The mother of adult children was morose.

What had happened, she wanted to know, to cause young adults who had doggedly trekked through school, college and a first job, to pull away from the traditional pattern of settling down, buying a house and having children?

They all seemed to be embarking on lengthy and apparently quite challenging, not to say expensive and time-consuming, hikes in, say, Peru or New Zealand or the North American wilderness.

If not that, they were embarking on ‘gap’ years abroad, or drifting from job to job and relationship to relationship.

And some never even left home at all!

It was all posh coffee, nail bars, male grooming parlours, and weekend breaks in Amsterdam.

I harkened back to Bill Clinton galloping into the White House in 1992 on the back of the simple slogan, ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’.

But that’s not quite it either.

The truth is many of our young adults are pulling out of the well-trodden life-paths of previous generations because they haven’t a glimmer of a hope of achieving the simple, traditional markers of adulthood that we and their grandparents and their great-grandparents took for granted.

It is the economy, stupid, but it’s also down to a society hag-ridden by ferociously high expectations, exorbitant living costs, a deeply unhealthy obsession with image and appearance, and a screaming shortage of affordable accommodation, rented or bought.

People spend far........

© Evening Echo