This post is taken from the weekly newsletter “Darons Daronnes” on parenthood, sent every Wednesday at 6 p.m. To receive it, you can register for free here.
This weekend, tired of being stuck in a unique alternative to our family soundtrack (Parents: “Are we listening to Orelsan? » /Children: ” No, Fly Me ! »), I put on an old Blur album. Modern Life Is Rubbish, 1993, a masterpiece. At this point, it may be useful to let you know that my objectivity is compromised, as I harbored a lifelong passion for the Britpop band fronted by Damon Albarn, to the point of making it the subject of my dissertation for mastery, a long time ago.
But that’s not the point, as Damon would say. While I hummed with infinite happiness the refrain of For Tomorrow, I thought back to my 16 years. And there, I really had a thought of old schnock: I told myself that it was better before.
dreams of conquest
I suddenly had the conviction that my adolescence was lighter than that of the young people I see around me. I was afraid that my children, still small (8, 5 and 3 years old), would never experience this feeling of being bigger than the world, these dreams of conquest. Of course, I am not completely blinded by nostalgia: nothing was simple at 16, I felt bad about myself and tortured and, moreover, I was privileged enough not to be burdened with material worries. .
But here, beyond the individual circumstances, I had the impression that something had changed. The light and melancholy joy of this album, the playfulness of these musicians who had set out to tell the story of an eternal England, as if nothing else on earth mattered, all this seemed to me to belong to a world of which we definitely would have locked the door. A world before Brexit, Covid-19, the climate threat, the war in Ukraine, the permanent political crisis. A world where I could be a teenager and think only of myself, my navel, my pierced arch and the next Blur concert – and sometimes demonstrate against Jean-Marie Le Pen with the certainty that youth would triumph.
“Twenties Crisis”
In an article that my colleague Célia Laborie devoted to what we have dubbed “the crisis of the twenties”, the philosopher Claire Marin said: “It has become more difficult to find your place, because you can no longer be in a purely selfish logic, like in my generation, where everyone cared about their own career, their own choices. Today, certain concerns, particularly ecological ones, can only be tackled collectively. »
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