Modern life doesn’t work

@sugarandcyanide has absolutely hit the spot.

I'm in the building trade and have a couple of gypsy mates who are respectively a bricky and a groundworker - I think there is much to be admired in your lifestyle, you look after each other, stick together as families, always seem pretty happy and to some extent stick two fingers up to modern officialdom - good for you!

Life has always been a struggle but in different ways. Things that were relentless hard, expensive tasks for our ancestors are easy for us, but they have been replaced by stuff that is hard in a different eay.

This morning I completed some very mundane thing easily, quickly and cheaply - had a hot shower, made some porridge for breakfast, heated my home to an acceptable temperature, washed up and sorted out some minor banking jobs.

A hundred or so years ago all of those things would have been more difficult, time consuming and expensive. Lucky families would have had domestic servants to get up in the cold before dawn to lay the fires, light the stove and heat the water. The rest of us would be doing it ourselves or more likely leaving for work at the crack of dawn after a quick wipe with cold water, a bit of bread and feeling freezing cold.

I work part time at home mortgage free. Left the ratrace years ago. Modest income but worth it

Have you seen the price of housing? How is my 22 year old newly graduated DD meant to buy a house in central London where she has to work right now because of her job role? Many folk don't have control over where they live, expensive houses are not always big houses either in the SE. A high cost lifestyle is now the norm just trying to eat, pay bills and a mortgage.

I totally agree on consumerism though and the constant need / drive to own things, I think social media is very much to blame for fuelling this.

They do!!!! No way can see my washing machine living happy life for 20 years....
Imho it's too much technology in one thimg and lower quality parts.
The more technology stuffed into one thing, the more likely it is to break

Children are a choice

And so many are choosing not to have them which makes certain public services unaffordable.

One of the reasons humans have been so successful as a species, is that we are very adaptable, and have very "plastic" (maleable) brains, especially through infancy and childhood.

Still though, we are SO, SO removed from hunter gatherers (as we've still spent the vast majority of our evolution being), I have to agree with you. We're almost victims of our own success in a way. Capable of surviving, but not necessarily thriving, in the world we have created.

Why not downsize if the home is too big and your children's father is living in a bedsit? The lower outgoings could mean you could work fewer hours allowing some quality time with your children. I'm not suggesting it will be easy but you seem keen for things to change.

As for more people with learning disabilities working in the 20th century than today they were mostly working in servitude and/or exploited toiling for very long hours on a very low wage.

I'm a gypsy and we get so much criticism from others for our traditional lifestyles. We always say we don't want to do anything differently, we are happy with our lifestyle. Then it's people living like the OP who refuse to believe we could be happy and try to convince us we MUST live the "modern way" and "get out of the 1950s". No thanks. I'll keep my single income, nuclear family 100% of the time.

Sounds like hell OP, you have my sympathies, you were sold a lie.

I think a huge part of it is awareness. There have always been loads of poorer people ekeing out an existence, hand to mouth, but they were surrounded by others like them and it was perceived as the norm. Ordinary folk saw the rich from a distance, understood them to be a tiny proportion of people & didn't really know a great deal about how they lived

Social media bombards us constantly with media focussed on the wealthiest minority and we are given a huge amount of detail about a lifestyle few of us can afford.

Switch it off. Get offline, stop following all this crap. You will be happier.

Which jobs involving computers do you think aren't 'tangible'?

Other people in other countries routinely have to spend 50% of their income on food.

But you can’t look at in a vacuum. What are people in other countries spending on housing? childcare? utilities? what are their wages like?

There used to be a big Remploy factory in our town that made electric heaters ,library furniture and school furniture and employed mainly disabled people, it was a fantastic place, all adapted for them.

It was government owned and supplied state schools and libraries.

Sadly gone

Lots of us immigrants started on nmw somewhere in gut of hospitality beast. So we are aware of low wage life. That's what I was describing on personal level. We had good lives😕
Yes, food is cheap in uk but other bills are more than for example where my family lives, let alone DHs.
I remember how often we used eat in nandos 😭

In the 20th Century many women were economically inactive or underemployed and divorce was rare for much of the century unless you were very wealthy. Wealth and class, as now, would have been key to your experiences. However, both my DPs lost a elder sibling in the war and most of us in the UK have not experienced that in our lifetime.

The reality is that completely deregulated capitalism rigs the game so much that it ends up eating itself as entrepreneurship and competition disappear. That's why anti-trust laws were introduced in the US a century ago. Today's reality though is that transnational big corporations (enabled by globalisation) have killed local businesses, communities and bankrupted states (not enough tax intake to maintain services) without offering viable alternatives. AI disruption is the latest iteration of this and will be the nail in the coffin. We are heading for a post-employment (and terrifyingly) post-human world in which we won't be able to justify our economic value anymore while still being trapped in a system that mercilessly rests on economic value. I'm worried for kids and my old age.

I don't have children and still struggle.

Children are a choice.

I find myself humming "rocking the suburbs" from "Over the hedge" as I read these posts.

Thanks for posting this. I've been feeling very despondent about the rat race and not progressing in my career but actually my job is very flexible and allows me to be there after school more days than not. That's something to be valued.

On social care, what happens if you have a joint asset eg house but only one partner needs the care? Do they still force you to sell?

That’s the thing though, I think when parents split there’s an understandable desire to keep things consistent for the kids by either staying in the family home (at crippling cost to the woman) or to buy something as similar as possible. If all you could afford is a 2 bed home then your DD would need to share. It’s not ideal but neither is being down to your last penny.

We’ve been sold this story of what an acceptable life is, from homes to hobbies to clothes even down to how often we do our laundry and we don’t stop to think how sustainable it is until we’re trapped in it. Social media has so much to answer for - the living off grid, lentil weaving life style is no more sustainable (how many of those influencers fund their life style through content creation) than the affluent life styles sold at the other end of the spectrum. It’s all aspirational - but not realistic for most people.

Agreed. Mind you, I also agree (ish) that we had it very, very good in the last decades of the 20th and the first of this century. It spoiled us - collectively, in the UK - and people's expectations of 'normal' are way higher. Much higher than they were in my youth (born 1955) and unimaginable in my parents'.

We can live comfortably with less, and most of us will probably have to remember how to, starting around now.

I've got another gripe, though - things just not damn well working! Appliances genuinely do break down sooner, and the fix is rarely something you can do yourself with some instructions and a screwdriver. New-type appliances like LED lights are fab, but have to go in the bin when they conk out. New cars are computers, Practical Mechanics can't help you there. Systems & processes are rushed into operation with insufficient troubleshooting, they don't join up with the previous & next process, and there are no humans trained to assist with the failures. Let's ignore the robot assistants that are only able to tell you what's already on the goddamn website.

I shall go & calm down now 😬

It is about making the most of the time you are in.

send this to the Prime Minister. Serioulsy, they need to understand, and too many MPs are remote from this struggle.