AIBU to think lifestyle expectations and spending habits have risen enormously?

this speaks volumes about you then doesn’t it.

Are you vegan?

Me and the entire lobster enjoying world yes.

Yes

I think meat in all its forms is pretty awful, I can’t see how a hierarchy of suffering can be drawn. You kill and eat animals. I am not a vegetarian, just a realist.

No.

It’s costing me 3k to replace my boiler and move it out of a bedroom.

My coffee machine was £10 on Facebook marketplace!

I’m trying to think of the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought now, bar my house (which is small). My last car was £5k!

And our household income isn’t measly, it’s 95k and we live in the north west. I know lots of people have lots more money, but some people with less live much more “luxuriously”!

Interesting. It does seem then like you move in fairly well off circles, then.

But I know what you mean about luxury becoming a sort of norm.

I think we redecorated our house once when I was growing up, and it seemed quite frivolous to me. We had camping holidays, our grandparents old sofas, and I had a single mattress that had certainly been around since the 70s!

I’m now 37 and I see what you’re talking about happening around me, but it’s not in my immediate social circle, where people are modest and unpretentious: they make do and mend, buy secondhand, holiday cheaply, grow things, and would never spend 3k on a coffee machine!!! I’m sure such people can be very down to earth and pleasant - I’ve known some extremely wealthy and very lovely people - but it is quite shocking!

I’m about 7 years older than you and grew up about an hour from London.

I used to eat out. I holidayed abroad at least once a year.
i knew what a cappuccino was (didn’t have one until after uni!)
and we had a TV that didn’t only have signal to broadcast to at set points in the day as you had.

Your childhood in very rural Scotland in the late 80s/90s was not what most Uk kids were experiencing growing up during the 90s

That will teach me to read the thread before posting 🙄

Maybe I just live poor but I’m not unusual among my friends in our expensive London houses.

We all get our furniture second hand or free online or charity shops. Clothes from Vinted. We still have the TV that was in my husbands teenage bedroom (we are 31), we have no car, we take coffee and lunch to work with us, I make everything at home from bread to meals to cakes to jam. We do have a nice coffee machine but it was £300 7 years ago. I grow my own food (some anyway) and flowers. I walk or take the bus most places including for the food shop (Aldi). When something breaks I open it up and fix it usually - I just google the most common issues and give it a go as I don’t want to pay £100+ for a call out. Just fixed my oven that way - £10.80 for a new heating element. I’ve had my phone 5 years. My laptop 9.

We do all this because all of our money goes on private medical expenses (currently £1300 a month) because the NHS is so fucked it was going to leave DH to rot. But most of my friends live like this anyway bar the scratch baking and food growing which are my personal hobbies.

So I don’t think everyone has such an inflated lifestyle. I think you just don’t see when someone buys a couch from Facebook Marketplace vs new or paints their house themselves or makes their own focaccia.

If you can afford a £1mil house you can afford new cars + kitchens.

Typically its family money. Very few jobs pay that much.

How are your friends able to afford this much, especially as you say they're not all very high earners?

What area of Italy was this? Southern Italy is still poorer than north, for one thing- were you in the south or north?

Perhaps it depends on where you live, who you socialise with, and what you see on social media, OP. I am a few years younger than you, and live in a very different world!

Admittedly it's a small survey, but where I live and work, I don't think anyone has a brand-new car (21 plates are probably the latest). Most people that I know seem to go on one holiday abroad per year at most; others just go to a caravan or campsite in the UK for a long weekend, if they can get the time off. Alcohol isn't a big thing, and OK, we might spend £3k+ on livestock, tractors and trailers, but you'd get laughed at for paying that for just a coffee machine! Our clothes and farm boots are expensive, but they're of sturdy brands that will last, and are comfortable to wear all day- and sometimes, those are the kind of things that we get and give for Christmas.

It is quite normal to buy big purchases (like cars) on finance, and a lot of people seem to have a small amount of debt. Keeping up with the Jones' is still a thing, and clearly, the goalposts keep changing, so people want more. Expectations are higher, and people want more for their money. There are so many more choices and varieties of things these days, more of an emphasis on looking 'nice' in some areas (judging by the amount of hair and nail places on high streets), and so on.

Yes, I'm rural. Welcome to the countryside, where we wonder how we will manage to afford to buy lamb meat, when we have live ones running around in the fields around us!

I agree that life- and expectations- in other areas is vastly different. My trip through a major UK airport earlier this year was very much a "fish out of water" experience. I recently spent a rare long weekend where I grew up (non-farming world), and the business and traffic seemed like organised chaos. Even my mother said, "You're probably not used to this, that's why... and do you even have any traffic lights in <nearest town>? I don't remember seeing any when we've visited you!" I couldn't wait to come home.

Hopefully, your friends will enjoy their steak in red wine, and the coffee machine... and that you find some small pockets of simplicity in your city!