I feel like I'm working a lot, being cheated out of my early 20s by the pandemic - totally not in my control. And yet, older generations still have the gall and the balls to talk about how "young people are lazy". Recently I found out I'm in Gen Z (1997) and I'm not buzzing with that because of the bad press towards us.
We had an interesting chat with my Dad a few nights ago. He was saying how when he was young he knew how to use a spanner, how to cook, how to do all this stuff that I honestly have little to no clue about. I see people on their "home-style" Instagram accounts putting up panelling and paint and all this stuff I would probably do so wrong and it would look awful, and no-one would want to come and see me in my house cos it's so shit... Sorry, that's my inner monologue coming out again.
I remember when I was 17 and had my first proper serious boyfriend, and we went to Cornwall for a few weeks with his family to stay in their house down there, and of course I wanted to be a good girlfriend and help around the house, but I literally had no clue what I was doing. This woman, who ended up teaching me a lot about a lot of things during my time with her son (most of which she will never know), taught my how to properly clean a whole bathroom, top to bottom. No-one had taught me how to do that - my parents worked incredibly hard in their business and as such we had a cleaner so why would I have learned.
There's a vague memory in my brain of us going to see this family we used to see a lot in the Lake District. The matriarch, lets call her Mrs G, is the kind of woman that took no bullshit - so much so that when I was about 10 she made me vow that I would never accept a proposal unless she had met the fiancé-to-be first. Anyway, the memory is of her basically sending me upstairs the clean the bathroom in her house so that her and my parents could presumably have a drink and chat shit without being interrupted by the rogue 8 year old wandering around asking for attention (only child life - if that isn't an advert for having multiple children then I don't know what will convince you). I can't have done a very good job because 1. I was 8, and 2. she never asked me to do it again!
Since this I would like to say I started following Mrs Hinch and am now an obsessive cleaner, to the point where the rim that the base of my toothbrush leaves wherever I stand it pisses me off to much I've taken to standing my toothbrush on a piece of toilet paper inside my cabinet to avoid the horrible marks left on the sink.
So yes, admittedly, maybe I am a bit useless, in the sense of practical things. But I've been spending my time wisely... erm... building really nice houses on Sims 4 and writing blogs nobody reads instead of using a spanner, sue me. What these people that say "young people are lazy" are forgetting is, we are the ones that can set up their internet, can find anyone on Facebook within 2 minutes, know what a HDMI is for, speak in multiple formalities across multiple platforms simultaneously.
What I'm trying to say is that if, like me, you catch yourself feeling useless, then hold your head high! Don't forget those skills that you have that no generation before you has had. We're breaking new ground. And we're in a pandemic, so any laziness is automatically just not valid...so there! Now get back in bed, you lazy people, and enjoy it like the woman in the picture below obviously is - she's feeling no guilt and neither should you, whether you're posing for a stock photo or not.
