We're the flip-flop, bed-hop generation

Catholics believe life begins at conception; glossy magazines say we have to wait until 40 (or 60, or 74, or whatever they've made up this week). But research published this week suggests that 29-year-olds are having all the fun and are unable to resist the "urge to splurge".

According to the research commissioned by online auction site Ebay, 29 is the "age of true materialism", the point at which you command the highest spending power to fritter away on life's luxuries before worries about mortgages, pensions and school fees kick in.

But as a wizened 23-year-old, let me propose an alternative argument: life really begins when you leave university with a degree you'll never use, owe the Student Loan you can't afford, join a graduate scheme you loathe and live in an expensive flat in some godforsaken suburb ("because that's where everyone is") hoping you won't get mugged on the way home.

Life, in fact, begins with a quarter-life crisis - which is much like a midlife crisis, only worse: it's 20 years' premature, no one gives you any sympathy and you're too young, poor and insignificant to buy a sports car and run off with your secretary. Not that we deserve any sympathy. We're a mollycoddled, self-indulgent, selfish generation. According to another report published this week, young professionals are one of the groups most likely to waste doctors' time by not showing up to appointments. We've never had it so good, and we've never treated everyone else so badly - so here are a few thoughts on what has got us whinging twentysomethings behaving so badly.

The root of the problem is that university has become such a poor preparation for life beyond. No wonder graduate employers keep on complaining that students lack the requisite skills for the workplace (as The Daily Telegraph reported last week in yet another survey).

One of the hardest decisions a student has to take on an average day is whether to have chicken or minestrone Cup-a-Soup. The skills you develop - socialising, drinking, writing amusing e-mails - are hardly transferable to the marketplace. Learning how to copy other people's essays is only really useful if you want a career writing dodgy dossiers in the security services.

Leaving university therefore feels like falling off a conveyor belt of non-stop academic landmarks and launching in one fell swoop into the rest of your life. Farewell to brunches, and dancing midweek to club music in sweaty student clubs. Hello council taxes, daily commutes and pension schemes. On the bright side, it's only 50 years (or is it 60 now - it keeps on going up?) until we can retire. Oh, good.

And what exactly are we meant to get up to in the meantime? The intricacies of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic are all very interesting, but they don't lead you down a career path in the same way as studying economics or medicine. You can do anything or nothing with an arts degree. It opens every door and no door. So you choose the worst door of all and go and do a law conversion or an accountancy training like everyone else.

And once you've opened this door it becomes increasingly hard to close it again. Graduate trainees swear they'll make the Faustian pact for "just one more year", and end up trapped into a spiralling cycle of expensive partners, school fees and cocaine habits. Friends become split between those who work 90-hour weeks in the hope that one day they'll get a desk a little bit closer to the window, and those with interesting jobs who can never afford to go out and enjoy themselves.

The sad truth, then, is that to make money you have to work with money. And money per se is indescribably boring. One set of graduates is overpaid, overworked and unfulfilled. The other is underpaid, overworked and chippy. Both groups are jealous of the other. And sitting on top of them all, layer after layer, are two generations of more senior workers, determined that their juniors will have to jump through exactly the same hoops to get to where they are.
Few people, of course, genuinely love their jobs, but work for the vast majority of twentysomethings has become a labour of loathing. After a couple of months drafting PowerPoint presentations on recent trends in shampoo retailing, many find themselves longing for the chance to engage their brain again. Youth might be wasted on the young but university is definitely wasted on students.

These concerns aren't helped by a government that is desperate to ram-rod as many gullible teenagers into tertiary education as possible. Get a degree, they imply, and the world is your oyster. But graduates now have their expectations raised to such ridiculous levels that they are bound to be disappointed. Even the rubbish jobs are horribly oversubscribed.

No wonder, then, that we seek escapism within ourselves - blogs, Big Brother, wasted days at work entering obscure opinions under aliases in the "Have your say" section of the BBC website. No one is content just to do something any more; everyone wants to be someone. Everyone wants a short-cut to success. But there are more wannabe performers than there are spectators. More people seeking fame than there are 15-minute slots.

