Author’s Note: This post is a product of me coming up with a funny title, and then challenging myself to write a post to fit. The result is a post about the challenges of being a young person in the modern world. It is modern art piece meets ramblings meets Substack. I personally found the title hilarious the moment it entered my mind, and I just had to have a post with this name. So, without further ado, I present: “Last of the Summer Huel”.
Part I
What can you do with £106.58?
A lot less than you could several decades ago.
But you can still buy three boxes of ready-to-drink Huel, and that's still worth its weight in—well—in meal-replacement drinks.
Banana Huel, Vanilla Huel, Cinnamon Swirl Huel. Name a more iconic trio, I’ll wait (for you to do some combinatorics, and figure out how many equally iconic trios exist among the wonderful flavours of Huel.)
I have a recycling bag full of them. Empty carcasses of Huel bottles, having served their purpose on this earth, which was to provide me with tasty, convenient, smooth goodness.
I first tried Huel when I was 18, and I loved it. The idea of replacing a meal with something quick and easy, and also healthy, was just a game-changer for me. Sure, it’s expensive, especially if you buy the ready-to-drink stuff. But you’re paying for the added convenience.
Alas, all things must come to an end. Today was the day. Today was the end of the summer Huel. Today, the final Vanilla Huel met its drinker.
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
£106.58 doesn't grow on trees, so I think this may be the end of the summer Huel. I bought it to help me gain some weight, and it has served that purpose.
There is a British sitcom, which ran from 1964 to 2010, called Last of the Summer Wine. My parents used to watch it.
It followed the youthful misadventures of three elderly British men, living in a rural Yorkshire town, who couldn't seem to grow up. The trio passed the time by speculating about the townspeople and testing inventions.
I found it pretty boring, to be honest. Last of the Summer Wine is of its time.
Okay, okay. I found it boring when I was a kid. And clearly, the faded memories of a seven-year-old are no basis for a system of deciding on whether something is actually boring or not.
So, I went to YouTube, and investigated. And I found that it is actually somewhat funny. I mean, I think it’s well-written, at least, and I wouldn’t describe it as boring. But I can see why I found it boring then.
There are two contrasting effects at play, I think.
First, I am now more used to a world where the precise media that I want is available at a moment’s notice. And Last of the Summer Wine is not something I would choose over a true crime documentary on Netflix. Thus, I find LOTSW less of a treat than I may have done in the 90s, when the concept of being able to ‘Poke’ someone on Facebook was but a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and the concept of sharing your location over Facebook Messenger was but a sub-glint within that one.
Second, I am older, and thus more attuned to the subtleties of humour written for adults. So I may be more likely to enjoy LOTSW for that reason.
When I grow old, and discuss Huel with my children (who won’t exist, because I love them), what will they think of the meal replacement drinks I will no doubt still be obsessed with in my old age?
Will they find those boring too, just as I found Last of the Summer Wine to be dull and stuffy?
Clearly not, I think. Huel is timeless and delicious, and the meal-replacement drink industry will surely go from strength to strength over the coming decades, before the thinking-replacement AI industry goes from strength to basically-omnipotence and grinds down old Huel bottles to tile the universe with NFTs or something.
Okay, but let’s assume that doesn’t happen. In that case, society and culture will live on as normal, in the sense that technological innovation will still happen, but at a more recognisable pace than some AI-doomers fear and some accelerationists hope for.
In that timeline, I will be of my time, too. Perhaps, anyway. I mean, I’m of my time now, because that’s what of my time means, but also because I cannot claim to be morally timeless. I am highly steeped in my own culture, and whilst I try to step outside of that and consider what future generations may think about my moral circle, I can’t do that perfectly.
In a sense, I may be of my time already. The kids these days are already using language I either don’t understand, or recoil at simply because it’s unfamiliar. For today’s teenagers, gone are the days of being rekt. Instead, one is cooked, these days, you know. It’s cook or be cooked. And when one cooks, one must exclaim: let’s go!
It’s easy to focus on what’s different, though. Some things are still the same. Instead of cooked, one can still be screwed. When one cooks, one can still flex. One can be living one’s best life. One can be salty, and occasionally, there may be tea. None of this is taken from a home economics textbook. At least, I assume not. We’d be forgiven for having our suspicions.
Part II
“If you only knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk so much about wasting it. It’s him.”— the Mad Hatter, and also the superintelligent AI I met in the year 2060 (I took a trip there).
