Rebecca Goldsmith reflects on the tendency of young people today to identify as ‘types’. She considers the dangers inherent to this way of thinking and the role politics might play in the revival of an alternative model of selflhood – one with greater scope for individualism, change and multiplicity.
I have spent much of the last year reading and listening to the voices of children and teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s.1 Leaving the Institute of Education archives, or the Wolfson Centre in Birmingham, I’ll check my phone and be struck by the contrast between then and now, how young people speak today and how they spoke several generations ago. This is less about articulacy, and more how different generations conceive of and understand their lives. It tells us something about the cultural impact of recent economic and technological change, and it foregrounds the need to reestablish a politics of self-fulfilment, autonomy and aspiration.
Children who came of age in post-war Britain were encouraged – whether by magazine columnists, social scientists, their teachers, or their parents – to think about and imagine their future lives. In the ‘New Jerusalem’ ushered in by the 1945-51 Labour governments, and against the backdrop of greater affluence, the trajectory of one’s life was held to be less defined by where and to whom you were born. As individuals were increasingly exposed to different ways of living, through travel as well as popular culture, the assumption that young people would follow a similar trajectory to their parents was steadily undermined.2 All of which contributed to the widespread sense that children born in the post-war era could and would live different, better lives compared to previous generations.
The promise of post-war progress was, of course, never completely realised. Opportunities and outcomes continued to be restricted along lines of class, race and gender. All the same, this ideal had some purchase in reality. British society after 1945 did see an increase in social mobility, primarily due to changes in the sectoral makeup of the national economy and the structure of the workforce. At the same time, increased access to consumer goods and economic security contributed to a heightened emphasis on individual freedom, choice and fulfilment. For the generation who grew up in the immediate aftermath of the war, the question of ‘who shall I be?’ loomed larger than ever before.
Young people today speak very differently about themselves and about their lives. This was captured, with understandable unease, by Dan Brooks in a piece for The Outline in 2020. Reflecting on conversations with his own teenage son, Brooks described the imprint of ‘Type of Guy Theory’, a set of ideas prominent in contemporary online discourse, seen in the plethora of short-form videos that name ‘a series of essential identities that express themselves in certain behaviours’. Whether asking to speak to the manager makes you a ‘Karen’ or insisting that you are ‘not like other girls’ makes you a ‘pick me’, the central premise of ‘Type of Guy Theory’ is that ‘you are a type first, and you behave accordingly’.3
At first, this might not seem an especially concerning phenomenon. Some of the most prevalent online tropes include the ‘sigma male’, an archetype of masculine drive, productivity and hard work, or the ‘youngho’, used to denote (typically feminine) behaviour such as ‘using TikTok as google’, having a freezing cold bedroom, never folding your clothes, and enjoying a ‘sweet treat’ every day. This last example may well reflect the time and financial pressures facing young people today, and the kind of lifestyle such exhaustion can produce. But it also suggests a discursive validation of negative traits, encouraging complacency and denying the potential to be and do better.
More worryingly, this way of thinking lends itself readily to misogynistic articulations. The mindset has been actively encouraged and capitalised on by those prominent in the so-called ‘manosphere’, including the Tate brothers (Andrew Tate’s ‘motto’ is allegedly ‘There are only two categories of people – pimps and hoes’).4 The brothers’ online output is full of pithy ‘life lessons’ such as ‘you can be a sad winner or a sad loser’, with the latter category defined by apparently ‘unmanly’ behaviour such as adhering to a vegetarian diet or drinking still water.
For all their emphasis on self-improvement and discipline, the Tate brothers’ mindset demands that you pin yourself down. Lifting weights, smoking cigars, and treating women badly is about proving who you already are (‘a pimp’, not ‘a loser’). This is not a world in which men, let alone women, participate in a continual, reflexive process of self-discovery. Separating the sheep from the goats on the basis of how you behave in relation to others, your moral code, is by no means a new concern. But this current impulse towards self-differentiation involves imbibing and adhering to codes dictated by others which are, in the hands of the Tate brothers at least, actively harmful to our social fabric (and most directly to a great deal of women).
