To read newspaper headlines, you’d think that millennials had invented the avocado. Apparently this expensive fruit (usually “smashed” on toast, with a variety of garnishes) is all we eat – if we even eat it at all, rather than just ordering it and snapping it for our Instagram feeds, before chucking it on top of the ever-increasing food waste mountain, for which we are also to blame. The fetishisation of the avocado has now reached such an apex that avocado-specific bars are opening in London and New York, which also, coincidentally, happen to be the spiritual homes of the worst of all millennials – those of us with the audacity to live in expensive cities despite not being rich.
Avocado-related injuries are on the rise. There are reports of a global avocado shortage. Soon, a manbun-sporting tech startup intern named Lennon will report that, while drinking a negroni in Shoreditch House and discussing LCD Soundsystem’s new song, he became the first human in the western world to turn green.
And now, avocados are the reason that people like me can’t afford to buy houses.
How did this happen? Well, the theory posited by Australian millionaire and property mogul Tim Gurner is that if young people weren’t spending so much money on brunch, they might be able to afford to buy a house (which has nothing to do with luxury property developers such as Gurner, naturellement). He is not the first wealthy man to say this. Anyone my age and younger has become used to it by now.
Brunch has become a convenient scapegoat for structural inequality. Instead of truly examining the social and economic forces that lock young people out of the property market, why not focus on our expenditure? Never mind that, for most young people, it would take over a century of skipping their luxurious monthly brunch in order to get a mortgage for a poky starter home. Never mind that older generations had access to free or heavily discounted education, cheap property prices and stable, unionised employment, or the fact that their breakfast options were severely limited (this, I believe, is why they focus on brunch and not, say, your Netflix subscription. They didn’t even have yoghurt in those days, my mother says).
Never mind that after working every hour that god sends, saving every precious penny you earn that doesn’t go to a landlord who won’t fork out to stop your shower leaking and says that the mould would disappear if only you stopped having the cheek to insufflate indoors, you sit at home, strung out and anxiety-ridden reading the news on your smartphone (how much did that cost you, by the by?), and see that the average property value has gone up by over £2k in that week alone, which is more than you earn in a month. And you think: screw it, I’m going to leave this decrepit fungus-ridden hovel full of wobbly flat-pack furniture that is sapping all my income, and get myself some eggs.
Because, guess what, we all need a treat every now and again to stop us dying inside.
What the brunch-blaming brigade seems to miss is that this victim-blaming approach is as old as the hills, a convenient proxy for justifying a society that remains deeply unequal. Poor people wouldn’t be poor if only they cooked everything from scratch and didn’t spend all their money on cigarettes and flatscreen televisions. Young black men wouldn’t be shot or stabbed if they weren’t somehow predisposed to violence. Women wouldn’t be murdered by their partners if only they had the courage to leave. American families struggle to afford health insurance because they keep buying smartphones. Single mothers wouldn’t be finding it difficult to put food in their kids’ mouths if they’d kept their legs together.
All these groups are distinct, and suffer in varied, complex ways, but the individualistic moralism is the same: the seed of your hardship lies in your own flawed nature, your weakness. It is nothing to do with sexism, racism, generational injustice or global capitalism. Because look at me! I worked hard, and I’m OK. Look where I am today.
It’s tiring, and tedious, and would, perhaps, come from a place of guilt, if these people had the compassion to be capable of such an emotion. It’s easier to blame the disadvantaged and the vulnerable than it is to examine your own privilege, to pick apart the narrative of your own life and think, “Hey, maybe I lucked out there, maybe it wasn’t just my talent.”
My generation and those younger recognise that the odds are stacked, that the myth that hard work alone will get you a comfortable life is just that: a myth. We are labelled snowflakes for this relatively new way of thinking, and told that we are dodging responsibility. But who is really dodging responsibility here? While young people interrogate an unjust society, who is it with their fingers in their ears, refusing to admit that their revolution failed?
A word to boomers: we didn’t invent the avocado. You did. You embraced it so wholeheartedly that you yearned for bathroom suites in the same shade. You’re the ones who dominate the cultural narrative, then wonder why your offspring fetishise the objects of your nostalgia. I read earlier this month that Paul McCartney had his first avocado in about 1963, when he was 21. Not only was I not born, but my mother wasn’t even on her period yet. You made this world. Take some responsibility for it.
Last Saturday, I attended a bottomless brunch. It was, I imagine, the sort of thing that Gurner would hate – pumping soul music, people in their 20s feasting on pancakes and guzzling unlimited bloody marys. How dare we? Afterwards, in order to save money, we went and sat in the park with cans of cider, like teenagers, then repaired to someone’s house for cigarettes and music. We spent Sunday in our beds, groaning it off, and as we did so, the houses didn’t get cheaper, and the world did not become fairer, and sleeping didn’t get any easier.
And then the week rolled round again.
