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The quality of life has been declining since the noughties for sure but you don't even have to go back that far to find what seemed like an acceptable level. Life was far better even in 2016 (on the eve of the "forbidden word" vote) and not only better but seemed to be improving. There is just a huge drop in quality of life between the mid 2010s and now.
That being said, the huge difference is no doubt a compounding of big and small issues that were just amplified with "the forbidden word" and COVID.
Quality of life peaked at some point in the late noughties. I appreciate that not everybody benefited from this, but most people were reasonably affluent, things were going ok, and the world was beginning to looking with admiration at Britain.
In 2008, that changed for the worse, and in 2010, 2015, and 2016.
2008 was a global event, but the others were choices we made.
In 1997 houses were affordable. By 2007 many were priced out of the market for good. People forget that prices rose 211% under Blair. Which is 140% after adjusting for inflation.
Thats affected the lives of millions. Stuck in rental properties, paying someone else’s mortgage.
I could ring up the GP at lunchtime while at work, get an appointment for that afternoon, leave work at 4pm and be seen by 5.
Zero chance of that nowadays. If you dial 10 seconds too late after 8am then you’re out of luck.
Trick is to start ringing slightly less than 10 seconds before 8am, skip the recorded messages by opening the keypad and spamming numbers and if you've timed it right, you're now 3rd in queue. Why the health service feels like I'm glitching/speedrunning a video game just for an appointment, I do not know.
My GP doesn’t even release appointments, you have to call at 8am and the best outcome you can hope for is “someone (ie a GP or PA) will call you sometime this afternoon/morning”, it’s like they assume everyone works part time and can just stop working at a moments notice
Which is also a Tory fuck-up, they cancelled the NHS digitization work that was being done and instead allowed all the different trusts and surgeries to buy in whatever the hell they wanted resulting in a complete mess of non-compatible systems.
Yup. Just took me 18 months for a simple surgery to get done. Was in pain that entire time for what ended up being 20 minutes under a local anaesthetic.
My mum's due to have a hip replacement at the end of this month - she's been on the waiting list for 2 years.
During that time she's lost her job and has been sent a repossession order for her house.
Our GP runs a similar service. You book a telephone consultation on-line and one of the doctors calls you back at a specified time usually within 48 hours. If they think they need to see you in person following the consultation they book you an appointment while talking to you.
The last time I did this the GP saw me the following morning after the consultation.
On-line prescription requests and booking blood-tests are also available which save a lot of time.
Yeah exactly, how are people who work supposed to get an appointment? I need to be at work for 8am, I can’t just get to work and then leave immediately or later that day…. They have a policy that you must give notice for a doctors appointment, on the day of is not enough notice
Man i remember going to the hospital and being seen within a hour or two and having something given to me or next steps within a few hours.... i have fond memories of my interactions with the NHS in the 90s and early 2000s.. contrast that to now...
Just last year I was waiting 8 weeks for a routine apt, 2-4 weeks for a med review, and 1-2 weeks for an emergency appointment. I switched practices in February, and now I get a routine appointment within 48 hrs without fail. All face-to-face, too. They actually apologised for not being able to give me a same-day apt last week. It's such a breath of fresh air.
Vastly so, those house price surges were well underway . Labour should have built a lot of council housing though. That was a mistake but the country was far better then than now.
Completely agree - house prices were and still are one of the main issues this country faces. But they did grow even after 2007, partially because credit was cheap, partially because we just do not build enough houses.
Prices have stabilised recently, but the problem remains, and now interest rates are much higher.
Actually under Cameron prices rose by zero per cent after adjusting for inflation.
And under May, prices again rose by zero per cent after adjusting for inflation.
No fan of the Tories and what we really need is a real terms reduction but zero per cent is a lot better than 140% increase.
Most inflation measures includes housing costs, so you're adjusting using a metric that includes itself. Food prices and consumer goods coming down so much have offset the house price rises vs the late 90s and early 00s. For a better idea you'd have to look at housing costs vs median wage IMO.
Mine was £40k in 2000, now they're being snapped up for £210, with people bidding over the asking price. The street is facing a park, so it's ideal for families.
My sister paid £60k for hers early 90's, they're going for between £300k to over £400K, it's insane.
Largely because it was triangulating the boomer vote
This is why I think the next government will eventually get serious about it, thats not going to be the part of the electorate to triangulate around in future.
The population has increased 10 million since the millennium. We're currently building poor quality housing on flood plains and agricultural land. Farmers are already warning crops are going to struggle because of climate change - and we only produce under half our required food anyway - and the number of adverse weather events we experience yearly will be increasing.
The population is due to grow another 6 million by 2030.
House building is not the long term answer here.
Same reason the Conservatives don't: Rising house prices wins votes.
It's crucial to understand that most people who actually go out and vote are home owners. Their house is their biggest financial asset. Prices rising makes them *feel* richer, and people mostly vote based on feelings.
This is why every government does everything it can to keep the house price bubble pumped up. Help2Buy, stamp duty relief... Liz Truss couldn't outlast a lettuce because she fucked with pensions and house prices (via the rate jump).
This is also why Starmer is unlikely to do anything that lowers house prices either. It would cost him too many votes.
Not Blairs fault but he did nothing to stop it. All goes back to the Glass–Steagall legislation being repealed in the states in 1999, banks went crazy hence housing bubble
Blair also deregulated buy to let mortgages. Plus he permanently devalued university degrees as an unintended consequence of his "education education education" push (and thus increased construction costs by not training enough construction workers as they were all chasing white collar jobs via degrees)
Late nineties were great. The Internet was new and wild open, lots of cool quirky things and people online. It wasn't yet dominated by attention economy mega corporations but a tool of personal fulfillment and liberation. Technooptimism was the norm.
Electronic music was big and there was a real hippie vibe in continental Europe.
I feel ever since 9/11 things went downhill.
There was a definite shift from the glow of a new millennium by the events of 9/11. Being the optimist I always thought that even after this there was a consensus of, changing things to make security better and to stop global terror. This ended with the over reach of the invasion of Iraq. It divided people over whether it was right or wrong and we doubted whether our leaders were lying and the legitimacy of the actions of our countries.
and not exclusive to the UK, modern technology iand social media is doing more damage to peoples psyche's and relationships to the real world. Getting square eyes from watching too much tv seems so quaint now.
Lifestyles that were considered poor and somewhat undesirable in the late 90s are extremely aspirational today. The council
houses I grew up near in london, keen to never end up in, are now extremely aspirational and out of reach private accommodations that I could only dream of living in.
Britain was also hit incredibly hard in 2008, more so than many other similar countries.
I think 2008/09 really is the watershed moment, its what ultimately leads to our leaving the EU.
US was hit harder considering it was a US crisis. The US has had huge recovery since, but the UK hasn't because of sheer incompetence and mismanagement.
That US huge recovery?
It was done by following a plan architected by a certain Gordon Brown.
The UK followed that plan (and was starting to recover), up until 2010, when the Tories/Lib Dems and mega-austerity hit, and the Tories have been following that ever since.
It certainly contributed but alot of it was also that the Tory moderates at some point turned into seat warmers that consistently fold under any kind of pressure.
It depends on how you measure QoL.
Personally, I benefit *massively* from having a map and a dictionary and an encyclopedia in my pocket at all times. The map, in particular, has genuinely saved my life on at least one occasion. If you showed my mobile phone to someone in the 1970s, they would probably be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy it. Nowadays, we all take it for granted.
Hedonistic treadmill and all that
I mean, that is a completely different discussion.
Seen from the 1970s, we have all turned into cyborgs (or smombies in newspeak). Hardly anybody is still able to function without their phone. I think that is certainly a double edged sword.
> Hedonistic treadmill and all that
No doubt about it.
Being Reddit, a lot of the answers here are totally delusional (no, there were no unions in the 90s...yes, people still had to work, they worked a lot longer for a lot less).
But the problem is that the UK has benefited from technological development in other countries whilst the stuff that we are in control of has got significantly worse.
I would say there are a few big technological changes that matter (mobile phone, online shopping, and a lot of stuff becoming completely free) but everything is quite incremental. We had maps before...you just bought a book with a map? What do you think people did, just walked around aimlessly until they got to the right place?
And, more importantly, these two things aren't connected. The choice wasn't: you can have this phone...but the price of this is significantly more sexual assaults. The two things aren't substitutes either. You can enjoy your phone and not like crazy house prices. That is why people are angry because a lot of stuff that matters has really got worse (I know what things were like before, it isn't even remotely close, 1997 was the peak of everything: the UK was safe, everything was cheap, etc. It is impossible to understate how shit things are now compared to then).
We'd had six years of brutal austerity by that point.
It's rose tinted nostalgia to blame everything on Brexit, life had been hard for the poorest for a long time by then.
Depends on the age of the responder too and even where they lived is a factor.
If you were a kid in the 90’s it’s not as easy to compare.
I was in my 20’s in the 90’s and I had literally none of the pressures people of that age have today.
Also in my own family there was a distinct north south divide. Thatcher fucked my northern side of the family. The decline for them started in the 80’s.
Same. I'm Cornish from the mining country , it went to shit from the eighties . Things were still far better then than now. With the state of the NHS this was a terrible time to get disabled.
I don't disagree that there has been a decrease in living standards since 2016.
However, the Brexit vote was a reflection on the country I believe. People were feeling left out, disenfranchised, and had seen their qol drop since 2008. That was a large part of the 52% vote, believing that we needed to change something drastic to improve. It wasn't all acceptable then.... Brexit was a symptom not a cause.
By 2016, austerity was very much hitting the people it was first designed to. Low income, unemployed and disabled people. Since then, it has affected almost everyone.
Politically the country has been a mess since so perhaps people forget that it wasn't sunshine and flowers before either. Austerity really was the worst policy, in hindsight it looks even more ridiculous when interest rates were at a record low then. The lost investment in this country is absolutely blindingly obvious now. God it makes me sad.
The problem is austerity and declining union power taking wages down with them. People love to hate on train drivers but their wages are higher than expected because they 1) join and stay in their unions consistently, 2) are prepared to go on strike when necessary. I was at lunch the other day and a combination of friends working in teaching and the NHS were discussing joining unions. One said she joined for a year then left because 'I didn't use it' - like it's a Netflix subscription or something. And another was talking about how he joins when he anticipates having a problem, but is planning to leave when/if it blows over. That's exactly the sort of behaviour that gets you weak unions and stagnating wages. Neither the government nor any employer is going to raise wages when people are this willing to try and game the system to their short term advantage while leaving their co-workers or union friends out in the cold. Strikes don't work when it's only 1% of your employees who walk out. We're easy to pick off one by one, so if we refuse to stand together then we're doomed. Yet this is what people choose nowadays time and again.