It's not all gloom, of course. Working out what you don't want to do can be a valuable roundabout way of finding your vocation. If you can't join them, beat them.We are an entertainingly ridiculous demographic in many ways, simultaneously cynical and passionate, directionless and idealistic, self-absorbed and generous, puerile and romantic, naïve and worldly. We're too old for teenage angst; too young to start worrying about house prices.
We also enjoy complex sexual and platonic relationships. Our grandparents courted. Our parents dated. Goodness knows what you'd call our shenanigans. Lines become blurred between friends and lovers - often with few consequences. Friendship groups are large and fluid. Best friends can be of either sex.

Relationships themselves have largely become a question of timing. You might hold an excellent hand but still decide to twist once more on 20 in the hope of being dealt an ace. We end up with so many choices that we're putting off marriage later and later. The issues facing many thirtysomethings are now the same for those a decade younger. It is this question of choice that sets our generation aside. Of course, every generation thinks that it is unique in some way. Every generation thinks it invented sex. And every older generation shakes its head and declares it's seen it all before. They're right to an extent.

But the way in which we're now bumbling into a paralysis of indecision is without precedent. Endless freedom to choose can trap as well as liberate as we career-hop, bed-hop and flip-flop into stalemate.Ultimately, however, we're really quite upbeat about it all in a way. True, we might be saddled with debts, sadistic bosses and undiagnosed sexually transmitted diseases. We might have no causes, no beliefs, and nothing worth fighting for. But we also have one of the best, navel-gazing decades of our lives ahead in which to experiment before things get serious.

If not now, then when? And if it all goes wrong, we can always take out another loan and go travelling again.

Australia learns joy of real footy

The sport that most Australians call footy (and most English people Australian No Rules Football) generally has scores in the low hundreds (six points for a goal, one, deliciously, for a behind). Goals are cheap. It is the uniquely high value of the currency in football (soccer if you must) that makes the sport as remarkably prone to explosive drama as it is to angst-ridden longeurs.

One goal, one measly goal, and a bitterly disputed one at that, and it looked certain to do for the Aussies. Japan were dominating possession and style with their slick midfield. A second goal frequently looked likely, and it would have killed the game off. But one goal it was, and as the match edged towards its close, it looked likely to be just enough.

And then the match turned and stood on its head: a sudden cataract of goals and emotions and it was all about Japanese tears and Australian song. Only football can do this because only in football does a goal matter so much. The explosion of release at a goal is something no other sport does in the same way. In Australian Rules, a goal is a kiss on the lips, in football, it’s an orgasm.

That’s what all Australia is learning. No sport is intrinsically superior to any other, but football has the most basic appeal of them all. There are sophisticated pleasures in football, and sophisticated ways to watch the game, but the moment of a goal releases the most basic instinct in sport. There’ll be Vegemite sandwiches on the ceiling and tinnies all over the floor at the mad topsy-turvy joy of it all.

Australia are in the World Cup finals for the first time since 1974, and they have done so with a team that reflect modern Australia. No, not rugged, uncompromising and bristle-chinned, and no corks on the hats, either. Rather, this was a team that represented a self-confident, well-travelled and multicultural approach to life. And it was a match in which Australia were welcomed into the commonwealth of football.

And they can teach the Poms a few things about sport, and not for the first time. They showed England how to deal with heat: you keep bloody running. England wilted on Saturday, Australia never stopped, and that is why they won. Here is the moral of the match for the England team: heart is not temperature dependent.

Yokishatsu Kawaguchi, the Japan goalkeeper, might have knocked the heart out of Australia with one save of genuine brilliance and another that was pretty damn good. But Australia just kept coming and got their reward. In all cultures, a goalkeeper is the most uniquely vulnerable of players and Kawaguchi followed a fine save with a ghastly cock-up, coming for a long throw and failing to get back.

Tim Cahill, of Everton, scored an equaliser, and then got the second with a belter of a shot that went in off two posts. John Aloisi scored the last and Australia learnt the hideous addictions of football. Australian footballing virgins might like to know that their next opponents are Brazil. No worries, eh?

