A former mentor of mine, an uncompromising newspaper editor of the old school, once told me that he could tell whether a job applicant was going to be successful by how they walked into the interview. Anyone who didn’t stride in purposefully was not going to get a job with him. This, by the way, was a man who fired someone because he saw them walking too slowly to the photocopier. Yes, different days, all right.

I mention this because I wondered what he would have made of someone walking in for an interview holding a matcha in a disposable cup. I doubt they would even have made it to the sit-down bit of the meeting. I think he would have regarded it as disrespectful. Or unprofessional. Or maybe a sign of slovenliness. Or of a distracted mind. Or even of poor time management. Or maybe all of them.

Today’s boss class, undeniably, is much less harsh in its judgements and less intransigent in its reliance on first impressions, but nevertheless the clutching of a coffee cup has become a touchstone topic in the modern culture wars.

On social media channels, a debate is taking place about the politics of coffee, and particularly as it relates to job interviews. A TikTok post from an experienced New York recruiter has gone viral. In it, she says: “When you show up with an iced coffee or an iced latte, it is perceived… that this interview is just a stop on your list of errands for the day,” It projects an unserious attitude, she added.

Unsurprisingly, this prompted a vehement response from Gen Zers, whose broad feeling was that the fight wasn’t about the lattes, but about rejecting “arbitrary standards of professionalism” that have nothing to do with whether someone can actually do the job or not. But what this debate exposes more than anything is another generational divide, in which the coffee cup has become a cipher.

While there is a danger in investing too much significance in this debate, there is no doubt that the humble coffee cup means something. Is it an emotional support prop for an anxious cohort of young people? Sometimes there isn’t even any coffee in the cup: it’s just a comforting thing to hold, a recyclable, urban, Gen Z version of worry beads.

Or perhaps it says something more profound about our attention-deficit world, a symbol of those who are too distracted to pay attention to what others might consider the proprieties of appearance? At this point, I should come clean. I hate it. I know it speaks of my own intolerance (or maybe age) but I find it jarring to see people walking down the street, into a shop, and particularly into a work meeting, cradling a coffee cup. To my mind, it’s as non-U (another dated concept, I concede) as walking around eating a sandwich.

In any case, what are the coffee-carriers communicating? That they are so busy, so important that they have to drink on the run? Or is it a fashion statement? “I only drink fair trade”. “My cup is reusable”. Either way, I must resist the temptation to rush to judgement. Young people have enough to worry about without being told that their takeaway coffee is a statement about personal style or etiquette. In a world that’s increasingly insecure and problematic for the next generations, who am I to express moral disapproval about someone’s taste in coffee?

The young are particularly vulnerable to this kind of scrutiny. They have grown up in an age in which almost everything they do is photographed, shared, commented upon, mocked and judged – and especially by boomers of my generation. And it all happens in public, too. How they look, how they speak, their politics and their brand loyalties are all evaluated in an endless trial of social acceptability.

Add that to the difficulties of an employment landscape in which the robots are coming to take all our jobs, and a cost of living crisis that hurts the younger generations disproportionately, I think it’s fair to say that their takeaway coffee predilections are the least of it. Especially as new entrants to the jobs market, they can hardly be blamed for the creation of these extremely challenging conditions. Perhaps, I may suggest, it is the generations (millennials, boomers, however you wish to term them) mocking and judging these younger people, who ought to take a look in the mirror.