Agreed. It feels like COVID is used as a convenient scapegoat by the government when in reality the decline had already begun, COVID strapped a rocket to it.
Things were getting worse in 2016 for millions of people and the decline was clear (mostly thanks to Tory policies following the 2008 crash, though Labour were promising cuts too). Hence the ‘forbidden word’ vote result!
You are right. It's big and small issues.
But considering Ukraine, Covid and the forbidden word came in the same few years things are a lot worse than they should be at this point. Any one of those would have been bad but all three at once is what has caused the biggest drop in quality of life.
The financial burden of COVID has been many times worse than the forbidden word.
We are heading into uncharted waters. The next few years are going to be rocky.
We can get our quality of life back but it will take a while. There is work and blood ahead of us though. A rocky few years with wars and struggle I expect.
I would argue not the next few years but going forward well into the future looks very bleak, we have only just started to feel the effects of AI on the reduction in jobs now, the rentier economy is becoming more and more the norm with companies that offer platforms, Amazon, eBay, Uber, becoming the overlords of businesses of all sizes, income/wealth disparities increasing at record levels, climate change starting to spiral out of control, there isn't much to be optimistic about really.
Tbf we need AI to take jobs with our aging demographics and large pension cohort to support. To offer some more optimism, we are decarbonising our electricity grid pretty rapidly in the UK too, with loads of offshore wind coming online over the next few years which will make us world leaders in wind energy. Solar is also beckming ridiculously cheap now and both should help bring power costs down. I am overall pessimistic but it's always good to see some sunshine through the grey!
Wind energy is one of the few things this country has done right! Let's hope they don't attempt to derail that too as a favour for their chums in the fossil fuel industry.
I remember stickers next to light switches and sockets at school asking us to "Think before we use" [paraphrasing] in order to reduce electricity usage. Admittedly, that was a long time ago, early to mid 70s. People were encouraged to cut down at home as well, with the carrot of lower bills.
It was successful and as a nation we used less electricity.
The problem was this reduced the money the government received from the nationalised electricity supply and so the prices were increased. We (our parents) were left paying the same money for less electricity, or paying more for the same electricity.
My point is, and maybe I'm being a cynic here, the cost of generating electricity might fall but don't hold your breath expecting that to be reflected in the price at the meter. It won't be.
At least people were hopeful in the 90s.
I swear you can't even talk positive about the country now.
"Weather is nice today"... "We're all going to die"...
It's because of the chronically online distorting reality.
You don't have to go far from this very sub, just outside in fact, and real life is nothing at all like you'd think reading comments here.
Exactly. I think this sub tends to exaggerate, as well as other subs, just how bleak life is. It gets me down just behind here sometimes and I need to leave Reddit for a few days.
Spend too many days here and you’ll just feel everything is bleak and hopeless, but in real life, while not paradise, is still not as bad as made out.
"I'm sorry, but in 2021 *thousands* of Ukrainians were being slaughtered by Russian invaders, millions of vulnerable people around the world died from COVID, the environment continued to be raped by greedy capitalists, and you just sat there eating your sandwich like everything was all okay!? Privileged people like you make me sick."
People are just living their life, day to day, we're not going around crying all the time.
If you talk to basically anyone about the cost of living or the state of the UK, they will pretty consistently tell you how fucked it is.
The inverse though is that you only have a limited frame of reference in the real world.
I don't need food banks, so I have no idea if food bank use is up, or if they're struggling for supplies.
I imagine the vast majority of people don't know how well the pensions and savings are of their neighbours.
Etc.
Mate, read the room. This country is completely fucked. 14 years of austerity, covid fraud, and the fucking b word equals this state flat lining in the next 20 years. Might as well see it for what it is. The UK is the new poor man of Europe
That’s just not true.
“The UK will be the fourth best performing G7 economy relative to pre-pandemic levels: Despite weak projected growth in 2024, the UK will still outperform France, Japan and Germany with real GDP around 2.7% higher in 2024 on average relative to 2019 levels.”
https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/pwc-uk-economic-predictions-2024.html#
You ... do realize that these are *projections*? That this is a *press release!*?
From a company that no doubt sells a lot of business to the Tory government!
The measures by which the "performance of the economy" is judged are not necessarily relevant to, or reflective of, the experience of the people who live within that economy.
For sure. My best days are when I'm out in the real world, I treasure small and uncomplicated interactions with people. For example yesterday I chatted to an old couple I haven't seen in ages, helped a guy with arthritis in his back stand up, spoke to a mum about her boys interest in football and was complimented by some charity workers. All little things but they added up to a good day.
Interactions online are much more divisive and oftentimes ridiculous. I'm constantly second guessing myself incase someone gets offended or misinterprets my words. And our brains draw us into controversial or uncomfortable topics which we'd avoid in the real world.
Although it was a somewhat icky cliché, the whole Cool Britannia era was a wave of positivity for our national image. The focus on soft power through our film and music industry was a welcome boost for our national identity, superseding the era of colonial hard power and the attitudes of Empire, which we thought we'd turned our back on since the 60s. Instead, a positive image of BritPop, Guy Ritchie films and the Spice Girls.Things Can Only Get Better.
Now look what has happened since. This lurch back to some Boys Own comic vision of a Britain that sticks its Vs up to Johnny Foreigner, and once more stands isolated in Europe. Farage and Mogg and suchlike; aloof, arrogant and superior. I cannot get behind that. For me, it's the very worst attitudes of a past we should long since have consigned to history.
In the nineties, net migration averaged 100K per year.
The last 2 years have seen 800K per year. Over 1.5 million in 2 years. We haven’t built the infrastructure and homes for an extra 1.5 million.
Some may feel that is too much when they are already struggling with rental costs/access to services.
If net migration is historically low then it’s perhaps no surprise that it wasn’t so much of an issue.
I used to be part of a massive group of friends when I lived in the UK and we would go round the country clubbing together. It was amazing, the after parties were epic.
On certain subs, and things like Twitter, yes. But if you leave your phone at home and just go out into the world, I find that in general my interactions are positive. People also seem to forget that the 90s were also full of doomongering.
While rose tinted glasses are true in the 90s I felt like I could go out and achieve things, own a home, live in nice area, get a degree etc.
Now I’m worried for my kids, my currently salary has same buying power as the salary I had 20 years ago. But everything has gone up in price, food, gas, electric and of course house prices.
How are my kids ever meant to afford a home? If they go to uni they’ll leave with a mountain of debt. I honestly don’t think my kids will have the same opportunities as I did and that for me is a massive downer.
Edit: just for salary clarity 20 years ago I was a Dept manager in a shop first job after uni. I’m now an accountant.
Those 13 years were the most prosperous since the 1945-1951 Atlee government.
When have Britons ever been better off at the end of a Tory government than at the start? The answer is "never".
> While rose tinted glasses are true in the 90s
One thing that strikes me is that in the 90s I used to work in homelessness (not the highest salary by a long shot) and rented. I was still able to go out drinking 6 pints (in none wetherspoons) 5/6 days a week. I'm not saying it was the best lifestyle choice but it was fun and affordable and common back then. I'm not sure the young adults of today have this as an option.
No chance. I earn a decent wage, but 5 or 6 pints in my area will set you back 40 quid. I couldn’t afford to do it a three times a month let alone per week
If you own a home then you need to get yourself in a position where they benefit from that. If they want to go to university but can't get on to a good course at a prestigious institution then strongly advise them against it.
>get a degree etc.
Sure, if like me you were in the top 10 or 15% of the country academically. Otherwise, no, you could not get a degree. Places were extremely restricted and the exams a lot harder.
I've done 4 degrees, starting in the 90s. A generalist undergrad in my field, 2 specialisms at masters level and a masters outside of my field of work.
It's been useful to my career to have the first three, but since Blair's expansion and fees, the standards required have plummeted. Inevitably, I suppose. If you're buying something you expect to get it.
>How are my kids ever meant to afford a home? If they go to uni they’ll leave with a mountain of debt. I honestly don’t think my kids will have the same opportunities as I did and that for me is a massive downer.
I worry about that too. Under the old system I'm pretty sure my kids would have got a uni place as they're doing better than most of their school, so an undergrad degree would still have shown an earnings premium.
Now they might be better looking for a degree apprenticeship, or some sort of code camp equivalent, then buying a starter flat asap.
What's your take on the value of long education courses Vs the expectation that AI will keep eating careers? I'm wondering if career hopping becomes a thing, it might be those without the massive student loan debt that are best able to carry it out?
Not sure what you mean by long education, but assume it’s a 3 year degree course. At the moment (& for my kids it’s a good decade away) doing something like accountancy qualification at 18 and by 21 being qualified would be better than going to uni, then entering workforce and then doing the accountancy qualification. A lady at my work was fully qualified at age of 22 and moved companies a few times before joining us at age of 25 for huge pay rise each job move. If a 22 year old joined after uni they’d likely be on half her salary.
AI will change so much by time my kids are adults. Let’s just say I’m hoping they aren’t fighting terminators.
Steer your kids towards the trades.
We’ll always need humans to do electrical work, carpentry, etc.
Until the terminators get really advanced and we have to call them out to come and rewire our houses or fit our kitchens.
I often wonder about the extent to which education really has deteriorated. I remember doing mock GCSE papers in the 2000s that were clearly copyrighted in the early 1990s. Later, while doing my undergraduate degree, I found a dissertation written by an LSE student in the 1980s. In neither instance did it feel like I was uncovering wisdom that the ancients left behind. Also, every older person in my family is a pre-1997 university graduate. Again, nothing special there.
I doubt people are thinking life was better under the threat of IRA bombs.
Not to discredit Major's work, but Blair absolutely sealed the Peace Agreement.
Who disrupted that after 20 years? Oh yeah, Boris... What Party did he belong to? Oh yeah, the Tories...
> I doubt people are thinking life was better under the threat of IRA bombs
All in all, yes they are. Northern Ireland aside, which was horrible, most of the UK just weren’t fussed. The same way we just went about life as normal after 7/7.
They were a far more sane incantation of the Tory party though - even as someone who wasn’t a fan, I remember vocalising at the time that Cameron signalled a worrying change in tone. And then the Brexit debacle caused a purge of the more sensible faction, and that’s when the loons took over.
