"Youth were never more sawcie, yea never more savagely saucie . . . the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded," writes Thomas Barnes in 1624.

I'll tell you what shocked me; I believe it was from the most recent You Are Not So Smart podcast dealing with 'The Future; a tiny thing, it was, but it engendered both repulsion and resolve to continuing evolution, as I had become fat and comfortable in my view of the world.

It was the observation of the death of the concept of selling out.

I'm a child of the 70's/80's but with something of an affinity for the 60's. I occupied disused cinemas in London with acid dropping, stand-in-a-circle-and-summon-the-spirit-of-King-Arthur types, in order to provide community theatre for the bemused locals. The developers who wanted to turn this church of the image into a shopping centre and block of luxury apartments was clearly satanic. We had always fought the capitalist oppressor! That was the paradigm of the world!

Yet in a short section on the podcast, young twenty-somethings struggled to define my understanding of the phrasal verb "selling out" in the same was I might infuriate a 20's flapper who asked me to define a strike breaker.

The suggestion is that, far from being something worthy of derision, garnering the attention and support of a faceless corporation is not merely laudable but a validation of one's success. It's something to which one aspires. Obviously this won't be applicable to entire generation any more than any other general observation but the world rolls on and suddenly there's a real danger of finding myself standing before a herd of hairless apes much like me but whose cuckoo eyes are very alien and blink at me with utter lack of affinity as I bleat about The Man and wave my irrelevant finger, distracting them for a moment before they return to their sponsored social interactions.

Also, you know, seven years is like 1000 internets ago. Kids these days may be Snapchatting filthy, unencrypted strands of their own RNA to each other for all I know.