Anonymous Zoomer: How Britain's social contract undermines young people like me

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If you’ve spent any time on social media recently then you will have probably come across the above meme.

It captures the complete and utter frustration that many young Zoomers like me, from Generation-Z, now feel.

At the centre of the ‘Social Contract Meme’ is a young man named Nick, an exasperated 30-year-old who has simply had enough.

Nick is an archetype of the young urban professional. He is just trying to get by —working hard, playing by the rules, keeping himself to himself, hoping to build a life where he can find genuine prosperity.

But around Nick are all the growing social obligations and pressures that are now being thrust upon him, and many other young Zoomers like him, by our hapless, self-interested, neglectful and utterly disconnected political class.

On one side, there is the money that Nick is forced to give up to the developing world and its progeny —a transfer away from Nick to things like the foreign aid budget, to support people overseas, and also to the rapidly rising number of immigrants here in Britain, most of whom now come from outside Europe and many of whom are now breaking our laws to enter Britain illegally.

This is represented by ‘Karim’, emblematic of a new urban underclass which parties on both the Left and Right, both Labour and Tory, have created through a mix of welfare largesse, the extreme policy of mass immigration, failing to integrate newcomers into wider society, and instil in them a sense of social responsibility.

Through a generous welfare system, Nick’s money is transferred away from him to the likes of Karim, who lives on benefits, engages in gang violence and drug-dealing, lives in social housing, and sends more of Nick’s money outside of the country to the developing world in the form of remittances, all of which further erodes the social contract here in Britain.

At the same time, on the other side of the meme, Nick is also under pressure from a social contract which demands that his taxes are used to help sustain financially secure if not affluent Baby Boomer pensioners, like ‘Simon & Linda’.

Nick and Zoomers like him fund the pensioner class via the state through the state pension and healthcare spending, as well as through a broken property market that has allowed Baby Boomers, many of whom also retired on final-salary pensions, to snap up houses for a fraction of what they cost today and then make a fortune as the value of their homes surged, not least as governments printed more money.

Off Nick’s back, Simon and Linda can now sit back and enjoy their golden years, cruising around the world, voting for politicians who promise to maintain if not expand their financial benefits, and opposing the construction of new homes.

At the same time, Simon and Linda, who are ensconced in wealthy neighbourhoods and no longer active in the labour market, also belong to the luxury belief class, no longer having to endure the negative effects of policies they aggressively advocate to feel good about themselves in debates with fellow retirees, like mass immigration, which fall disproportionately on workers like Nick, who have to compete for jobs and housing amid managed decline.

Most tellingly, all of the arrows point in one direction – away from Nick.

Though he is forced to give much to others, including growing numbers of people from outside his national community, he receives little or nothing back in return.

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Of course, like all memes, the story the social contract tells is necessarily reductive.

Some immigrants fall closer to the predicament of Nick than Karim, and many pensioners are struggling to get by —living a life of austere survival rather than opulence, especially now that Labour has taken aware their winter fuel payments.

But the popularity of the meme, which now has spin-offs in many other countries, speaks to the fact that for young Zoomers like me, who are just trying to play by the rules and get by, it often feels as though the system is treating us with utter contempt.

Nick is us, and we are Nick.

And, like Nick, we feel that the social contract in Britain, like the social contract that confronts our counterparts in many other nations, is completely rotten.

We simply cannot take it much longer, as the growing number of us who are rejecting the old parties for radical anti-establishment alternatives reveals.

The rottenness of the social contract is felt most acutely by Zoomer professionals, like me, who are living in London.

Due to the economic hollowing out that has befallen much of Britain, our capital city …