It’s a mad world out there, and the very concept of being of one’s time is rapidly changing. Today’s youth have to contend with the intersection of the old and the new to an extent previous generations simply did not. I can be teaching Welsh to a woman from Idaho in the morning, playing games in Virtual Reality with people from Japan in the afternoon, and doing a crossword with my dad in the evening. It’s all rather bonkers, really. The various sub-domains in which my life operates is certainly too much for me to explain to my elderly parents. Whilst they have learnt to live with technology, the level of being used to it my generation requires is just a bit too much for them to quite fully understand. Too much for them to have a complete grip on. People of my generation (and younger) must run harder than ever to keep up, and we must increasingly do so by ourselves. Peer support networks are increasingly necessary, and yet seem tragically in decline.
I don’t want to overstate all this. Obviously, every generation copes with change. And some people have to cope with significant change when they are older and less able to adapt. I just think that my generation, and those that come after us, have had, are having, and will continue to have a particularly rough time of it. I don’t think many people would deny that.
The messy intersections of generations and individual preferences in society has also given rise to sub-cultures in which we must each find our place. This foists upon us a whole new axis of variability to worry about. In order to cope, we must splinter ourselves into sub-personalities, each of which fits itself into sub-cultures in different ways. I think some of us split ourselves more than others, by the way. I think the domain of language, which I have already touched upon (or maybe a bit more than touched upon—grasped upon? Clutched upon?) presents particularly salient and significant challenges in this respect—we change our speech depending on who we’re talking to, and when, and why. Different vocabularies pertain to different subcultures.
I think there are some people who fit so neatly into one particular style of person that they don’t do much personality switching. But I roughly speculate that some people’s internal setup is such that they have to do a lot of it in order to get through life. Personally, I think I do this a slightly more than is healthy.
Take cooked, for example. I would be happy using this (in a slightly ironic, countersignalling way) with my best friend from school. I wouldn’t expect him to laugh much (a nasal exhale, at most) if I used this term. I would never use it with my friends who are much older than us (late twenties, thirties, my older brothers). They might not know the term, and I wouldn’t want to lump myself in with the ‘Modern Teen/Gen Z’ subculture. My school-best-friend would appreciate the countersignalling—others might not. We must all be careful in such territory, and I am constantly amazed at how well the human brain handles all this. Without batting an eye, we must endure the constant process of dipping in and out of subcultures and their associated lexicons, traditions, and values. We must process the subcultures of our present generation, and those of previous generations, just to get by (socially speaking, that is.)
And language is but one aspect of the various ways subcultures differ. Subcultures also have expected behaviours, expected views, expected gestures, and so on. I must confess to a bit of view-bending myself as I switch between different people. I know it’s bad, and I should do it less. But sometimes, you kind of have to.
I have recently been discussing inter-sub-cultural and intergenerational differences with one of my Welsh tutees. I told him that I think I might go mad (at least to begin with) if, hypothetically, I went back in time to live in the 1980s. He was very surprised by this, and I was surprised that he was surprised.
One overlooked effect of recent technological advancements is that the ease of access we now have to an increasingly diverse range of special interests has siphoned our attention to increasingly specific cultural sub-domains. The variety of films, video games, types of fiction, types of non-fiction, and so on and so forth is only breadthening, and our ability to pay attention to things that don’t fit our specific interests is correspondingly waning. In a hypothetical world where all this were not available to me—the present version of me, who has long since gotten used to it—I do think I may well go mad. To be suddenly plunged into a world where the number of different characters one could be is substantially narrower than I am used to would be extremely difficult, at least at first. Though I do think I’d get used to it, and perhaps even prefer it, eventually. It may well be a healthier way to live. In fact, I suspect it is.
And yet, we must still fit our lives into some sort of pattern that reaches some threshold of resemblance to the way we used to live. As human beings, we must fit ourselves within traditional routines and social structures, even though the variance in our daily activities and outlook is becoming only more pronounced as time marches on. Some of us are AI researchers. Some of us are bricklayers. And yet both those things count as a job, and thus fit within an established, shared sense of what that three-letter word means—despite the fact that the word has somewhat lost its power as a good term for encapsulating the massive breadth of things people do to make money. The boundaries of what counts as a job are fuzzier than ever. But we still cling on to the word, because we have few better alternatives. To most people, job means a livelihood. A means to dignity. Contribution, in some way, to society. Whatever that means. It doesn’t matter what you think it means. As long as you can keep up.
I have worked with people who are shocked that I ever had the opportunity to study in Japan. I have worked with others for whom that is a totally normal thing to have done. My reality is split between worlds. I have to keep up.
