October Newsletter

We now have a healthy and rapidly growing community of over 500 readers to this newsletter which centres on generational change, the family and ageing with some bits about culture, work and society thrown in. If you enjoyed this content, why not get it emailed directly to your inbox? Subscribe here?(and don't forget to pull it out of your spam folder)

Very excited to announce the first episode of my new podcast 'It's All Relative' launches this Thursday. Here's the teaser trailer.

Each episode, I shall be interviewing two guests from different generations of the same famous family to discuss their contrasting lives, experiences, views and values. First up is creator and writer of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes with his niece, author, Jessica Fellowes. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Women are quite often?labelled by their relation to others: wife, mother, daughter, divorcee?and widow.?Historically it made sense,?these labels reflect the male financial power source within families. But not for much longer......

• By 2025, 60% of Britain's wealth will be in female hands (principally widows)?
• The number of 65+ women divorcing increased by 30% between 2005-2015 (the largest?of any generational group)
• Dual income households are now the majority but joint accounts are in decline.

......Female wealth and independence is real. I spent the summer months interviewing Baby Boomer and Gen X women about their relationship with money, careers and retirement to understand how?greater financial power, independence and the decline of the male breadwinner model is changing women's relationship with money and?their expectations of?the financial services industry. This wasn't some tokenistic?exercise in?gender equality; very soon women will be the major financial power brokers in society.?It was such a fascinating project. Sponsored by Schroders, the report will be launched soon across socials.??

Stuff I've consumed...

1. #ad may now be a required hashtag for influencer-marketing but yet few of us really know how influencers actually make money. Well, one savvy Gen Z'er, 23yr old Lynette Adkins has built an impressive following by revealing insider secrets on how best to make money from content. Incidentally, she quit her job on the Amazon graduate scheme after she realised that she could make more from being an influencer (she now earns double her Amazon salary). Kids eh?! This month I had a 'heated discussion' with an investment banker who was complaining that all young people wanted to do is be an influencer on constant holiday and they would not be capable of the kind of hard graft involved in investment banking..... But how difficult is it to build a successful brand particularly one built around yourself? It involves high-level technical capability, market knowledge and 24hr client engagement....not so different from investment banking eh???

2. Speaking of savvy Gen Z, I'm slightly in awe of those who are flogging their digital art for ￡￡￡￡....

3. I could definitely relate to this article?on 'revenge bedtime procrastination'. If you work long hours, the last thing you want to do is immediately hit the hay.

4. My father was a collector/hoarder; he had over 10,000 DVDs, 7000 records, 12000 gramophone records, over 10,000 books. It was extreme; we had a record room and a library in our house but few bedrooms.?But in the modern era our relationship with 'stuff', particularly cultural objects my dad loved, is changing. As this brilliant article on the death of collecting in the digital age explains:?'My cultural aspirations are at the mercy of a corporation in Sweden: If Spotify clashes with a particular record label or decides a song format is unsuitable, I won’t be able to access it anymore through the channel I use most often, and I might very well just stop listening to it.'

5. Yet more evidence that the pandemic resulted in a baby bust and not boom.?

5. The FT's Janan Ganesh is a brilliant writer and this piece on 'the Lockdown epiphany that wasn't' is one of his best.?

Feast for the Senses

• READING: (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman by Dr Pragya Agarwal. Unique and brilliant book which looks at the history of reproductive rights?uniting discussions around?fertility, infertility, body-clocks/career pressures. The research is weaved together with?the author's own mothering journey. Recommend, Recommend. Recommend.?
• LISTENING:?My podcast of course....?It's All Relative'.?Did I mention?it's launching this Thursday?!
• WATCHING:?WeWork Documentary on Amazon. A founder who wasted billions and never made profit, flogging a kibbutz-inspired capitalist worker community to post-Crash millennial graduates in search of purpose. This is up there with the?Fyre Festival?doc.
• VISITING:?You can keep your?NFTs, I've gone?back to?galleries:?National Gallery and the Tate Modern this month. The use of light, colours, brush strokes up close.... and all that sq footage is great for crawling kiddies too.?

Thanks for reading, Eliza x

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