By their very nature these codes or ‘types’ are rigid and definitive, at odds with a concept of identity that allows for the possibility of change, complexity or multiplicity. In this regard, how ‘the kids’ talk today represents a worrying departure from the model of selfhood dominant for much of the second half of the twentieth century in western societies like Britain. Children and young people who were born and brought up amid post-war affluence in Britain were actively encouraged to imagine and reflect on what their future lives might look like. In essay competitions and creative writing exercises, they described leaving home and growing up, envisioning their ideal future careers. Sometimes this involved becoming a professional footballer or serving in the Merchant Navy. At other times, it might involve working as a dressmaker, becoming a housewife or the ‘bachelor girl’. Often, it involved getting married and starting a family.
This form of self-identity was by no means inherently progressive. A recurring concern with the question ‘who shall I be?’ might well be seen as akin to the kind of navel-gazing that is so brilliantly skewered by Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending (and summarised in Michael Wood’s review of that book), undermining ‘any sort of contact with the world that is not self-protective and self-regarding’.5 This mode of thinking may also have reinforced an outdated, linear model of the lifecycle that ultimately hinged on reproducing ‘traditional’ gender roles within the family unit. Indeed, answers provoked by the question ‘who shall I be?’ were not always comfortable or reassuring, particularly as the post-war generation moved through their lives.
The psychic turmoil and feelings of restlessness generated by this process are captured, movingly, in Nell Dunn’s 1965 collection of recorded interviews with women in their twenties and thirties, Talking to Women. In one exchange with Kathy, a twenty-six-year-old butter factory worker with a ten-year-old son, Nell asked, ‘Did you find that when you were about 15 you had a sort of idea of what life would be like? And it’s turned out very different to what you thought?’. Kathy responded in the affirmative.6 In another exchange, this time with the then twenty-five-year-old artist Pauline Boty, Nell (herself then twenty-nine) reflected on the life choices of young people her age, stating ‘But I don’t see quite why our generation do go on getting married’.7 For some women in the post-war era who felt their lives had come too close to resembling those of their mothers, recognition of this fact motivated major life decisions, whether re-entering the workplace, initiating the breakdown of their marriages, joining the women’s liberation movement, or a combination of all three.8 This form of self-reflection could, by drawing attention to the limits of post-war progress, encourage new ways of living and loving.
Even for those members of the post-war generation who seemed to opt for more ‘traditional’ or conventional life choices, paying attention to the stories they told about their lives lets us see the granular dynamics of inter-generational social change. Many of the men and women who came of age after the Second World War articulated their generation’s attempt to carve out new, ‘modern’ ways of being fathers, mothers, husbands and wives.9 Frequently this involved placing affection, communication and the celebration of individual autonomy at the heart of such dynamics. In this regard, as James Hinton beautifully posits in his study of service and selfhood in the Second World War, ‘[h]owever much an “ideology of domesticity” might seem to constrict and constrain women’s lives, closer inspection revealed cracks and contradictions and, beneath the surface, ongoing processes of democratic change’.10
A concern with the question ‘who shall I be?’ may have encouraged post-war Britons to see themselves as agents of social change, as they began to pioneer new, more progressive relationships between men and women, intimate or otherwise (characterised by a belief, for many, in men and women being ‘different but equal’). More broadly, this form of self-reflection privileged individualism, self-fulfilment and actualisation. At its heart was an understanding of identity as a process of becoming rather than ‘being’, as theorised by Stuart Hall.11 In stark contrast to contemporary models of selfhood prevalent today, this way of thinking held scope for reinvention and the possibility of ‘being’ several different things, both at once and across the course of a lifetime.
Why has this way of thinking receded? In the 1990s, the sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that large-scale structural factors like globalization had produced a new form of reflexivity by exposing individuals to a wider range of potential courses of action, inculcating an unprecedented degree of choice, a new set of opportunities and risks, in deciding how to live. In the decades since, these processes have accelerated, particularly in the wake of social media. Young people today are bombarded with images of how they ‘should’ look and live, and what they should consume. Beyond the point of liberation, these forces now contribute to an environment of overwhelm. The neat delineation of ‘types’ of people can be seen as one way of responding to and resolving this. The recurring experience of economic shocks and stagnation has surely also played a part. The life cycle that post-war Britons once imagined in such clear, distinct terms has become closer to a fantasy, as young people struggle to afford many of the key ‘markers’ of adulthood, such as leaving home or raising children of their own. All this, in concert with apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of AI and the impact of climate change, has produced what Alan Finlayson describes as an ‘occlusion of the future’.12 With any guarantee of inter-generational progress seemingly foreclosed, and control over the trajectory of one’s life minimised, small wonder that young people today seek refuge in defining themselves according to ‘types’ in the present, as opposed to reflecting on what they might one day become in the future.