People, (popular history?) massively underestimate the effect of the 2008 Financial Crisis. We're still feeling the reverberations of that globally.
It's affected everything from industry to credit to immigration to public services etc.
Basically the entire foundation of contemporary (post-1979) Western (Anglo-Saxon) capitalism was found to be deeply flawed we still haven't addressed this. We've just papered over the cracks and continued on our merry way.
Debt is still exponentially increasing and we have no way to reasonably address that without massive restructuring of our economy (society). Debt fuelled consumption is still the only game in town. And we lap it up.
Sooner or later the whole issue will hit the public consciousness again, (Crisis) and we'll have another historical event on our hands.
The reason people look back at the late 90's, early 00's with such positivity is because people were benefiting from a bubble that was propped up by unregulated banking systems, which was inevitably going to burst. And then that screwed everything up generations to come.
Except the United States ultimately recovered from it pretty decently because the government actually spent some money in the last 12 years, whereas the UK actively made sure that the recession would be as long and deep as possible by using the financial crisis as an excuse to spending-cut the economy to death.
What connection do you think there is between the financial crisis and "immigration" -- too many American bankers seeking asylum in London? Too many British preppers moving to New Zealand because they thought it was the end of capitalism?
Debt fuelled investment is the name of the game, and this country decided to stop investing.
The UK government spends about 45% of GDP whereas the US is 37%.
The main difference is that in a crisis (financial crisis or COVID), the US cuts more personal taxes , or straight tax refunds. This gets spent faster and they recover from recessions quicker. Whereas we put the cash through more layers and it takes longer to get spent.
I don't think that's really the point to be honest. The US adopted a much more expansionary fiscal policy over the last decade, whether that's tax cuts or spending is less important. What matters is that you try to run the economy near capacity and investment in the future is happening somewhere, be it the private sector or the government.
>Basically the entire foundation of contemporary (post-1979) Western (Anglo-Saxon) capitalism was found to be deeply flawed
I agreed up to here.
Western Europe.has economically stagnated since 2008.
Eastern Europe and the USA have been much more economically successful over the last 16 years, and they are arguably now more capitalist than western Europe.
As a millennial on the slightly older side (born 1989) they’re not wrong.
Life was far more optimistic in those days, we had our issues but society wasn’t as nearly as divided as it is today.
In the 2000s there was a sense that we could still have a better world, there was more hope.
Now in the 2010s & 2020s, this era seems to be the reverse of the 90s & 00s, very little hope, people are less happier than years ago
I would agree (born in 88) I think for me the turning point was the housing crash in 08, which made all that hopefulness turn into mush coming out of uni to a non existent job market. Personally my partner and I are doing alright now, not struggling but can’t afford a house and feel like we can’t afford children.
I think nostalgia contributes to some of this “good old days” but depending on where you were in life at these big turning points- housing crash, the B word and covid (ie not already owning a house, in a steady job etc) it really made it a struggle.
Born in 1989 and had a feel about the economy and culture in the 90s?
I can imagine two year old you being livid about black Wednesday and 7 year old you deriding Be Here Now as cocaine fuelled indulgence
They talk about 2000s and would have been about 18-19 when the 2008 financial crisis hit. Old enough to see the rug pulled out from underneath them? I do feel that was the turning point for a lot of what we have today.
I'm born in 82, could be this posters older sibling. Was in full time education at 18 but also earning good money on the evenings and weekends, we seemed to have a pick of the jobs (albeit all unskilled obviously).
Every weekend was a huge event, could travel up and down the country to various club nights. Even though I had to pay uni tuition fees they were low, like £1k a year or something. Rent was bugger all, £1 pints, most people's biggest expense was their phone contract.
I don't remember much divisiveness, there was still the BNP and that put the right wing very much in a particular box. Labour was very middle of the road at the time, the everyman party. Not nearly as much islamic extremism or Islamaphobia in the news. Queer culture was very accepted and mainstream (at least amongst the young in cities) but we had no constant gender or trans wars.
An element of rose tinted glasses I'm sure, but things did feel a whole lot better than today.
I don't mean to diminish, I'm roughly the same age, but the main reason we were more hopeful back then is because we were young and idealistic. It was also before the 2008 crash when everything seemed to be improving.
homelessness and child poverty were at an all time low
you could get a builder,
police turned up to burglaries,
nhs was flying high,
britain was respected for it's politicians and arts,
food was cheap and the food banks were for the homeless
No social media wrecking young people's mental health.
No camera phones, so you didn't have to worry about going viral when night clubbing.
No doom scrolling.
No pressure to post fake "best versions" of your life online, further damaging your friends mental health.
No cyber bullying.
No sextortion with nudes.
If all you've known it's growing up with these things then you can't possibly imagine how much better life was without them.
I love technology. I've worked in it my whole life. But fuck me there's a lot of problems the way millennials and gen z use it, which are not your fault individually.
Nah, life was much easier. My money went further and I was 100% happier as a result, less stress about life and the world.
I think something else that has impacted this is technology, the late 90s and early 2000s were a perfect point for tech, where it could be used just enough to benefit daily life but not so much that it distracts or starts to negatively effect you.
I know for certain that my mental health has taken a hit because of tech/social media, the world before was a bigger place with mystery and wonder. It’s now just sad as fuck, full of people desperate for attention or being overly aware of how fucked the world and planet are.
Dont disagree about social media, but internet speeds are faster now, which in turn makes remote working and video calling alot more seemless.
I was on a 2mbps in the 2000's which was painful
Of course that's true, but I think that most people probably did have better lives when the economy was growing and public services weren't in a state of semi-collapse.
Yes people get older and look back at when they were younger, sexier, hopeful (forgetting their youthful insecurities and fears). The 90s were not just cool Britannia, carefree spice girls, they were also prime Radiohead who despite being as good a rock band this country has ever seen were all about anxiety, despair and not fitting in ... ( Not to mention Nirvana in the States)
They were also the 90s recession, the house price crash with unprecedented and unrepeated levels of repossession, the end of the 80s (best decade ever).
All I'm saying is there's more than one way to look at the 90s.
Then there were all of labours wars, the dot com crash, stock market crash, GFC, 9/11, 7/7 all waiting for us in the noughtys.
>Then there were all of labours wars, the dot com crash, stock market crash, GFC, 9/11, 7/7 all waiting for us in the noughtys.
Most of this stuff didn't affect people day to day the way stuff is today. Granted I was pretty young for this, but only the Great recession in 2008 had any impact on my life and my family and we certainly weren't rich. The terrorist attacks were scary but ultimately barely a blip in my memory because apart from a few weeks after the fact life carried on. The fact remains that housing, education, healthcare, and day to day existence was better when you account for things like cost of living and job prospects. Yes, there were crises, but things tended to turn around fairly soon after the fact. It's only now we've had an entirely lost decade where nothing has really changed since 2008, in fact soon it will be more like a lost 20 years and a lost generation or two because our country has refused to address our economic issues the right way, and has opted for austerity..
My dear mum is in her 70s and she says this current era is the worst she’s ever experienced. Can’t get a dentist appointment, can’t afford to have the heating on, all the roads are falling apart, etc..
Oh before the 15 year Tory run yea? Big surprise. I'm utterly shocked that the party that guts everything we tried to build for its people is also in charge of Britain's great downfall. Shocked I say.
Whilst I hate the Tories as much as anyone, you can’t blame them for the rise of Musk, Putin, Bezos, Orban, Trump and so on and all the problems they’ve enhanced and the global impact of all of these people.
A man goes to a doctor. “Doctor, I’m depressed,” the man says; life is harsh, unforgiving, cruel. The doctor lights up. The treatment, after all, is simple. “The great enthusiastic Dave is in town tonight,” the doctor says, “Go and see him! That should sort you out.” The man bursts into tears. “But doctor,” he says, “I *am* enthusiastic Dave!”
Not a chance. There's 2 separate realities happening right now. The online reality middle class, sheltered redditors live in and the reality of living in run-down working class towns.
2008 was the downward trend, when we bailed out the banks, and wages just stopped growing.
Since then, we have been gaslit and brainwashed into be grateful to have full employment, at the expense of wage inequality increasing, and unprecedented wage stagnation.
As an old Millennial at 41, I have completely missed out on wage growth for the majority of my life.
Sure, I could have sacrificed more of my free time, saved more money perhaps, but the fact remains that most normal people have been priced out of independent living, home ownership, and dignity in most cases.
Brexit and Covid were the icing on the cake... And it wasn't just an impact in the UK, the same if not worse was happening in the US too.
I remember that era and even then people (the electorate) complained about immigration, the economy, cost of living, the NHS being on its knees, housing being unaffordable and everything basically sucking.
Go back and watch question time from the Blair years. They were complaining about 2 day waiting periods. Imagine that today.
I don't remember much about the noughties and almost nothing about the 90s but it's very hard to argue things weren't objectively better from a living standard point of view.
Complaints are relative to what you expect. Even in Scandinavia they complain things aren't good enough, whereas its welfare state and public transport are the envy of many Brits.
People always like to complain. That won't ever change, because people always want things to be better. That doesn't mean things haven't gotten measurably worse.
In 1997 my wife was in the throws of having a miscarriage (we didn’t know she was pregnant, so didn’t know what was happening), I picked up the phone to the doctor and 20 minutes later he was at our door, closely followed after by an ambulance who he phoned immediately he set eyes on my wife.
Her life was saved that day because of the flexibility of the service, you wouldn’t get that today, infact you can’t even get an appointment at the local doctors now unless you are standing outside the surgery at 8am and even then you need to be in the first 3 or 4.
Yeah, life was much better in the 1990’s.
People likely not old enough to remember the 90’s will likely say that for them things got worse post Brexit, and as good as you may have thought life was in the early 2010’s, it was nothing compared to the mid to late 90’s.
Let’s compare, I bought my first car in 1991 for £1000 and insurance for the year was £175.
I bough my first home (a park home) for £13k.
When I started my own business, the rent on the unit was £600pm.
I could call up the doctors at any time of the day and get an appointment.
I could drive at 70mph on the motorway.
Yup life was way better then than it is now.
Mother wanted to keep up appearances, lived life off credit. Failed to keep up repayments and then either talked her way out of trouble (she was a *very* pretty lady) or we just hid. As kids the instructions were that we *never* answered the phone or the door.
