Generation Y

You hear it a lot in the news: Generation Y - or the Facebook Generation, if you prefer - is going to live for a long time. My generation. Indeed, it will live for longer than any generation in history. Improvements in medicine, technology, the supposed end of the West's love affair with nicotine - someone has run all the countless variables through a super computer and determined that our average life expectancy will be remarkably high. The actuaries have calculated how much more we'll have to contribute to our pension schemes in order to stay in bread when we're 95, and, based on their changes to public sector pensions and tax increases, it seems that the government also has faith in our longevity. Either that or they just want to tax us more.

But are 'we' really going to live that long?

Call me a cynic, but when I look around, all I see are members of my generation and those of younger generations, getting excessively drunk every Friday night (doing untold damage to their livers in the process), smoking, maybe taking drugs, breakfasting at Burger King, and sitting for hours every day in front of TV and computer screens. How many Facebook statuses does one have to read that say "I got so wasted last night" before one starts to wonder if the scientists have made a big error in predicting a long and healthy life for 'us'? It was the baby boomers' good habits which have resulted in their longevity, more than medical advances.

Yet I can't argue with those medical advances. New cancer treatments, stem cell research (whether ethical or not), and other breakthroughs will certainly cure a lot of our diseases and mend our broken bones faster than ever before. However, at the risk of making a sweeping generalisation, it seems to me that my generation isn't looking after itself anywhere near well enough to live as long as, say, my grandmother, who's in her 80s. I'm not removing myself from this sad truth either: I could lose some weight; I've been sitting at this laptop for hours without getting up once. Who'd have thought that a chair could kill? But then again I've never smoked, I don't drink alcohol, and I'm more of a McDonald's kind of guy...just kidding.

The baby boomers have enjoyed unnaturally long lives, partly because they've benefited from the same advances 'we' will benefit from even more, but chiefly, I think, because they were born into a post-World-War-Two environment. When my mother was growing up in 1950s Liverpool, rationing was still in operation. It was a world in which children such as she could run freely through fields after school without their parents living in constant, media-fuelled fear of them scratching themselves, or being abducted. It was a time when there was still something to fight for. As for 'us' who were born in the late twentieth century, however, the world's been flattened and simplified so much that we're practically sedated in comparison.   

If I were one of those scientists, I'd stop shouting from the rooftops about how long Generation Y is going to live. It's the job of government to prepare for this eventuality, because it's largely a fact. 'We' are going to live longer than any previous generation. If I were them, I'd be more concerned with warning the young people of today who are abusing themselves in the name of YOLO that they're actually going to die much sooner than they need to. Yes, medicine has cured some terrible diseases that a person of my age in Britain can only imagine; yes, technology has opened up incredible possibilities. But please let's go back to basics. Eat more healthily, stop the binge drinking, put down the iPhone for five minutes and go for a walk with your mum around the block. That's the ticket to living a longer life, which no generation has a God-given right to. It has to be earned.