Generational Responsibility (Or: Who Actually Owns the Stadium)

Nobody hands you the baton and tells you the truth about the track.

That’s the bit everyone leaves out when they talk about generational responsibility, as if it’s a tidy relay where each runner just needs to grip the baton a bit tighter and pump their arms a bit harder. I’ve heard this analogy trotted out at dinner parties by people who inherited the house they’re standing in. I’ve watched it used, straight-faced, in opinion columns written by people who bought property when a deposit was a summer job and a stern word from your dad.

Here’s what the relay race metaphor gets right, and it’s the only bit worth keeping: someone did run before you. Someone did hand you something, whether that’s a mortgage-free future, a burning planet, a pension system held together with string, or a labour market that’s been quietly replaced with a vending machine that dispenses “gig opportunities.” Fine. That part’s true.

Here’s what it gets catastrophically wrong: it assumes the track was the same length for everyone. It assumes the baton wasn’t on fire. It assumes nobody moved the finish line halfway through your leg of the race, rebranded it as “personal growth,” and charged you a subscription to find out where it went.

I grew up moving countries every couple of years, forces kid, no say in the matter, no vote on the postcode. You learn early that the people who make the big calls are rarely in the room when you’re dealing with the consequences. That’s not a metaphor I picked up from a business book. That’s just what it’s like watching your dad get posted somewhere new while you’re the one who has to work out which kid at the new school is going to be a problem. Generational responsibility works the same way. The people running the show, the ones setting interest rates, gutting pension schemes, deciding a degree is essential and then deciding it isn’t worth the debt, they’re never the ones stood on the track wondering why their legs won’t work.

So let’s stop pretending this is a relay between generations. It isn’t. It’s a relay where the officials keep changing the rules mid-race, selling tickets to watch you fail, and then writing thinkpieces about why your generation “just doesn’t want it enough.”

Who actually holds the whistle

Let’s be specific, because vague anger is easy and specific anger is useful.

The officials in this race aren’t a generation. They’re not “the boomers” or “the elites” in that lazy, catch-all way the phrase gets used when someone wants to sound radical without doing any homework. They’re a much smaller, much more identifiable group: the people who set monetary policy, the people who lobby against wealth taxes while funding thinktanks that produce reports about “intergenerational fairness,” the people who deregulated housing as an asset class and then expressed polite bafflement when housing stopped being a place to live and became a thing you park spare millions in.

Some of them are in their seventies. Some of them are thirty-four and run a venture fund. Age was never the organising principle here. Proximity to power was. That’s the bit the relay metaphor obscures every time it gets used as “your generation vs mine,” because it lets the actual officials slip quietly out the fire exit while two sets of exhausted runners argue about who dropped the baton.

Three ways they moved the finish line

One: the degree. For a solid few decades, the instruction was unambiguous. Get the degree, take on the debt, and the debt will pay for itself because the finish line, a stable job, a mortgage, a pension, is exactly where they told you it would be. Then the finish line moved. The degree stopped being a guarantee and started being a minimum entry requirement for jobs that used to need none, while the debt stayed exactly where it was, fully formed, fully due, uninterested in the fact that the thing it was meant to buy had quietly relocated.

Two: the house. Same story, different track. Buy young, they said, property only goes up, and for the people who bought young in the right decade, it did. Then the finish line moved again, this time literally, priced out of the postcode you grew up in, priced out of the next one, watching the goalposts drift further from the pitch while being told, with a straight face, that the problem is you’re not saving hard enough on a salary that hasn’t moved since 2019.

Three: the pension. The one nobody talks about at parties because it’s too far off to feel real yet, except it is real, and it’s the cruellest move of the three, because it’s the one where the officials changed the rules and didn’t bother telling anyone. Final salary schemes quietly retired themselves. The state pension age keeps drifting later, always just out of reach, always framed as a “necessary adjustment” rather than what it actually is: a finish line being pushed back, year by year, by people who will not be alive to run that particular leg themselves.

The runner-blames-runner trick

The runner-blames-runner trick isn’t an accident. It’s not a natural byproduct of generational friction that just sort of happened, the way mould happens if you leave a window shut too long. Somebody built it. It gets built every single time a headline runs a version of “Are Millennials Killing the Napkin Industry” instead of “Wages Have Been Flat For Fifteen Years While Rent Hasn’t.” It gets built every time a minister stands up and talks about young people “needing to get on the housing ladder” as though the ladder wasn’t dismantled for parts by the people standing directly behind him. It gets built every time a boomer with a paid-off house and a final salary pension tells a thirty-year-old renter that avocado toast is the reason, and the thirty-year-old, exhausted, underslept, one payslip from a breakdown, actually stops to wonder if maybe it is the toast.