All this always boils down to personal circumstance. We were quite poor growing up, plus I was literally a child. I never get why people look back with fondness on their childhood. I didn't have a bad or even vaguely abusive childhood. It was great really and my parents tried damn hard to provide everything we needed.
But I look at what I can do now and it's staggering. I have a car and freedom so could literally just drive to say, Derby for the afternoon. Wouldn't want to, no reason to, don't intend to, it's just a dull Midlands city about 90 miles away. But there is literally nothing stopping me getting in my car and being there in about 90 minutes. Then standing around going "why the fuck did I drive to Derby?" But as a kid in the 90s if some TV show had made out Derby to be some magical place and I really wanted to visit it, it would have seemed like an impossible dream. Might as well have been Ulaanbaatar in terms of my chances of simply going there.
OK, so adults had cars in the 90s. That's fair, I can't use the fact I was a kid to dismiss it. But even adults didn't have the technology we have now.
Say I want to watch a film or TV show, any film or TV show. In the 90s I had to wait until it was either shown on TV or go to Blockbuster to rent it. Now I could download pretty much anything, and be watching it in excellent quality, in about five minutes all in. I have a magical device that allows me to speak to people on the other side of the world, see a live map of traffic (indeed on the roads, in the air, or at sea), look up information about anything I want, find the most random obscure recipe, instructional videos about pretty much everything, speak on high quality video to anyone even on the other side of the planet, take professional cinema camera quality video (a recent development of Android phones and an app called MotionCam). Even my own "real" cameras have a little card where I can just pop them onto my laptop and edit the contents. No fucking around with film or tapes. One of my cameras *can fucking FLY.*
A lot of the above might be leisure and entertainment, but a lot of it has also given me my career. The entire genesis of actually getting to work in the music industry is thanks to contacts I made on music forums.
Even on things like transport, my car is much more comfortable and safe than cars of a similar price point in the 90s. A drive to say London would have been an exhausting 6 hour ordeal. Now it's 3 and a bit hours at a lick and you feel like you've just had a nice sit down. You can fly to pretty much anywhere in Europe at short notice without either booking a package holiday or using an expensive national carrier.
That's before we even get into stuff that doesn't affect most people like my use of TRT which would have been near impossible to fix in the 90s.
I could go on and on. Sure things are more expensive, I don't stand much of a chance of getting a better house any time soon. But there was still poverty, war, death, etc in the 90s. And a lot of it was much much worse.
I still find it amazing and reassuring that I could pull a computer out of a skip nowadays, and still have something powerful enough to be the only tool required for music production, art and programming and all kinds of tasks. I'm never going to have to be without these incredible tools to express myself. There is so much high quality free software and operating systems now too, so it can be all legit too.
In the 90's this really wasn't the case at all.
Life in the 90s in London was pretty gritty from memory. Drug dens, dodgy Minicabs, run down everything. It was fun, but then again I was a 20-something single male, with no responsibilities other than somehow getting myself to work on a Monday after a weekend bender.
This should be rewritten as ‘life was better when I was a teenager, say most people in their forties.’
Why doesn’t the teenage nostalgia get called out in these silly stories?
Life was always better in the past, no matter which generation you ask. You'll find people tell you the 60s was best, or the 70s etc. It's just getting older
Whilst I was skint throughout that period, I was still in my prime, and society around me seemed more optimistic. There was something to aspire to at least. Now the future looks bleak in every direction, despite being better off personally.
The 90s was essentially the 11.30pm point of the house party. We didn’t care about consequences, everyone was having fun, colour was a thing, nobody had responsibilities. Then the naughties and teens kicked in and the inevitable hangover and clearing up our mess is what we’re now left with
Couldn't agree more...it wasn't the best with terrorist attacks and war but...as a teen on the 90s, summers were awesome waking up with only 4 channels and we had plenty to watch. Didn't have the internet till late 90s and even then it felt better, conversations on AOL felt more genuine. Dating was so much easier as well. Better music. If I needed an appointment to see a GP, could often see the same day (this was mostly during when labour were in charge)
I have friends I saw regularly, Gaming was great as every game shipped actually worked out the box, none of this 50+ GB updates, when gaming with friends actually meant being together.
We're going through a rough patch, but I'm pretty sure people are wrong in a big-picture kind of way:
I remember the 90s and 00s pretty well – TV was garbage, I didn't have a smartphone with most of the world's music at my fingertips, travelling internationally was a much bigger deal than it is today (not talking about Spain, but outside of Europe). Making international phonecalls was expensive and guess what, for most of this period, there was no video calls (skype came in the mid-2000s I'd say?). Outside of housing costs, people were on average poorer (google 1990s Ford Fiesta. this was the most common car in the UK.) Racism and homophobia were a lot worse than they are today, and even women were not treated with the respect that they are now. It was hard to get international movies and books, and it was difficult to learn even the basics of a foreign language unless you were quite privileged and could pay for private classes. Also, we forget this because not that many bad terrorist attacks actually happened, but people were quite worried about Islamist terror all the time.
The housing crisis is real, and is a real problem that we need to solve, the "cost of living crisis" is short-term inflation + a lack of growth, and we will get out of that too (in my view, largely a result of austerity, though Brexit obviously doesn't help, but I don't want to have that argument right now.)
It’s partly true and partly rose tinted spectacles of people looking back on their youth etc- I garuntee in the 2040s some people will talk about how much better life was back in the 2020s
The 90s and early 2000's were the best years of my life. I was born in 1990.
I remember the positive feeling for the future pre 9/11 and also pre 2008.
Living in London, I was surrounded by countless social schemes I could attend and keep me busy after school, during summer and other times. My single mother was able to work and provide me childcare and other social schemes so she could be at work full time.
She was able to buy a house on her own and I had a great childhood.
Kids dont even have access to HALF of what I had access to growing up. All the social programs and activities during summer time to keep us busy. It was the fringes that used to get into gangs, now we are seeing the results of not providing anything for the younger generations. More and more kids get involved with gangs purely due to not having things to keep them busy.
Even 2 parent households struggling to give their kids the attention they need due to being under extreme economic pressure.
Man we have lost so much in this country in terms of services in the last 15-20 years.
Pre 2008 for me. I heard someone refer to the 90s-2008 as the long nineties and it really hit home. Then there's a jump to 2016 and then 2020.
We've had to adapt just to stay sane, but that isn't helped by the fact that all my friends live abroad or up north. Out of a huge friendship group there's only 1 couple left anywhere near us.
Life was better before:
- the housing crisis. We did nothing to invest in a house building programme
- we were part of the EU
- the Internet didn't perpetuate societal division
- people were allowed to express themselves freely regardless of their opinions and to be offended if others disagreed
- political correctness became almost puritanical and devoid of common sense
- Tony Blair magnified the lack of trust in our politics
- we imported foreign cultures, religions and problems not compatible with what went before and were then surprised when these people refused to change.
I totally agree, life was better when I was 20-30 years younger. Ask me the same question again in another 20-30 answers and I'll give the same answer again
In the late nineties a night out in Birmingham would cost less than £50. I could get a taxi into the city for around a tenner, find bars that did 3 bottles for £5 deals or BOGOF vodka redbulls, or get pints for £2 or less. You could get smashed on £20-£30. Now it's £100 minimum, probably more like £150 for the same night out.
Just one example of how life was better.
It’s fascinating how simplistic people’s thinking is.
Tories hurr durr. As if the balls weren’t set in motion by prior governments (both red and blue).
The issue isn’t so much our current conservative government. It’s the huge infestation of corporatism into every corner of life. Profit line gotta go up. Lobbying expenditure is insurmountable. Governments can’t enact anything that actually improves things for the electorate because they’re all bought and paid for, either directly or by promises of post-politics positions. It’s broken. Not Torysim per se, but corporatism (not even capitalism, that’s too simplistic as well).
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The quality of life has been declining since the noughties for sure but you don't even have to go back that far to find what seemed like an acceptable level. Life was far better even in 2016 (on the eve of the "forbidden word" vote) and not only better but seemed to be improving. There is just a huge drop in quality of life between the mid 2010s and now. That being said, the huge difference is no doubt a compounding of big and small issues that were just amplified with "the forbidden word" and COVID.
Quality of life peaked at some point in the late noughties. I appreciate that not everybody benefited from this, but most people were reasonably affluent, things were going ok, and the world was beginning to looking with admiration at Britain. In 2008, that changed for the worse, and in 2010, 2015, and 2016. 2008 was a global event, but the others were choices we made.
In 1997 houses were affordable. By 2007 many were priced out of the market for good. People forget that prices rose 211% under Blair. Which is 140% after adjusting for inflation. Thats affected the lives of millions. Stuck in rental properties, paying someone else’s mortgage.
True, and it's a big part of quality of life, but healthcare and education were in much better shape then.
I could ring up the GP at lunchtime while at work, get an appointment for that afternoon, leave work at 4pm and be seen by 5. Zero chance of that nowadays. If you dial 10 seconds too late after 8am then you’re out of luck.
Trick is to start ringing slightly less than 10 seconds before 8am, skip the recorded messages by opening the keypad and spamming numbers and if you've timed it right, you're now 3rd in queue. Why the health service feels like I'm glitching/speedrunning a video game just for an appointment, I do not know.
NHS survival mode.
General Practice: Battle Royale
Love how you described this. I agree that's exactly what its like. So fucked.
You guys have queue systems? Ours are just "we're engaged, tough luck, try again!" Fucking doctor roulette.
New NHS any% speedrun strat discovered
Getting a GP Appointment ANY% WR
Britannia rules the waaaaaaaaves
Better off just after 14:00. I managed to get a phone consultation two weeks later.
I must be really lucky. I submit an online request in the morning and I’m seen on the day, without fail, by my doctor.
It massively depends on area. I could be waiting months if I didn't get lucky and guess the random time my GP releases appointments online.
My GP doesn’t even release appointments, you have to call at 8am and the best outcome you can hope for is “someone (ie a GP or PA) will call you sometime this afternoon/morning”, it’s like they assume everyone works part time and can just stop working at a moments notice
Ditto. Utterly ridiculous.
Which is also a Tory fuck-up, they cancelled the NHS digitization work that was being done and instead allowed all the different trusts and surgeries to buy in whatever the hell they wanted resulting in a complete mess of non-compatible systems.
It's almost like they want people to have to turn to private healthcare
Exactly. Non-emergencies are a 12-day wait now. And we haven't even mentioned surgical procedures, some of which are a year and more behind.
