The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. ‘Pain lasts a long time,’ he assured me.

What struck me about this encounter was not that it was typical of my Gen Z generation but that it was so obviously cringe-inducing – a sort of hackneyed pick-up line. Another student at the same bar – sporting an orange mullet and a thong as a T-shirt – tried to convince me my age was a social construct.

To me and many of my Gen Z peers, who were born after 1996, such talk feels increasingly silly: a millennial trend that’s got old and tired. The absurdity has become too glaring. If being distantly related to the Irish can engender self-compassion, could not my white Englishness be reframed as a form of victimhood? How can there be an end to oppression when the opportunities to be oppressed are so endless?

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We feel as if we’ve run into a mental wall, and the whole woke business is running out of road. ‘Intersectionality’ – the academic word for the game of victimhood top-trumps which has dominated our discourse for so long – seems to have metastasised so much it makes no sense to anyone. New neurodiversities, new genders, new sexual orientations, new disadvantages are spawned every day.

Read more: Spectator