That’s the trick working. That’s the whole mechanism, right there, functioning exactly as designed. You cannot sell tickets to a race where everyone’s looking at the box. So the box makes sure you’re looking at each other instead.

What the whistle actually sounds like

I’ve spent a career around people who give orders and people who take them, RAF Police first, security management after, and I’ll tell you the one thing that’s constant across every institution I’ve ever stood inside: the people issuing the instructions are almost never the people who have to live inside the consequences of them. That’s not a cynical observation, it’s a structural one. It’s baked into how power organises itself. The officer who signs off the operation isn’t the one clearing the mess afterwards. The board that approves the “restructuring” isn’t the one whose mortgage depends on the job that gets cut. The central bank that raises rates to cool an economy isn’t the one who watches their fixed-rate deal expire into something they can no longer afford.

So when someone tells you this is a relay and you just need to run your leg well, ask them, gently or otherwise, whether they’ve ever once had to run a leg where the track ended somewhere different to where they were told it would.

Most of them haven’t. That’s rather the whole point.

The stadium has a landlord

Here’s the thing about stadiums. They’re not neutral. Someone owns the land underneath the track. Someone’s collecting rent on the concession stands, the broadcast rights, the merchandise, the overpriced water they sell you at the gate because they know you’re thirsty and you’ve got nowhere else to go. That’s not a metaphor stretched too far, that’s just describing an economy. Every generational grievance gets marketed back to the aggrieved as a lifestyle product. Can’t afford a house? Here’s a five-part newsletter on “generational wealth mindset.” Burnt out from a labour market that’s quietly automating your job while calling it “efficiency”? Here’s a wellness app, £9.99 a month, cancel anytime, which you won’t, because you’re too tired to remember you signed up for it.

The stadium doesn’t just host the race. It profits from every lap you run, every stumble you take, every furious column you write about the runner next to you instead of the landlord above you both.

So what do you actually do with a rigged race

I don’t have a tidy answer, and if I gave you one it’d be a lie, and I’ve written enough during my time to know the difference between an honest ending and a satisfying one.

But here’s what I don’t believe. I don’t believe the answer is running faster. I don’t believe it’s gripping the baton tighter, developing better “resilience,” optimising your personal brand until you’re lean enough to slip through a gap that was never meant to exist. I don’t believe individual grit fixes a track that was built crooked on purpose.

What I believe is smaller and harder than that. I believe you start by refusing the frame. Every time someone hands you the relay metaphor and asks you to blame the runner who passed you the baton, you say no, actually, let’s talk about who built the track, who moved the finish line, who’s still selling tickets from a box you can’t even see into. You say it at the dinner party. You say it in the comments section, for all the good that does. You say it to the version of yourself at 2am that’s already halfway convinced the toast really was the problem.

And you look up. Properly up, past the runner next to you, past the generation you’ve been told is your natural enemy, straight at the box.

Because they’ve been counting on you not to.

The bit where I stop writing and start meaning it

I keep coming back to the same image, the one that started this whole piece off. The baton, on fire, being pressed into your hands by someone who’s already turning away, already half-forgiven for the state they’ve left it in because, well, it’s tradition, isn’t it, someone hands you something broken and you’re meant to say thank you and start running.

I’ve held a few of those batons myself. Watched my dad get posted somewhere new and understood, even as a kid, that the decision had been made by someone who’d never meet me, never see the school I’d have to walk into on Monday with no friends and a funny accent from wherever we’d just left. That’s generational responsibility in miniature, isn’t it. Someone, somewhere, moves a piece on a board they can see and you can’t, and you’re the one who has to live inside the consequences with a smile on, because complaining makes you the problem.

I didn’t get to vote on that posting. You didn’t get to vote on the interest rate, the degree inflation, the pension age creeping backwards like the tide going out and just… not coming back in. Nobody in this race got a ballot paper. That’s not incidental. That’s the design.

So here’s where I land, for what it’s worth, which is one bloke’s opinion typed out from a cave in rural Spain with dodgy water pressure and a laptop that’s seen better decades.

The race isn’t fair, and it was never going to be, and no amount of “just run faster” is going to fix a track that was built crooked from the first whistle. But the moment you stop looking sideways at the runner next to you, exhausted, furious, carrying exactly the same fire-lit baton as you, and start looking up, properly up, at the box where the officials sit taking notes and selling programmes, something shifts. Not everything. I’m not promising you the finish line stops moving. I’m promising you stop mistaking the person beside you for the enemy.

That’s not resilience. That’s not personal growth. That’s not a five-part newsletter series with a discount code.

It’s just refusing to run the race the way they’ve written it.

And if that’s the only leg you manage today, fine. Hand the baton on. Someone’s waiting for it, fire and all, and the very least you can do is tell them the truth about the track before they start running.

Until Next Time