Yup. Just took me 18 months for a simple surgery to get done. Was in pain that entire time for what ended up being 20 minutes under a local anaesthetic.
My mum's due to have a hip replacement at the end of this month - she's been on the waiting list for 2 years. During that time she's lost her job and has been sent a repossession order for her house.
The Tories just proudly announced that 99.7% of NHS Trusts have hit their 'target' of being seen in **64 WEEKS** How horrendous is that?
Typical tory way, increase the target window so it hits the current waiting time. Bingo, you have hit your targets lol
Our GP runs a similar service. You book a telephone consultation on-line and one of the doctors calls you back at a specified time usually within 48 hours. If they think they need to see you in person following the consultation they book you an appointment while talking to you. The last time I did this the GP saw me the following morning after the consultation. On-line prescription requests and booking blood-tests are also available which save a lot of time.
Yeah exactly, how are people who work supposed to get an appointment? I need to be at work for 8am, I can’t just get to work and then leave immediately or later that day…. They have a policy that you must give notice for a doctors appointment, on the day of is not enough notice
Man i remember going to the hospital and being seen within a hour or two and having something given to me or next steps within a few hours.... i have fond memories of my interactions with the NHS in the 90s and early 2000s.. contrast that to now...
Just last year I was waiting 8 weeks for a routine apt, 2-4 weeks for a med review, and 1-2 weeks for an emergency appointment. I switched practices in February, and now I get a routine appointment within 48 hrs without fail. All face-to-face, too. They actually apologised for not being able to give me a same-day apt last week. It's such a breath of fresh air.
Vastly so, those house price surges were well underway . Labour should have built a lot of council housing though. That was a mistake but the country was far better then than now.
Majority of that rise was subprime mortgages hence the collapse
Completely agree - house prices were and still are one of the main issues this country faces. But they did grow even after 2007, partially because credit was cheap, partially because we just do not build enough houses. Prices have stabilised recently, but the problem remains, and now interest rates are much higher.
Actually under Cameron prices rose by zero per cent after adjusting for inflation. And under May, prices again rose by zero per cent after adjusting for inflation. No fan of the Tories and what we really need is a real terms reduction but zero per cent is a lot better than 140% increase.
Most inflation measures includes housing costs, so you're adjusting using a metric that includes itself. Food prices and consumer goods coming down so much have offset the house price rises vs the late 90s and early 00s. For a better idea you'd have to look at housing costs vs median wage IMO.
This is somewhat bittersweet to say, but atleast some people here remember that it wasnt just our current government that have screwed us all over.
Mine was £40k in 2000, now they're being snapped up for £210, with people bidding over the asking price. The street is facing a park, so it's ideal for families. My sister paid £60k for hers early 90's, they're going for between £300k to over £400K, it's insane.
Why didn't the Blair govt build more homes?
Cuz Bliar was Tory Lite, gotta keep the system in sync.
Largely because it was triangulating the boomer vote This is why I think the next government will eventually get serious about it, thats not going to be the part of the electorate to triangulate around in future.
The population has increased 10 million since the millennium. We're currently building poor quality housing on flood plains and agricultural land. Farmers are already warning crops are going to struggle because of climate change - and we only produce under half our required food anyway - and the number of adverse weather events we experience yearly will be increasing. The population is due to grow another 6 million by 2030. House building is not the long term answer here.
Same reason the Conservatives don't: Rising house prices wins votes. It's crucial to understand that most people who actually go out and vote are home owners. Their house is their biggest financial asset. Prices rising makes them *feel* richer, and people mostly vote based on feelings. This is why every government does everything it can to keep the house price bubble pumped up. Help2Buy, stamp duty relief... Liz Truss couldn't outlast a lettuce because she fucked with pensions and house prices (via the rate jump). This is also why Starmer is unlikely to do anything that lowers house prices either. It would cost him too many votes.
Not Blairs fault but he did nothing to stop it. All goes back to the Glass–Steagall legislation being repealed in the states in 1999, banks went crazy hence housing bubble
They love pointing to 2008 but always forget about 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_European_Union
Blair also deregulated buy to let mortgages. Plus he permanently devalued university degrees as an unintended consequence of his "education education education" push (and thus increased construction costs by not training enough construction workers as they were all chasing white collar jobs via degrees)
Late nineties were great. The Internet was new and wild open, lots of cool quirky things and people online. It wasn't yet dominated by attention economy mega corporations but a tool of personal fulfillment and liberation. Technooptimism was the norm. Electronic music was big and there was a real hippie vibe in continental Europe. I feel ever since 9/11 things went downhill.
There was a definite shift from the glow of a new millennium by the events of 9/11. Being the optimist I always thought that even after this there was a consensus of, changing things to make security better and to stop global terror. This ended with the over reach of the invasion of Iraq. It divided people over whether it was right or wrong and we doubted whether our leaders were lying and the legitimacy of the actions of our countries.
and not exclusive to the UK, modern technology iand social media is doing more damage to peoples psyche's and relationships to the real world. Getting square eyes from watching too much tv seems so quaint now.
Lifestyles that were considered poor and somewhat undesirable in the late 90s are extremely aspirational today. The council houses I grew up near in london, keen to never end up in, are now extremely aspirational and out of reach private accommodations that I could only dream of living in.
Rent cost, flexibility of decoration/personalisation and general security of having a council house? Yes please!
Britain was also hit incredibly hard in 2008, more so than many other similar countries. I think 2008/09 really is the watershed moment, its what ultimately leads to our leaving the EU.
US was hit harder considering it was a US crisis. The US has had huge recovery since, but the UK hasn't because of sheer incompetence and mismanagement.
It was cause of austerity. Which was a very conscious choice of the Tory party, so hardly incompetence or mismanagement...
That US huge recovery? It was done by following a plan architected by a certain Gordon Brown. The UK followed that plan (and was starting to recover), up until 2010, when the Tories/Lib Dems and mega-austerity hit, and the Tories have been following that ever since.
It certainly contributed but alot of it was also that the Tory moderates at some point turned into seat warmers that consistently fold under any kind of pressure.
It depends on how you measure QoL. Personally, I benefit *massively* from having a map and a dictionary and an encyclopedia in my pocket at all times. The map, in particular, has genuinely saved my life on at least one occasion. If you showed my mobile phone to someone in the 1970s, they would probably be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy it. Nowadays, we all take it for granted. Hedonistic treadmill and all that
I mean, that is a completely different discussion. Seen from the 1970s, we have all turned into cyborgs (or smombies in newspeak). Hardly anybody is still able to function without their phone. I think that is certainly a double edged sword. > Hedonistic treadmill and all that No doubt about it.
Being Reddit, a lot of the answers here are totally delusional (no, there were no unions in the 90s...yes, people still had to work, they worked a lot longer for a lot less). But the problem is that the UK has benefited from technological development in other countries whilst the stuff that we are in control of has got significantly worse. I would say there are a few big technological changes that matter (mobile phone, online shopping, and a lot of stuff becoming completely free) but everything is quite incremental. We had maps before...you just bought a book with a map? What do you think people did, just walked around aimlessly until they got to the right place? And, more importantly, these two things aren't connected. The choice wasn't: you can have this phone...but the price of this is significantly more sexual assaults. The two things aren't substitutes either. You can enjoy your phone and not like crazy house prices. That is why people are angry because a lot of stuff that matters has really got worse (I know what things were like before, it isn't even remotely close, 1997 was the peak of everything: the UK was safe, everything was cheap, etc. It is impossible to understate how shit things are now compared to then).
there were unions in the 90’s. I was offered to join one when I did weekend work at Sainsbury’s.
Coinciding with the election of the tories, not really surprised there.
We'd had six years of brutal austerity by that point. It's rose tinted nostalgia to blame everything on Brexit, life had been hard for the poorest for a long time by then.
Depends on the age of the responder too and even where they lived is a factor. If you were a kid in the 90’s it’s not as easy to compare. I was in my 20’s in the 90’s and I had literally none of the pressures people of that age have today. Also in my own family there was a distinct north south divide. Thatcher fucked my northern side of the family. The decline for them started in the 80’s.
Same. I'm Cornish from the mining country , it went to shit from the eighties . Things were still far better then than now. With the state of the NHS this was a terrible time to get disabled.
I don't disagree that there has been a decrease in living standards since 2016. However, the Brexit vote was a reflection on the country I believe. People were feeling left out, disenfranchised, and had seen their qol drop since 2008. That was a large part of the 52% vote, believing that we needed to change something drastic to improve. It wasn't all acceptable then.... Brexit was a symptom not a cause. By 2016, austerity was very much hitting the people it was first designed to. Low income, unemployed and disabled people. Since then, it has affected almost everyone.
I agree with this, and it always surprises me that more people won't acknowledge the point.
Politically the country has been a mess since so perhaps people forget that it wasn't sunshine and flowers before either. Austerity really was the worst policy, in hindsight it looks even more ridiculous when interest rates were at a record low then. The lost investment in this country is absolutely blindingly obvious now. God it makes me sad.
The problem is austerity and declining union power taking wages down with them. People love to hate on train drivers but their wages are higher than expected because they 1) join and stay in their unions consistently, 2) are prepared to go on strike when necessary. I was at lunch the other day and a combination of friends working in teaching and the NHS were discussing joining unions. One said she joined for a year then left because 'I didn't use it' - like it's a Netflix subscription or something. And another was talking about how he joins when he anticipates having a problem, but is planning to leave when/if it blows over. That's exactly the sort of behaviour that gets you weak unions and stagnating wages. Neither the government nor any employer is going to raise wages when people are this willing to try and game the system to their short term advantage while leaving their co-workers or union friends out in the cold. Strikes don't work when it's only 1% of your employees who walk out. We're easy to pick off one by one, so if we refuse to stand together then we're doomed. Yet this is what people choose nowadays time and again.
Agreed. It feels like COVID is used as a convenient scapegoat by the government when in reality the decline had already begun, COVID strapped a rocket to it.
Things were getting worse in 2016 for millions of people and the decline was clear (mostly thanks to Tory policies following the 2008 crash, though Labour were promising cuts too). Hence the ‘forbidden word’ vote result!
You are right. It's big and small issues. But considering Ukraine, Covid and the forbidden word came in the same few years things are a lot worse than they should be at this point. Any one of those would have been bad but all three at once is what has caused the biggest drop in quality of life. The financial burden of COVID has been many times worse than the forbidden word. We are heading into uncharted waters. The next few years are going to be rocky. We can get our quality of life back but it will take a while. There is work and blood ahead of us though. A rocky few years with wars and struggle I expect.
