We had three days in Malta for my wife’s birthday, and it began badly. The hotel was the kind of bad where you stand in the lobby and start calculating how much of the trip you are about to lose to being annoyed.
It lasted about an hour. We walked, we ate too much, and a friend of twenty years arrived with his family. His daughter is almost the same age as mine, and from the moment they met they played together as if nothing in the world needed explaining. It turned out to be one of the best short trips we have had in years.
And still, I spent it with one eye on the island and the other, a little anxious, on my phone.
The eye on the island kept noticing people. It is a small place, not much more than half a million residents, and roughly a third of them are not Maltese. You hear Maltese, English, Italian, and the accents of every place a waiter, a nurse, a driver or a student can come from. Many of the older foreigners were British. Linen shirts, a tan, a glass of something at four in the afternoon. Boomers from England. The island has been inviting them for decades with cheap taxes, and I cannot say I blame them. I would like one of those afternoons myself.
Next to them were the young ones who came to work, a lot of them from India and the Philippines. Old people who came to rest, young people who came to work, the same streets, the same café tables. That is exactly the arrangement an ageing continent says it wants, and here it was working on a very small piece of rock.
I know I should be careful. Three days is a holiday, not a study. I have no idea what this costs the Maltese in rent, in traffic, in patience, and I suspect they keep a list. A town is not a country. What holds together for half a million people can come apart for tens of millions.
The other eye was on France. Every time I sat down with a coffee, my phone had another picture: a school blockaded, kids in the street, smoke over a city centre. It began in high schools in September, with too many children in a class, too few teachers, and rooms like ovens in the summer. By Saturday hundreds of thousands were out. More than a thousand people were arrested in a single day and a historic town hall burned down. The faces were young. Many of them are too young to vote.
It is an odd thing to hold both at once. A teenager in a French suburb throwing something at a police line, and my daughter running along a pavement with her friend, and me in the middle with a pastry, feeling guilty about enjoying it.
By coincidence, October 16th was also the anniversary of Marie Antoinette’s execution, the woman who supposedly said “let them eat cake.” She never did. Rousseau wrote that line about some unnamed princess when she was still a child in Vienna. We hung it on her afterwards, because a person is easier to blame than a structure. I think we are doing the same thing with France now.
The easy story is about who is in the street and where their parents came from. The cultural questions are real, and I will not pretend otherwise. But when I looked at the shape of the country instead, a different picture came up. About a fifth of France, fourteen million people or so, are Boomers. They are the biggest generation in the country, and they vote like it. A lot of the young do not vote at all.
I saw a post on X this week that made the whole argument in one image: young people in the streets of a French city, and in another corner of it, Boomers dancing. I could not open the post again to check the details, so take it as what I saw, not as evidence. But it stuck.
I want to be fair to everybody in that picture. A retiree voting to protect the pension they paid into is not a villain. A twenty-year-old who stays home may have decided, reasonably, that the booth does not answer him. Everyone is behaving rationally from where they stand. That is exactly the problem.
And the promise that was supposed to hold this together, that younger workers arriving from abroad would carry the pensions of an ageing continent, has not obviously been kept. That is my reading, and I hold it loosely. What I am surer of is that the group that normally balances a society, the working middle, is hard to find in either picture.
I know where it is. I am fifty. I am not the Boomer dancing and I am not the teenager in the street.
In The Last Generation That Will Retire I wrote about the squeeze on people my age: a promise that expired, and a gap of many years between becoming hard to employ and becoming eligible for a pension. What I did not say then is who we are squeezed between. The generation above us holds the votes and the assets. The generation below us holds the anger and the future. And the middle pays, in tax, in care for ageing parents, in school fees for children, and does not appear in the photograph.
A few years ago I read The Fourth Turning, which argues that history moves in cycles of about eighty years, each one ending in a crisis where the old order is torn down and rebuilt. They put the current crisis as starting around 2008 and ending somewhere near 2033. Most historians do not take it seriously, and some call it an elaborate horoscope. They may be right. But a horoscope can still ask a good question: if this is the part of the story where hard decisions get made, why are they not being made?
The candidates are not mysterious. Spread inherited wealth more widely. Speed up robotics so that fewer workers carry more retirees. Rebuild education and retirement into several steps instead of one cliff at sixty-five. On paper they look easy. I thought they were when I wrote them in my notes. They are not, because every one of them takes something from someone who votes.
That is the answer I keep coming back to. An authoritarian system can impose a hard call. A democracy has to persuade the people who will pay for it, and they happen to be its biggest bloc. So the decision waits, and waiting is also a decision, made by default, with the bill passed to someone who was not in the room.
Which brings me to the question I could not put down on that island. Are we responsible only for our own time?
Two thinkers answered it within a year of each other, while France was coming apart. Burke said no: society is a partnership between the living, the dead and those not yet born, and no generation has the right to spend it all. Jefferson, writing to Madison from Paris, said the opposite: the earth belongs to the living, and the dead have no rights over it.
They cannot both be right. But read together, they describe the trap. Boomers can quote Jefferson: the living decide. The young can quote Burke: you spent our share. Each side finds the philosopher who supports what it already wanted.
My own answer, for what it is worth, is that we are responsible for our time and for the handover. A generation that does only the first is a tenant. A generation that does the second is an ancestor. I would like my daughter to remember me as the second.
What frightens me is not that Europe is in a hard decade. Every generation gets one. In May You Live in Interesting Times I wrote about reading Zweig twice, and what frightens me is the other outcome, the one he lived through. I believe the European Union is the highest level of organised civilisation people have managed so far. No wars between neighbours who spent a thousand years killing each other, shared law, open borders, a six-year-old who thinks speaking four languages is ordinary. It is an achievement. Achievements can be lost, and the trend line at the moment does not point up.
Which is why Once Brothers hit me the way it did. It is a documentary about Dražen Petrović and Vlade Divac, and for me it was never only a documentary. Petrović was my hero when I was a kid. I played guard too, the same position, and I watched everything he did on the screen: how he faked, how he set up a play, how he defended, how he shot. I memorised it. Then I went down to the asphalt court in the neighbourhood and tried it again, and again, and again, with a kind of ambition I have not had since. Not for a trophy, not for a team. Just to play, to compete for one short match, to be a little better than the day before. I think that watching him also taught me how to manage people later: see the game two moves ahead, and set up the others before yourself.
That ambition is something I lost somewhere on the way to fifty, and I did not notice when it went.
So when I watched the documentary, two tears came up, and they were not only about Petrović and Divac. They were about those days, which I understood will never come back. And they were about what happened to the two of them. Two of the best players of their generation, as close as brothers, teammates for the same country. Then the country broke along lines neither of them drew, and the friendship broke with it. Petrović died in a car accident in 1993 with the friendship still broken. Yugoslavia did not look like a place that would break, until the morning after.
I watched our two girls play together the moment they met, and nothing in it needed explaining. For my daughter, a mixed world is not a policy. It is the water she swims in.
I do not know whether my generation will make the hard calls in time, or leave them to hers. I do not know whether the union she is growing up in will still be one when she is my age. What I know is that for three days I saw what the alternative looks like when it works: different ages, different origins, a small piece of ground shared by people who mostly got on with it. That is not a solution. It is evidence that what we are afraid of losing is real.
And one day, when she is old enough, I would like to take her to an asphalt court and play with her, not against her. That is the only version of competition I still believe in.
The dancing bothers me. Not because dancing is wrong. Because the music is still playing, the bill has not arrived, and I would like someone to check who is paying for the band.
