A Brief History of Teenage Entertainment in the Helderberg, or the Spectacular Absence Thereof
Strand residents have been bored in exactly the same spot since approximately 1987, archival evidence suggests
It must be established up front, for the record and for posterity, that the entertainment drought currently afflicting Helderberg teenagers is not breaking news. It is not even middle-aged news. It is a multi-generational drought of biblical proportions, the Helderberg’s own slow-motion plague, except instead of locusts it is bored sixteen-year-olds circling the Somerset Mall food court for the four hundredth consecutive Saturday since records began.
Approach any Strand resident between the ages of thirty and fifty with the innocent question “what did you do for fun as a teenager here” and observe carefully. There will be a pause. The eyes will go soft and distant, the way a man’s eyes go soft and distant when he remembers a girlfriend from 1998. And then, almost without fail, you will receive a description that lines up so precisely with what is happening at the mall this very Saturday that you will begin to suspect time is not, in fact, linear in Somerset West, but circular, like a roundabout, or like the parking situation outside Spur.
Largely unchanged in spirit if not in branding. The beach in summer, populated by the same sunburnt optimism. And underneath it all, the same low hum of restless Saturday-evening energy, resolving itself through the same ancient and entirely reliable technology: a group of teenagers, a parking lot, and absolutely nowhere they need to be.
Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where this column must, in fairness, award the current generation a small heritage medal for Commitment to Tradition Despite Superior Options. The thirty-to-fifty-year-old cohort did their mall-circling in a state of total, unmediated presence, because there was nothing else to do. No phone in the pocket. No alternative universe available at the swipe of a thumb. They were bored, and they were there for it, and they talked to each other because talking to each other was the only entertainment product on the shelf.
The current generation, by contrast, walks around with the entire recorded creative output of human civilisation sitting in their back pocket. Every film. Every song. Every video of a man falling off a quad bike in Brazil. Streaming services with more content than a single human lifetime could exhaust, algorithms designed by some of the most expensively educated minds on the planet, purpose-built to keep a teenager’s attention captured indefinitely.
And on Saturday afternoon, having access to literally all of it, what does the modern Helderberg teenager do?
They go to the beach.
This columnist does not pretend to have a tidy explanation for this. Developmental psychologists, presumably better funded and better credentialled than this particular desk, are reportedly still working on it. But something is being demonstrated here, repeatedly, every single weekend, by teenagers who could not articulate it themselves even if you handed them a microphone and a moment of uncharacteristic sincerity: the human animal, even the extremely online human animal, still wants to be in a room — or at minimum a food court — with other human animals. Preferably ones its own age. Preferably away from parents. Preferably within walking distance of a slushie machine.
It is not, this column would like to firmly state, a failure of imagination on the part of Helderberg youth, despite what certain municipal newsletters and concerned aunties at church have implied over the years. It is not evidence of decline, moral or otherwise. It is, in fact, a solution — an elegant, low-cost, infinitely renewable solution to the ancient social problem of what now — and it has been quietly working, generation after generation, mall after mall, since long before any of the current participants were born.
The beach does not know it is performing a vital function. But somewhere between the cafe and the cinema entrance, something rather older and more important than commerce is taking place, and has been taking place, more or less unbroken, since the previous generation’s own parents were probably saying much the same thing about them.
Some traditions, this column is forced to conclude, simply refuse to die. Even when issued a smartphone.
Harmen Bockelenberg writes the Helderberg History desk for Die Helderburger and would like it noted, for the record, that he too once circled a mall with no discernible purpose, and stands by the decision.
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