I would argue not the next few years but going forward well into the future looks very bleak, we have only just started to feel the effects of AI on the reduction in jobs now, the rentier economy is becoming more and more the norm with companies that offer platforms, Amazon, eBay, Uber, becoming the overlords of businesses of all sizes, income/wealth disparities increasing at record levels, climate change starting to spiral out of control, there isn't much to be optimistic about really.
Tbf we need AI to take jobs with our aging demographics and large pension cohort to support. To offer some more optimism, we are decarbonising our electricity grid pretty rapidly in the UK too, with loads of offshore wind coming online over the next few years which will make us world leaders in wind energy. Solar is also beckming ridiculously cheap now and both should help bring power costs down. I am overall pessimistic but it's always good to see some sunshine through the grey!
Wind energy is one of the few things this country has done right! Let's hope they don't attempt to derail that too as a favour for their chums in the fossil fuel industry.
I remember stickers next to light switches and sockets at school asking us to "Think before we use" [paraphrasing] in order to reduce electricity usage. Admittedly, that was a long time ago, early to mid 70s. People were encouraged to cut down at home as well, with the carrot of lower bills. It was successful and as a nation we used less electricity. The problem was this reduced the money the government received from the nationalised electricity supply and so the prices were increased. We (our parents) were left paying the same money for less electricity, or paying more for the same electricity. My point is, and maybe I'm being a cynic here, the cost of generating electricity might fall but don't hold your breath expecting that to be reflected in the price at the meter. It won't be.
> The financial **burden** of COVID has been many times worse than the forbidden word. Whilst others made unmitigated profits 😒
At least people were hopeful in the 90s. I swear you can't even talk positive about the country now. "Weather is nice today"... "We're all going to die"...
It's because of the chronically online distorting reality. You don't have to go far from this very sub, just outside in fact, and real life is nothing at all like you'd think reading comments here.
Exactly. I think this sub tends to exaggerate, as well as other subs, just how bleak life is. It gets me down just behind here sometimes and I need to leave Reddit for a few days. Spend too many days here and you’ll just feel everything is bleak and hopeless, but in real life, while not paradise, is still not as bad as made out.
"I bought a ham sandwich earlier this year" "Not everyone can afford such food, and you should be mindful of that. I haven't eaten since 2021"
"I'm sorry, but in 2021 *thousands* of Ukrainians were being slaughtered by Russian invaders, millions of vulnerable people around the world died from COVID, the environment continued to be raped by greedy capitalists, and you just sat there eating your sandwich like everything was all okay!? Privileged people like you make me sick."
People are just living their life, day to day, we're not going around crying all the time. If you talk to basically anyone about the cost of living or the state of the UK, they will pretty consistently tell you how fucked it is.
The inverse though is that you only have a limited frame of reference in the real world. I don't need food banks, so I have no idea if food bank use is up, or if they're struggling for supplies. I imagine the vast majority of people don't know how well the pensions and savings are of their neighbours. Etc.
Mate, read the room. This country is completely fucked. 14 years of austerity, covid fraud, and the fucking b word equals this state flat lining in the next 20 years. Might as well see it for what it is. The UK is the new poor man of Europe
That’s just not true. “The UK will be the fourth best performing G7 economy relative to pre-pandemic levels: Despite weak projected growth in 2024, the UK will still outperform France, Japan and Germany with real GDP around 2.7% higher in 2024 on average relative to 2019 levels.” https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/pwc-uk-economic-predictions-2024.html#
You ... do realize that these are *projections*? That this is a *press release!*? From a company that no doubt sells a lot of business to the Tory government!
Do you feel the effects of the fourth best performing G7 economy though?
That means nothing to an average person. I can’t pay my rent with GDP
The measures by which the "performance of the economy" is judged are not necessarily relevant to, or reflective of, the experience of the people who live within that economy.
For sure. My best days are when I'm out in the real world, I treasure small and uncomplicated interactions with people. For example yesterday I chatted to an old couple I haven't seen in ages, helped a guy with arthritis in his back stand up, spoke to a mum about her boys interest in football and was complimented by some charity workers. All little things but they added up to a good day. Interactions online are much more divisive and oftentimes ridiculous. I'm constantly second guessing myself incase someone gets offended or misinterprets my words. And our brains draw us into controversial or uncomfortable topics which we'd avoid in the real world.
Although it was a somewhat icky cliché, the whole Cool Britannia era was a wave of positivity for our national image. The focus on soft power through our film and music industry was a welcome boost for our national identity, superseding the era of colonial hard power and the attitudes of Empire, which we thought we'd turned our back on since the 60s. Instead, a positive image of BritPop, Guy Ritchie films and the Spice Girls.Things Can Only Get Better. Now look what has happened since. This lurch back to some Boys Own comic vision of a Britain that sticks its Vs up to Johnny Foreigner, and once more stands isolated in Europe. Farage and Mogg and suchlike; aloof, arrogant and superior. I cannot get behind that. For me, it's the very worst attitudes of a past we should long since have consigned to history.
In the nineties, net migration averaged 100K per year. The last 2 years have seen 800K per year. Over 1.5 million in 2 years. We haven’t built the infrastructure and homes for an extra 1.5 million. Some may feel that is too much when they are already struggling with rental costs/access to services. If net migration is historically low then it’s perhaps no surprise that it wasn’t so much of an issue.
But, but, I thought Brexit was supposed to fix immigration???
No, it gave our Govt more control. And The Tories have used that to ramp up migration 4 fold.
It's easy to be hopeful if you have something to be hopeful for.
The negativity in Britain is really getting to my mental health recently
It reflects the desperate mess we are in.
I used to be part of a massive group of friends when I lived in the UK and we would go round the country clubbing together. It was amazing, the after parties were epic.
On certain subs, and things like Twitter, yes. But if you leave your phone at home and just go out into the world, I find that in general my interactions are positive. People also seem to forget that the 90s were also full of doomongering.
While rose tinted glasses are true in the 90s I felt like I could go out and achieve things, own a home, live in nice area, get a degree etc. Now I’m worried for my kids, my currently salary has same buying power as the salary I had 20 years ago. But everything has gone up in price, food, gas, electric and of course house prices. How are my kids ever meant to afford a home? If they go to uni they’ll leave with a mountain of debt. I honestly don’t think my kids will have the same opportunities as I did and that for me is a massive downer. Edit: just for salary clarity 20 years ago I was a Dept manager in a shop first job after uni. I’m now an accountant.
14 years of Tory rule will do that to anyone.
Tbf there was 17 years of Tory rule until 1997. Of the last 45 years only 13 have had a (New) Labour government.
Those 13 years were the most prosperous since the 1945-1951 Atlee government. When have Britons ever been better off at the end of a Tory government than at the start? The answer is "never".
> While rose tinted glasses are true in the 90s One thing that strikes me is that in the 90s I used to work in homelessness (not the highest salary by a long shot) and rented. I was still able to go out drinking 6 pints (in none wetherspoons) 5/6 days a week. I'm not saying it was the best lifestyle choice but it was fun and affordable and common back then. I'm not sure the young adults of today have this as an option.
No chance. I earn a decent wage, but 5 or 6 pints in my area will set you back 40 quid. I couldn’t afford to do it a three times a month let alone per week
If you own a home then you need to get yourself in a position where they benefit from that. If they want to go to university but can't get on to a good course at a prestigious institution then strongly advise them against it.
100% agree. If you think it’s bad for our kids, don’t even dare think about how it’ll be for our grandkids.
>get a degree etc. Sure, if like me you were in the top 10 or 15% of the country academically. Otherwise, no, you could not get a degree. Places were extremely restricted and the exams a lot harder. I've done 4 degrees, starting in the 90s. A generalist undergrad in my field, 2 specialisms at masters level and a masters outside of my field of work. It's been useful to my career to have the first three, but since Blair's expansion and fees, the standards required have plummeted. Inevitably, I suppose. If you're buying something you expect to get it. >How are my kids ever meant to afford a home? If they go to uni they’ll leave with a mountain of debt. I honestly don’t think my kids will have the same opportunities as I did and that for me is a massive downer. I worry about that too. Under the old system I'm pretty sure my kids would have got a uni place as they're doing better than most of their school, so an undergrad degree would still have shown an earnings premium. Now they might be better looking for a degree apprenticeship, or some sort of code camp equivalent, then buying a starter flat asap. What's your take on the value of long education courses Vs the expectation that AI will keep eating careers? I'm wondering if career hopping becomes a thing, it might be those without the massive student loan debt that are best able to carry it out?
Not sure what you mean by long education, but assume it’s a 3 year degree course. At the moment (& for my kids it’s a good decade away) doing something like accountancy qualification at 18 and by 21 being qualified would be better than going to uni, then entering workforce and then doing the accountancy qualification. A lady at my work was fully qualified at age of 22 and moved companies a few times before joining us at age of 25 for huge pay rise each job move. If a 22 year old joined after uni they’d likely be on half her salary. AI will change so much by time my kids are adults. Let’s just say I’m hoping they aren’t fighting terminators.
Steer your kids towards the trades. We’ll always need humans to do electrical work, carpentry, etc. Until the terminators get really advanced and we have to call them out to come and rewire our houses or fit our kitchens.
I often wonder about the extent to which education really has deteriorated. I remember doing mock GCSE papers in the 2000s that were clearly copyrighted in the early 1990s. Later, while doing my undergraduate degree, I found a dissertation written by an LSE student in the 1980s. In neither instance did it feel like I was uncovering wisdom that the ancients left behind. Also, every older person in my family is a pre-1997 university graduate. Again, nothing special there.
‘Life was better before the Tories 15yr asset stripping exercise’
Very clever. The nineties were also at the end of a long period of Tory rule and that was mainly Thatcher…
I doubt people are thinking life was better under the threat of IRA bombs. Not to discredit Major's work, but Blair absolutely sealed the Peace Agreement. Who disrupted that after 20 years? Oh yeah, Boris... What Party did he belong to? Oh yeah, the Tories...
> I doubt people are thinking life was better under the threat of IRA bombs All in all, yes they are. Northern Ireland aside, which was horrible, most of the UK just weren’t fussed. The same way we just went about life as normal after 7/7.
We had a Tory government for most of the 90s.
