Philomena Cunk in Cunk on Britain asks a historian, “Did people in the Middle Ages know they were living in the middle of all time?” She replies earnestly, “No, in fact they very much thought, ‘This is Now.’”

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Of course, they are wrong, that was very much then. But what if we are wrong about now being now too? Especially with such a short sounding word, it certainly is elusive – so perhaps we shouldn’t put so much emphasis on it. Yet our current globalised society refuses to countenance even the near-future – one which I hear is hurtling somewhat unavoidably towards us, and no NASA probe has quite figured out how to push it out the way.

 

We ridicule the pleas of children who want to see their adult lives as secure as our own (I jest; chaos is always upon us). But though some of us are managing, and the rest of us barely, the state of the world is clearly getting worse at an accelerating rate, into which children are so unblissfully aware they are growing up. We are ‘shorting’ our futures by prioritising now – thanks for the cool words, finance – with a defiant and somehow ideological refusal to get social and environmental matters solved. Repeatedly we are told that we’re trapped within an economic system that can’t get enough of short-term gain, and now indebted to our future to the tune of $300 trillion global debt and counting. It’s as if we don’t really believe tomorrow will come. When the only argument that really makes sense is the middle-aged misanthropist’s throwaway “What do I care, I’ll be dead then” we know we’re in a quicksand of deep shit, which I would not be surprised exists in pretty much any English river these days.

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So, what corrective vision might solve this near-sightedness? Most obviously one might turn to politics and activism, if your disposition happens to land on ‘optimist with a cause’. If you’re one of those people that doesn’t happen to need money, then activism has a pleasant low-to-no barrier for entry due to the sheer unending volume of work that needs to be done. Demand never exceeds supply, especially when the majority is unpaid. Good job if you do manage to earn as an activist, but even then: who’s listening when our politicians ban you from being heard – and even when you’re just potentially about to say something? In contrast, the barrier to politics is most similar to that of platform 9 ¾. For most, it is not so much high as non-existent. In this case however you don’t have to be a magician to get through, but a background in the Dark Arts won’t hurt.

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Here in the UK, politics seems to be hellbent on keeping with terrible tradition, with electoral systems so arcane candidates are still racing past posts. Conservatives gonna self-conserve, I get it. But in this case, being fair, both major parties prefer to be equally unfair, and neither wants to see any form of proportional representation in place (Keir Starmer defied Labour members who voted in favour of it this year), despite the acknowledged safe-seat stagnation which rules out fair competition and disillusions its voters. I once stood as the Green Party MP candidate in a historic Labour stronghold, so one could say I shot myself in both feet with compostable bullets before I even started, as well as being an obvious PR beneficiary. One major discovery I had in my newfound role of budgetless leafleteer was the huge number of people I encountered who were abstaining, directing emotions ranging from apathy to active anger at me, their face-to-face representative of failed democracy, because they believed nothing would change.

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On a more global scale, structural change looks like the only way to get us out of our current life-destroying habits. Whilst governments back business before people, corporations defer to their shareholders’ need for profligate profit as their excuse for not behaving better, and these same companies sponsor business-backing politicians to boost their chances against less bootlicking rivals, we aren’t going anywhere else any time soon, except further down a dizzying spiral that 99% of people and 100% of non-human life don’t seem to be directly considered in, let alone driving.

So, all in all, the queue to get anything done through direct or political action seems to extend beyond closing time. But, if not through politics, what other avenues are there for change? Whilst today’s adults have come of age to legally fuck the world, the young have cleverly circumnavigated the parental controls to see the snuff for themselves. We are now at risk of letting children become so disenchanted that they ‘go it alone’. Like Bart’s emancipation from Homer, a reference I must use against an impenetrable culture of Tiktok and Roblox, we may soon experience a whole generation justifiably divorce themselves from their chronically unwise elders, and we wouldn’t even be on the right apps to know it.

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I enjoy carrying out amateur surveys on the disparate and yet interconnected lives of modern youth since I run a private tuition company. Yes, I spend a lot of my time exacerbating the education gap like a good left-leaning hypocrite who requires food and shelter via the exchange of money (now ‘contactless’). During these unscrupulous data collections, I have discovered that kids really care about the world, i.e., the environment and basically any animal except flies, until they hit their first exams. After this entrance into competitive stress, they get very worried about themselves and their social positioning. It turns out the examined life is also not worth living. Very soon their most desired job transforms from pet vet to ‘vlogger – preferably viral’. For what I might have a few years ago guessed was a virgin lumberjack who had the misfortune of immaculately conceiving an STD, I now hear that social media is really the maker of career of the decade. And I actually think this might be a legitimate source of both income and art.

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From what I can tell, the current purpose of education appears to be passing exams. The least cynical reason for this is lack of a better idea. GCSEs, A-levels and their iterations worldwide are becoming less relevant to employers because either “everyone has them” or “not enough people do” – in other words, they don’t know what they’re talking about which is pretty annoying for people who have had successive teenage nervous breakdowns to achieve them. Therefore, A*t (top marks if you get the pun) might be to focus more on making the learning content worthwhile for itself, and less incidental to permitting an evaluated grade.

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In the UK it has been decided for you that you must decide at 18 which subject you will specialise in for the next three to four years. Hopefully you didn’t hate everything at school, in other words, but there are some new subjects like Social Anthropology and Forensic Criminology out there, so fingers crossed. The oddest consequence of this format is that university becomes yet another rite of passage that makes what you learn instantly irrelevant upon graduation, unless you go into academia. Your BA or BSc (hons or dis-hons) is now CV-able and ideally your geography/politics/chemistry/fish husbandry degree enables you to get hired as a management consultant contracted to businesses that don’t really need your zero-years-experience-but-thousands-of-pounds-an-hour advice, but that’s the way things work. There are few professions that profit from such prematurely expressed career destinies, but this attitude had trained us to believe our life is a ladder and any tangential moves, out of natural curiosity or otherwise, are frowned upon as failing your first ladder, as you are no longer careering upwards.

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And in reality, I’ve heard north career’s not all it’s cracked up to be. So, what have we here – the present is currently rigged against the future, but it’s definitely not determining it. I don’t know if you’ve heard but Tiktok is recently (as in it is me who has discovered this recently on Twitter, which is for adults) experiencing a neo-surrealist emergence via homemade content deftly crafted through in-app video editing functions. Apparently, this timing (post-covid, post-everything-going-wrong) is analogous to the post-world war I trauma that originally spawned Dadaism, but I’m not an Art Historian with Social Media referents, so don’t quote me. I’m not even an Art futurist, as futurism was 100 years ago. This neo-surrealism might be surprising to anyone who observes that what they dismissed as “too much screen-time” is actually a humorous and complex stream of productions made independently by teenagers who have readily armed themselves with virtual creative abilities and a way to promote their ideas and creations to larger populations than most artists and comedians in known history. I’m impressed anyway. So now, now, I needn’t worry. The revolution is already here, and it’s selfish, it speaks parceltongue, and it doesn’t give a shit when you pretend you do. The old way is out – and that’s why the “establishment” are fighting their corner out of absolute slimy desperation now. Our job is just to clear the path to allow better ideas to win against the old ones before they take us down with them. And whilst we’re at it, maybe improve the state of children’s TV which is really quite shit now.

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And that’s How for Now.

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