Victory is for wimps!

SOME will tell you that sport is all about winning. Have nothing to do with such people. Winning is not the only thing in sport. There is also, for example, losing. Losing is one of the most important things in sport, and people do it all the time, and in a thousand different ways. You can lose gloriously, dramatically, heroically, unluckily, abjectly, humiliatingly, defiantly, and haplessly.

You can lose by a street, by a distance, a canvas, a short head, a knockout, on points. You can be hammered, trounced, beaten out of sight. You can be edged out, beaten by the narrowest of margins. You can be beaten and hang up your boots/gloves/bat/racket; you can be beaten and take a lot of positives from this.

But it all adds up to the same common experience of sport: not winning. And not winning was very much on my mind as I looked back on Arsenal’s jaunt to Paris and the miracle that never quite was. I watched Arsenal for their last three rounds in the Champions League and enjoyed the ride: the wonderful demolition of Juventus, the angst-ridden squeezing out of Villarreal, and the final in Paris against Barcelona.

It seemed possible that this would be the most wonderful night in their history. Arsenal winners! Arsenal, the best team in the world! Arsenal glorious, Arsenal for ever one-up on Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal repeating the unlikely heroics of Liverpool the previous year and stealing the European Cup from beneath the noses of the great. But it didn’t quite happen.

Arsenal were down to ten men but a defiant goal up, Barcelona were beginning to believe that God had forgotten them. For a brief instant, hope flickered and seemed ready to burst into flame. Then a goal, and hope collapsed like a house of cards. Glorious no longer, Arsenal bitterly accepted their right to be called the first loser in the Champions League.

But everybody except Barcelona lost. If winning is the only way of validating the sporting experience, the Champions League has 31 non-teams. Next season, there will be 32 more clubs at the start, and 31 more losers at the end. Losing is a big thing in sport, perhaps the biggest. Winners get more space in the papers, but it is the losers that have numbers on their side.
But we repress the idea of losing. So much of the sporting experience is about anticipation: the sort of things we might do, when it all begins. And in anticipation, we are all champions, and the teams we follow and cheer for and cherish are always unbeatable. Until, of course, we are beaten.
Defeat is the sporting experience that dare not speak its name. Defeat is the thing that keeps us coming back: for when victory is certain, where is the joy? A mismatch brings no pleasure to the winner, and we call such victories hollow.

Victory is not much of a dish unless it is seasoned with the possibility of defeat. And even when teams or individuals dominate for a sustained period of time, we know that defeat will get them in the end. It always does: Pete Sampras, Michael Schumacher, West Indies, Liverpool, Manchester United, Australia. Defeat is thrilling, defeat is intoxicating, defeat is the most exciting thing in sport, apart, that is, from winning. Defeat is an important — perhaps the most important — part of the sporting life. Certainly, football fans and those who bet on horses know that.

To say that winning is the only thing in sport is to say that Tabasco is the only thing in a Bloody Mary. The Tabasco gives you the zing and the bite, but it is not the Tabasco that intoxicates, and it is not the Tabasco that keeps you coming back for more. Without defeat there is no victory; without losers, there is no winner. We celebrate the winners: and we do so while repressing the thought that every winner floats high on buoyancy on the tears of the losers. We should be for ever grateful to every loser. Without losers there is no sport.

We who follow sport are hooked on the twists and turns of the narrative: the ever-changing cast of heroes and villains, the thrilling alternations of victory and defeat. It is the unexpected victory that is always the sweetest, because it comes so close to defeat.

Arsenal were within a Thierry Henry miss of a wonderfully unlikely win. This time 12 months back, Liverpool provided the miracle that Arsenal narrowly failed to deliver. Last summer, England won the Ashes, and the joy of the victory sprang from almost 20 years of unbroken defeat by Australia, and intermittent defeat by practically everybody else. Without that history of defeat, victory would have been far less sweet. Defeat is a constituent part of sporting joy.

We are as hooked on defeat as we are on victory. Sport would not be sport without misery, without despair, without hopelessness. Victory is for wimps: it is in defeat that the true spirit of sport is to be found.