I have studied with people for whom consuming meal-replacement drinks on the daily is a natural part of life. I have studied with others for whom it is extremely strange. There is an awareness asymmetry there, as the Huel-conscious group is keenly aware of the routines of the majority, and yet the majority know little of the Huel-conscious group. They are weird, after all. My reality is, again, split between worlds. The Venn Diagram of the Huel-conscious, the non Huel-conscious, the Year Abroad-conscious, and the non Year-Abroad conscious looks something like the Olympic Logo after a heavy night’s drinking. It’s a total mess. Again, I have to keep up.
I must maintain some sort of coherent internal sense of who I am, because nobody else has the time to keep track of all that for me. They’re busy enough with their own Venn Diagrams.
My main point in all of this is that it’s all too easy to think that change is in the future. It isn’t. Change has happened, and change is happening right now.
Recently, it’s just been happening so fast that I’ve actually noticed a bit.
Machines can beat humans at chess. They could do that twenty years ago. Have you been keeping up?
ChatGPT is now far better than Google for many things. Have you been keeping up?
Have.
You.
Been.
Keeping.
Up?
Ultimately, my take is this: customs change, and we must all shift with the tides. To the extent that we want to be flexible—and I think we should want to be very flexible—we must make special efforts to be less of our time, I think. Or at least, capable of being so. To be as flexibly timeless as possible. To adhere to principles that are as eternal as possible. To be adaptive and responsive to change, in such a way that we do not fall behind the times in the way that almost everyone always seems to, at some stage in their lives. Or at least, to fall behind the times a little less than we would otherwise, had we not been paying special attention.
Part III
There’s an element of foresight required in this, too. What will people think in the future, and how can we best prepare ourselves for that now? And, more importantly, why will they think that way? And what relevance does that have to us now?
There is a serious moral dimension here. 80,000 Hours has an excellent episode of its podcast, featuring Will McAskill, entitled: Will MacAskill fears our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about that?.
This topic is far too broad for me to do it justice in a few paragraphs. But briefly, the idea is:
Premise: We see past generations as having endorsed and engaged in heinous moral crimes, like slavery, child labour, corporal punishment, colonialism, and so on and so on and so on.
Probing follow-up question: So who are we to say that we’re not doing equally horrible things now?
A quote from the podcast:
“When you look at Bentham and Mill they were extremely progressive. They campaigned and argued for women’s right to vote and the importance of women getting a good education. They were very positive on sexual liberal attitudes. In fact, some of Bentham’s writings on the topic were so controversial that they weren’t even published 200 years later.”
I think it is incumbent on us personally, and as a whole society, to think deeply about this. Let us not fall prey to the End of History illusion.
At this point, you may be thinking that the post has taken a rather abrupt and serious turn. And I mean, it has, and it hasn’t. The whole thing is serious. I just use the humour to cope, and hopefully to help you cope too.
Anyway, the podcast is great (both that episode, and the other episodes).
Conclusion
We’re nearly at the end of the post. It’s been a wild ride, huh.
I’ll leave you with this:
In a few decades’ time, I may be quite old.
I may be—shudder—of my time. Properly of my time, like the old geezers in Last of the Summer Wine. The ones to whom cooking meant, y’know, cooking. I will reflect, with my friends, on all the things we used to do. The Substack posts we wrote. The Cinnamon Swirl Huel we drank (or I drank, mostly). The memes we used to share. Lol.
But when that time comes for me, assuming the winds of change have not blown any sort of anti-ageing serum my way, I will take comfort in the fact that the brutal efficiency of meal-replacement drinks will live on once I am gone.
I have seen the Last of the Summer Huel, but Huel is not just for Summer.
And thank goodness for that.
A man approached me, and placed on the counter a shirt he wished to purchase. He reached into his pocket for his wallet, and (to my surprise, though it shouldn’t have been) pulled out a crumpled paper £5 note. I picked up the shirt to scan it (for barcodes had been in widespread commercial use since the late 1970s). I took the money, and handed back the item.
“Would you like your receipt?”
“Yes, please.”
I dutifully printed the receipt (for printed receipts had been in widespread use for more than half a century, and the word ‘receipt’ itself was still blissfully ignorant of the inelegant slang usage that would be foisted upon it decades later…)
“And here’s your change…”
“Oh, keep it,” he said.
I paused for a moment. And then, before I had a chance to stop myself, I said:
“A wise choice. But if you only knew Change as well as I do…”
—My Imagination: Back to the 1980s (A Memoir) (Joe Jones, as yet unpublished)
this is me just becoming aware of the Huel consumers. so you've at least done something to bridge that awareness gap here
Now I'm curious, how old are you? 🤔