They were a far more sane incantation of the Tory party though - even as someone who wasn’t a fan, I remember vocalising at the time that Cameron signalled a worrying change in tone. And then the Brexit debacle caused a purge of the more sensible faction, and that’s when the loons took over.
People, (popular history?) massively underestimate the effect of the 2008 Financial Crisis. We're still feeling the reverberations of that globally. It's affected everything from industry to credit to immigration to public services etc. Basically the entire foundation of contemporary (post-1979) Western (Anglo-Saxon) capitalism was found to be deeply flawed we still haven't addressed this. We've just papered over the cracks and continued on our merry way. Debt is still exponentially increasing and we have no way to reasonably address that without massive restructuring of our economy (society). Debt fuelled consumption is still the only game in town. And we lap it up. Sooner or later the whole issue will hit the public consciousness again, (Crisis) and we'll have another historical event on our hands.
The reason people look back at the late 90's, early 00's with such positivity is because people were benefiting from a bubble that was propped up by unregulated banking systems, which was inevitably going to burst. And then that screwed everything up generations to come.
I would say that the fact we didn't have much internet, barely a phone and the music was on a different level.
Except the United States ultimately recovered from it pretty decently because the government actually spent some money in the last 12 years, whereas the UK actively made sure that the recession would be as long and deep as possible by using the financial crisis as an excuse to spending-cut the economy to death. What connection do you think there is between the financial crisis and "immigration" -- too many American bankers seeking asylum in London? Too many British preppers moving to New Zealand because they thought it was the end of capitalism? Debt fuelled investment is the name of the game, and this country decided to stop investing.
The UK government spends about 45% of GDP whereas the US is 37%. The main difference is that in a crisis (financial crisis or COVID), the US cuts more personal taxes , or straight tax refunds. This gets spent faster and they recover from recessions quicker. Whereas we put the cash through more layers and it takes longer to get spent.
I don't think that's really the point to be honest. The US adopted a much more expansionary fiscal policy over the last decade, whether that's tax cuts or spending is less important. What matters is that you try to run the economy near capacity and investment in the future is happening somewhere, be it the private sector or the government.
>Basically the entire foundation of contemporary (post-1979) Western (Anglo-Saxon) capitalism was found to be deeply flawed I agreed up to here. Western Europe.has economically stagnated since 2008. Eastern Europe and the USA have been much more economically successful over the last 16 years, and they are arguably now more capitalist than western Europe.
As a millennial on the slightly older side (born 1989) they’re not wrong. Life was far more optimistic in those days, we had our issues but society wasn’t as nearly as divided as it is today. In the 2000s there was a sense that we could still have a better world, there was more hope. Now in the 2010s & 2020s, this era seems to be the reverse of the 90s & 00s, very little hope, people are less happier than years ago
I would agree (born in 88) I think for me the turning point was the housing crash in 08, which made all that hopefulness turn into mush coming out of uni to a non existent job market. Personally my partner and I are doing alright now, not struggling but can’t afford a house and feel like we can’t afford children. I think nostalgia contributes to some of this “good old days” but depending on where you were in life at these big turning points- housing crash, the B word and covid (ie not already owning a house, in a steady job etc) it really made it a struggle.
Born in 1989 and had a feel about the economy and culture in the 90s? I can imagine two year old you being livid about black Wednesday and 7 year old you deriding Be Here Now as cocaine fuelled indulgence
They talk about 2000s and would have been about 18-19 when the 2008 financial crisis hit. Old enough to see the rug pulled out from underneath them? I do feel that was the turning point for a lot of what we have today. I'm born in 82, could be this posters older sibling. Was in full time education at 18 but also earning good money on the evenings and weekends, we seemed to have a pick of the jobs (albeit all unskilled obviously). Every weekend was a huge event, could travel up and down the country to various club nights. Even though I had to pay uni tuition fees they were low, like £1k a year or something. Rent was bugger all, £1 pints, most people's biggest expense was their phone contract. I don't remember much divisiveness, there was still the BNP and that put the right wing very much in a particular box. Labour was very middle of the road at the time, the everyman party. Not nearly as much islamic extremism or Islamaphobia in the news. Queer culture was very accepted and mainstream (at least amongst the young in cities) but we had no constant gender or trans wars. An element of rose tinted glasses I'm sure, but things did feel a whole lot better than today.
Lol you were 10 by the end of the 90s, I'm sure you remember that decade and how it felt really well
You do have memories of being 8-10 you know….
Memories that are distorted and tainted by a child-like innocence and childish view of the world.
I don't mean to diminish, I'm roughly the same age, but the main reason we were more hopeful back then is because we were young and idealistic. It was also before the 2008 crash when everything seemed to be improving.
back then when we said "britain is a bit shit" it was because we secretly knew it was the best. now people kinda mean it
Back then when HIGNFY said that it was funny. Now it’s the laughter of desperation
People always tend to look back with rose tinted glasses when it comes to nostalgia and the past
homelessness and child poverty were at an all time low you could get a builder, police turned up to burglaries, nhs was flying high, britain was respected for it's politicians and arts, food was cheap and the food banks were for the homeless
Food banks didn’t exist, period.
immigration was low
No social media wrecking young people's mental health. No camera phones, so you didn't have to worry about going viral when night clubbing. No doom scrolling. No pressure to post fake "best versions" of your life online, further damaging your friends mental health. No cyber bullying. No sextortion with nudes. If all you've known it's growing up with these things then you can't possibly imagine how much better life was without them. I love technology. I've worked in it my whole life. But fuck me there's a lot of problems the way millennials and gen z use it, which are not your fault individually.
I'd say a greater evil than all of these put together is the avalanche of misinformation that has swayed voting and created movements like anti-vax.
Nah, life was much easier. My money went further and I was 100% happier as a result, less stress about life and the world. I think something else that has impacted this is technology, the late 90s and early 2000s were a perfect point for tech, where it could be used just enough to benefit daily life but not so much that it distracts or starts to negatively effect you. I know for certain that my mental health has taken a hit because of tech/social media, the world before was a bigger place with mystery and wonder. It’s now just sad as fuck, full of people desperate for attention or being overly aware of how fucked the world and planet are.
Dont disagree about social media, but internet speeds are faster now, which in turn makes remote working and video calling alot more seemless. I was on a 2mbps in the 2000's which was painful
Of course that's true, but I think that most people probably did have better lives when the economy was growing and public services weren't in a state of semi-collapse.
Yes people get older and look back at when they were younger, sexier, hopeful (forgetting their youthful insecurities and fears). The 90s were not just cool Britannia, carefree spice girls, they were also prime Radiohead who despite being as good a rock band this country has ever seen were all about anxiety, despair and not fitting in ... ( Not to mention Nirvana in the States)
They were also the 90s recession, the house price crash with unprecedented and unrepeated levels of repossession, the end of the 80s (best decade ever). All I'm saying is there's more than one way to look at the 90s. Then there were all of labours wars, the dot com crash, stock market crash, GFC, 9/11, 7/7 all waiting for us in the noughtys.
>Then there were all of labours wars, the dot com crash, stock market crash, GFC, 9/11, 7/7 all waiting for us in the noughtys. Most of this stuff didn't affect people day to day the way stuff is today. Granted I was pretty young for this, but only the Great recession in 2008 had any impact on my life and my family and we certainly weren't rich. The terrorist attacks were scary but ultimately barely a blip in my memory because apart from a few weeks after the fact life carried on. The fact remains that housing, education, healthcare, and day to day existence was better when you account for things like cost of living and job prospects. Yes, there were crises, but things tended to turn around fairly soon after the fact. It's only now we've had an entirely lost decade where nothing has really changed since 2008, in fact soon it will be more like a lost 20 years and a lost generation or two because our country has refused to address our economic issues the right way, and has opted for austerity..
My dear mum is in her 70s and she says this current era is the worst she’s ever experienced. Can’t get a dentist appointment, can’t afford to have the heating on, all the roads are falling apart, etc..
Oh before the 15 year Tory run yea? Big surprise. I'm utterly shocked that the party that guts everything we tried to build for its people is also in charge of Britain's great downfall. Shocked I say.
Whilst I hate the Tories as much as anyone, you can’t blame them for the rise of Musk, Putin, Bezos, Orban, Trump and so on and all the problems they’ve enhanced and the global impact of all of these people.
Youre not wrong at all but they've certainly done more than their fair share in making things worse for the average British public
It really was better, but I have hopes for the future
I'm envious of you mate because I don't see things getting better any time soon
But you’re enthusiastic Dave
A man goes to a doctor. “Doctor, I’m depressed,” the man says; life is harsh, unforgiving, cruel. The doctor lights up. The treatment, after all, is simple. “The great enthusiastic Dave is in town tonight,” the doctor says, “Go and see him! That should sort you out.” The man bursts into tears. “But doctor,” he says, “I *am* enthusiastic Dave!”
If enthusiastic Dave doesn’t have any hope what chance do the rest of us have?
Not a chance. There's 2 separate realities happening right now. The online reality middle class, sheltered redditors live in and the reality of living in run-down working class towns.
2008 was the downward trend, when we bailed out the banks, and wages just stopped growing. Since then, we have been gaslit and brainwashed into be grateful to have full employment, at the expense of wage inequality increasing, and unprecedented wage stagnation. As an old Millennial at 41, I have completely missed out on wage growth for the majority of my life. Sure, I could have sacrificed more of my free time, saved more money perhaps, but the fact remains that most normal people have been priced out of independent living, home ownership, and dignity in most cases. Brexit and Covid were the icing on the cake... And it wasn't just an impact in the UK, the same if not worse was happening in the US too.
I remember that era and even then people (the electorate) complained about immigration, the economy, cost of living, the NHS being on its knees, housing being unaffordable and everything basically sucking.
Go back and watch question time from the Blair years. They were complaining about 2 day waiting periods. Imagine that today. I don't remember much about the noughties and almost nothing about the 90s but it's very hard to argue things weren't objectively better from a living standard point of view. Complaints are relative to what you expect. Even in Scandinavia they complain things aren't good enough, whereas its welfare state and public transport are the envy of many Brits.
People always like to complain. That won't ever change, because people always want things to be better. That doesn't mean things haven't gotten measurably worse.
