Spare us the self-pity. The young have never had it so good

The customs, beliefs and values of which these words were an expression seem almost laughably remote today. In the selfie and social media age our emotional habits have come to resemble our attitude to private debt. When invited to spend our souls in public, we take delight in doing so. Whenever we are invited to spill our worth out, we accept the invitation. Easy to satirise, the stiff-lipped virtues of an earlier era have come to be regarded as callous at best and emotionally atrophied at worst.

For decades we have told ourselves that it is better to give voice to our complaints than to hold things in. Better to “make yourself human” by giving vent to the full wail of the human condition than to bear the thing graciously and not make a fuss.

If you doubt the long recessional of this type of character, consider when you last heard someone say: “Mustn’t grumble.” Or that dated favourite of elderly relatives: “No use complaining.” Today these phrases seem to belong to another age, for a very good reason. Yet the reasons they arose were also good.

In an era when ill health, poverty and early death were far more common than they are today, you needed to be wary of grumbling about your own problems. Not just because the person you were speaking to might have suffered far worse hardships than yourself, but also because grousing about your own troubles risked simply adding to the general pool of misery.

Who needed more complaining? Especially when there was no possible relief or answer to the thing being complained about. We all get sick, so why pretend it’s just you? We all die, so why behave as if you’re the first?

A short while ago I was invited to speak on an American campus. The university in question had recently had a particularly extreme example of what has become known as Millennial “snowflakery”. It involved a student who had been admitted to hospital for a week after reading a novel that was part of her course.

It was afterwards claimed that she had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — a condition apparently triggered by the novel. A lot of American students claim to have PTSD. While I have no doubt that it exists among soldiers, I remain unpersuaded that life in the 21st-century Ivy League is so traumatic that students need to be treated like shell-shocked veterans of war.

Having expected the other students to be as sceptical as me, I was surprised to discover them instead to be almost infinitely sympathetic to the problems raised by the case. Like many of their British counterparts they had, throughout their lives, been encouraged to devote an almost infinite level of significance to their own and others’ feelings.

They had also been persuaded that the universe cared. The tiniest flicker on their emotional dials was expected to have consequences in the world around them. Anyone who has watched Keeping up with the Kardashians on television will know how this looks. It is life as the register and analysis of fleeting and insignificant feelings that any sane person should realise matter to the cosmos not one jot.

Of course there may be times — if one is a multimillionaire reality-TV star, or a student on an Ivy League campus — when the endless and exhausting analysis and voicing of one’s own sentiments tempts one to believe there can be a solution of some kind. Perhaps with enough complaints this condition of ours is curable? Possibly with enough attention, studies and mindfulness we can renegotiate the whole bargain?

The downer for such dreamers must come with the reminder that in any human era but the present such behaviour would not have lasted past the first ad break.

Trying to be constructive, I have taken to discussing with Millennials I meet why the attitudes of an earlier age may have had their own rewards and virtues. Millennials get plenty of ridicule and lambasting. But, in an age when the whole world’s feelings and opinions can reach them (and vice versa) in a nanosecond, I don’t underestimate the trepidation and concern they feel. However, if you dislike the values of an age, it is not enough simply to lambast them. It is necessary to suggest an alternative.

And so, whenever I get the chance, I have taken to explaining the reasons for restraint over exhibition, understatement over extravagance and privacy over revelation.

It is true that sometimes these suggestions seem so alien that they might as well have come from an Aztec priest. But plenty of young people do get this. The mass and maelstrom of modern communications has driven them away from the culture of endless self-exposure, and the rewards of endless self-revelation are not obvious to all of them.

The smarter members of their generation can also see what any outsider can observe: that young people in the West today are probably the luckiest generation in the luckiest countries in the luckiest income bracket in world history. If life is such hell for them, what will it be like when the rest of the world catches up with them, demanding equal or greater opportunities? When they fall down the ladder, what reserves will they have to draw upon?

It is the certainty that no one can be this lucky for ever that persuades me that the emotional incontinence that has typified our age will one day recede in its turn. In Britain, as in America, the economic tide has lifted most of us. The prevalence of peace has benefited us all. But it cannot always be. And when things change — as one day they will — we might yet need to remember some of those “cold fish” virtues.

The emotional flintiness of a couple of generations ago probably needed some relief. Just as the initial baby-boomer instinct to let it all hang out needed, in its turn, to be reined in. But the virtues of the past are worth keeping fresh, not least for when they might be needed again.

Dominic Lawson is away