasy settings.
I struggle so much trying to write non-cringey dialogues in any settings though, and writer's block hasn't been helping much lately. I'd like to respond that reversely, as a young person I struggle with writing adults' and elder people's dialogues. But I actually just struggle with writing about any character that is different from me haha