In 1997 my wife was in the throws of having a miscarriage (we didn’t know she was pregnant, so didn’t know what was happening), I picked up the phone to the doctor and 20 minutes later he was at our door, closely followed after by an ambulance who he phoned immediately he set eyes on my wife. Her life was saved that day because of the flexibility of the service, you wouldn’t get that today, infact you can’t even get an appointment at the local doctors now unless you are standing outside the surgery at 8am and even then you need to be in the first 3 or 4. Yeah, life was much better in the 1990’s. People likely not old enough to remember the 90’s will likely say that for them things got worse post Brexit, and as good as you may have thought life was in the early 2010’s, it was nothing compared to the mid to late 90’s. Let’s compare, I bought my first car in 1991 for £1000 and insurance for the year was £175. I bough my first home (a park home) for £13k. When I started my own business, the rent on the unit was £600pm. I could call up the doctors at any time of the day and get an appointment. I could drive at 70mph on the motorway. Yup life was way better then than it is now.
In the nineties I was a kid hiding from bailiffs. Let's not all wear rose tinted specs here.
Why were they trying to repossess you?
Mother wanted to keep up appearances, lived life off credit. Failed to keep up repayments and then either talked her way out of trouble (she was a *very* pretty lady) or we just hid. As kids the instructions were that we *never* answered the phone or the door.
Almost the whole world would think nineties are better, except for Russians
I don't think life was that good in the 90's for Rwandans, Somalis, Bosnians or Afghanises. War and genocide tend to make times shitty.
Go and watch TraumaZone (Adam Curtis documentary). It’s mad what happened over there. Putin only features in the last few minutes of the last episode.
All this always boils down to personal circumstance. We were quite poor growing up, plus I was literally a child. I never get why people look back with fondness on their childhood. I didn't have a bad or even vaguely abusive childhood. It was great really and my parents tried damn hard to provide everything we needed. But I look at what I can do now and it's staggering. I have a car and freedom so could literally just drive to say, Derby for the afternoon. Wouldn't want to, no reason to, don't intend to, it's just a dull Midlands city about 90 miles away. But there is literally nothing stopping me getting in my car and being there in about 90 minutes. Then standing around going "why the fuck did I drive to Derby?" But as a kid in the 90s if some TV show had made out Derby to be some magical place and I really wanted to visit it, it would have seemed like an impossible dream. Might as well have been Ulaanbaatar in terms of my chances of simply going there. OK, so adults had cars in the 90s. That's fair, I can't use the fact I was a kid to dismiss it. But even adults didn't have the technology we have now. Say I want to watch a film or TV show, any film or TV show. In the 90s I had to wait until it was either shown on TV or go to Blockbuster to rent it. Now I could download pretty much anything, and be watching it in excellent quality, in about five minutes all in. I have a magical device that allows me to speak to people on the other side of the world, see a live map of traffic (indeed on the roads, in the air, or at sea), look up information about anything I want, find the most random obscure recipe, instructional videos about pretty much everything, speak on high quality video to anyone even on the other side of the planet, take professional cinema camera quality video (a recent development of Android phones and an app called MotionCam). Even my own "real" cameras have a little card where I can just pop them onto my laptop and edit the contents. No fucking around with film or tapes. One of my cameras *can fucking FLY.* A lot of the above might be leisure and entertainment, but a lot of it has also given me my career. The entire genesis of actually getting to work in the music industry is thanks to contacts I made on music forums. Even on things like transport, my car is much more comfortable and safe than cars of a similar price point in the 90s. A drive to say London would have been an exhausting 6 hour ordeal. Now it's 3 and a bit hours at a lick and you feel like you've just had a nice sit down. You can fly to pretty much anywhere in Europe at short notice without either booking a package holiday or using an expensive national carrier. That's before we even get into stuff that doesn't affect most people like my use of TRT which would have been near impossible to fix in the 90s. I could go on and on. Sure things are more expensive, I don't stand much of a chance of getting a better house any time soon. But there was still poverty, war, death, etc in the 90s. And a lot of it was much much worse.
I still find it amazing and reassuring that I could pull a computer out of a skip nowadays, and still have something powerful enough to be the only tool required for music production, art and programming and all kinds of tasks. I'm never going to have to be without these incredible tools to express myself. There is so much high quality free software and operating systems now too, so it can be all legit too. In the 90's this really wasn't the case at all.
Life in the 90s in London was pretty gritty from memory. Drug dens, dodgy Minicabs, run down everything. It was fun, but then again I was a 20-something single male, with no responsibilities other than somehow getting myself to work on a Monday after a weekend bender.
This should be rewritten as ‘life was better when I was a teenager, say most people in their forties.’ Why doesn’t the teenage nostalgia get called out in these silly stories?
Life was always better in the past, no matter which generation you ask. You'll find people tell you the 60s was best, or the 70s etc. It's just getting older
Whilst I was skint throughout that period, I was still in my prime, and society around me seemed more optimistic. There was something to aspire to at least. Now the future looks bleak in every direction, despite being better off personally.
Yes you were young and in your prime like you said, of course you'd feel more optimistic then
“Life was better when I was younger” says almost everyone.
People were at different stages in their life so it's hard to say.
OP, I want to understand how you can post so much on Reddit within a year.. and all so political! How is your mental?
The 90s was essentially the 11.30pm point of the house party. We didn’t care about consequences, everyone was having fun, colour was a thing, nobody had responsibilities. Then the naughties and teens kicked in and the inevitable hangover and clearing up our mess is what we’re now left with
Couldn't agree more...it wasn't the best with terrorist attacks and war but...as a teen on the 90s, summers were awesome waking up with only 4 channels and we had plenty to watch. Didn't have the internet till late 90s and even then it felt better, conversations on AOL felt more genuine. Dating was so much easier as well. Better music. If I needed an appointment to see a GP, could often see the same day (this was mostly during when labour were in charge) I have friends I saw regularly, Gaming was great as every game shipped actually worked out the box, none of this 50+ GB updates, when gaming with friends actually meant being together.
Loved the AOL chat rooms. Wasn’t so keen on the phone bill tho.
MSN Messenger was where it was at later on, with all the crazy add-ons
The slaying of Harambe was the harbinger of the end times, everything went downhill fast after that happened in 2016
We're going through a rough patch, but I'm pretty sure people are wrong in a big-picture kind of way: I remember the 90s and 00s pretty well – TV was garbage, I didn't have a smartphone with most of the world's music at my fingertips, travelling internationally was a much bigger deal than it is today (not talking about Spain, but outside of Europe). Making international phonecalls was expensive and guess what, for most of this period, there was no video calls (skype came in the mid-2000s I'd say?). Outside of housing costs, people were on average poorer (google 1990s Ford Fiesta. this was the most common car in the UK.) Racism and homophobia were a lot worse than they are today, and even women were not treated with the respect that they are now. It was hard to get international movies and books, and it was difficult to learn even the basics of a foreign language unless you were quite privileged and could pay for private classes. Also, we forget this because not that many bad terrorist attacks actually happened, but people were quite worried about Islamist terror all the time. The housing crisis is real, and is a real problem that we need to solve, the "cost of living crisis" is short-term inflation + a lack of growth, and we will get out of that too (in my view, largely a result of austerity, though Brexit obviously doesn't help, but I don't want to have that argument right now.)
It’s partly true and partly rose tinted spectacles of people looking back on their youth etc- I garuntee in the 2040s some people will talk about how much better life was back in the 2020s
Prior to mass immigration; who would have thought it....
Policemen were taller ....summers were longer too. And a penny sweet cost half as much and you could buy a house for tuppance ha'penny.
The big dividing line is 2008 and the banking crisis. People were saying at the time that there would be a lasting fall in standard of living
The 90s and early 2000's were the best years of my life. I was born in 1990. I remember the positive feeling for the future pre 9/11 and also pre 2008. Living in London, I was surrounded by countless social schemes I could attend and keep me busy after school, during summer and other times. My single mother was able to work and provide me childcare and other social schemes so she could be at work full time. She was able to buy a house on her own and I had a great childhood. Kids dont even have access to HALF of what I had access to growing up. All the social programs and activities during summer time to keep us busy. It was the fringes that used to get into gangs, now we are seeing the results of not providing anything for the younger generations. More and more kids get involved with gangs purely due to not having things to keep them busy. Even 2 parent households struggling to give their kids the attention they need due to being under extreme economic pressure. Man we have lost so much in this country in terms of services in the last 15-20 years.
The crash of 2008 killed it. Been shite ever since.
Pre 2008 for me. I heard someone refer to the 90s-2008 as the long nineties and it really hit home. Then there's a jump to 2016 and then 2020. We've had to adapt just to stay sane, but that isn't helped by the fact that all my friends live abroad or up north. Out of a huge friendship group there's only 1 couple left anywhere near us.
[Whatever could have changed, what could have caused this? I guess we'll never know.](https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/migration-statistics-over-time)
Life was better before: - the housing crisis. We did nothing to invest in a house building programme - we were part of the EU - the Internet didn't perpetuate societal division - people were allowed to express themselves freely regardless of their opinions and to be offended if others disagreed - political correctness became almost puritanical and devoid of common sense - Tony Blair magnified the lack of trust in our politics - we imported foreign cultures, religions and problems not compatible with what went before and were then surprised when these people refused to change.
I totally agree, life was better when I was 20-30 years younger. Ask me the same question again in another 20-30 answers and I'll give the same answer again
Well duh one night out now bankrupts you and is shite, let alone having to live with your parents.
In the late nineties a night out in Birmingham would cost less than £50. I could get a taxi into the city for around a tenner, find bars that did 3 bottles for £5 deals or BOGOF vodka redbulls, or get pints for £2 or less. You could get smashed on £20-£30. Now it's £100 minimum, probably more like £150 for the same night out. Just one example of how life was better.
2 libraries 3 youths clubs, a boxing gym, swimming baths and an indoor football facility have all gone in my area in the last 2 years
But on the flip side, numerous conservative doners and family members have got life-changingly rich, and isn't that the most important thing.
And it'll likely never be as good as it is today. Express elevator to hell: going down.
It’s fascinating how simplistic people’s thinking is. Tories hurr durr. As if the balls weren’t set in motion by prior governments (both red and blue). The issue isn’t so much our current conservative government. It’s the huge infestation of corporatism into every corner of life. Profit line gotta go up. Lobbying expenditure is insurmountable. Governments can’t enact anything that actually improves things for the electorate because they’re all bought and paid for, either directly or by promises of post-politics positions. It’s broken. Not Torysim per se, but corporatism (not even capitalism, that’s too simplistic as well).
I lived through both and can categorically say it wasn't! People are so predictable.