How can we return to a more positive and progressive form of self-reflection? And what role does politics have to play in all this? The task for social democratic politics today is surely to provide the conditions whereby people, once again, feel able to ask, ‘who shall I be?’. Rather than answering that question for them, political leaders should see their purpose as restoring the material conditions – the economic security, opportunities, and crucially the provision of care – that allow people to see their lives in terms of self-fulfilment, actualisation and individual autonomy.
The stories we tell about our lives matter, whether expressed in private or on the public stage. Keir Starmer was occasionally alive to this. In his 2024 speech at Labour Party conference, he reflected on the opportunities he had enjoyed as a teenager while part of the Croydon Youth Philharmonic Orchestra: the foreign travel, the exposure to other cultures. Reflecting on the fact his brother, born with learning difficulties, was not privy to the same opportunities, Starmer recounted his father’s refrain every time the future prime minister achieved something: ‘Your brother has achieved just as much as you, Keir’.13 The payoff, in policy terms, however, was not always clear. And a government that might embrace diversity of outcomes in one speech too often seemed rhetorically and imaginatively out of step with modern Britain, heavily preoccupied with industrial employment, grudging towards the merits of university education, frequently lapsing into the assumption that working-class voters are reactionary and monolithic, and struggling to articulate much sense that there is more to life than aggregate economic statistics. The language of freedom, autonomy, and flourishing did not come easily.
Andy Burnham’s speech, delivered on 29 June 2026 at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, showed some promising points of departure in this regard, emphasising not only that ‘everything starts with a good home’, but also that the end goal of progressive politics ought to be enabling young people ‘to be everything they want to be’.14 It remains to be seen whether Burnham’s ambitious policy reforms will achieve this. For now, we can start by encouraging the young people in our lives to dare to imagine a different future for themselves.
Rebecca Goldsmith is a Research Fellow in History at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is currently working on a monograph, provisionally titled ‘The making of “Labour’s working class”, 1931-1951’, alongside a new project on autobiographical selfhood in post-war Britain. She is a contributing editor of Renewal – a journal of social democracy.
Notes
- This research forms part of a broader project on ‘autobiographical selfhood’ in post-war Britain, tracing the narratives that post-war Britons told about their lives across the life course – childhood forms the first stage in my story. For excellent existing work on young people’s narratives of selfhood: Laura Tisdall, We Have Come to Be Destroyed, Yale University Press, 2026.
- Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, 1991.
- Dan Brooks, ‘Raising a Person in a Culture Full of Types’, The Outline, 31 January 2020.
- Heidi Blake, ‘Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse’, The New Yorker, 8 June 2026.
- Michael Wood, ‘Stupidly English’, London Review of Books, 33/18, 22 September 2011.
- Nell Dunn, Talking to Women, Silver Press, 2018; first edn. 1965, p30.
- Ibid., p13.
- Lynn Abrams, Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings and the Self in Post-War Britain, Oxford University Press, 2023, pp35-6.
- Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, ‘Vernacular Discourses of Gender Equality in the Post-War British Working Class’, Past and Present, 254/1, 2022, pp277-313.
- James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self, Oxford University Press, 2010, p9.
- Stuart Hall, ‘Who Needs “Identity”?’, in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, SAGE Publications, 1996, pp14-15.
- Jack Jeffrey and Alan Finlayson, ‘The left (still) doesn’t understand the internet’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 33/2, 2025, pp9-21.
- ‘Keir Starmer’s speech at 2024 Labour Party Conference’, https://labour.org.uk/, 24 September 2024.
- Andy Burnham’s speech at Manchester’s People’s History Museum 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7mTyrpf-NA.