Things you are so pleased that they happened in your lifetime

[MrsGrindah]

Just heard a woman make reference to “ her wife” and it struck me how pleased I am to be able to experience gay marriage becoming a reality.
Other things I am glad I’ve lived through are:
The internet! And all that goes with it eg Skype Alexa etc. If you’d have told me as a child that we would be living like this I wouldn’t have believed it.
Changes in medical science..things like IVF , transplants etc.
The Berlin Wall coming dow

I’m not just glad these things happened, I’m glad I could witness them. What are yours ( no matter how trivial!)

@Cakemonger beat me to it! I cried during his inauguration speech.

90s rave scene

@LookCloser I was a uni and woke up on my birthday to the sounds of the speech coming in from my housemate's room and knew he'd won. It was wonderful

The para-olympics 2012 (or power olympics) as my kids thought it was called. God they loved it.

Watchin Mo Farrah win the double.
Central heating.
Rape within marriage becoming law.
Gay weddings and general reduction in homophobia (still a way to go).
Men being more hands on Dad's (still a way to go for some)
The national living wage (not High enough but still).
Dancing in a field til dawn in the 90s

New Years Eve 1999-party time!

Recall the feeling of knowing that a turn of a millennium won't happen for another thousand years. Vast!!

Disabled children and adults being widely able to live in the community with their families. When I was growing up we had a residential convent school near us where disabled children were sent away to live. I would hate for my own DS to have needed to be sent away to live just because of his disability.

All the medical advances - dgrandma had Parlinsons when there was little that could be done, in the /0 years since she passed research has meant a different life for anyone diagnosed to what she had.
And ‘test tube’ babies, heart and lung transplants, MRI scans and the advancements in cancer research, heart disease........just wish more could be found out and help given for dementia

20 years

Another one: cancer is more and more becoming just another disease. Survival times keep improving, some are curable. A friend has had both NHL and testicular cancer, and he'll probably outlive me.

IVF

Health and safety generally- safer car and road design, and the change in social behaviour such that you just wear your seat belt and don't drink drive and you are not considered pathetic or uptight. Smoking ban in pubs etc and awareness of passive smoking danger to other people. Good H+S in the workplace so industrial illness or accidents aren't considered "just one of those things".

I am also very happy about gay marriage. My 62 yo brother is gay and in our life time it’s gone from being his horribly guilty secret (Irish Catholics so a lot of shame and stigma around homosexuality in our youth), to him gradually coming out to a selected few to entering a long term relationship to now being happily married to his partner of 25 years. His husbands family and ours are now one big extended family group and there is so much mutual love and affection. That was unimaginable when we were teenagers.

I was also thrilled when Meghan Markie married into the royal family. We seemed to come a long way from the days of “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’. Sadly that doesn’t seem to be going very well atm but I am hopeful for the future.

On a much more trivial level, I live in a house with multiple toilets and en-suite bathrooms. When I was growing up we had an outside loo and we got to bath in shared water once a week. I am eternally grateful for the day to day luxuries of instant hot water, powerful showers, heated towel rails and no spiders!

The pill, women's liberation, equal pay, equal legal rights in the U.K.
National Trust and National Parks doing what they do today. Improvements to health and housing. Britain in the EU.

Trade Union -led workers' rights. The internet, some of it.

End of WW2 (I was born in 1945)
NHS
More than one black and white TV channel
Collapse of Berlin Wall
Central heating (as a child, in the winter I would scrape ice off the inside of my bedroom window)
Computers

And looking forward -
Brexit

Shallow one from me: smartphones. If you had told me as a child I would one day have a phone about the size of half a pack of playing cards that I could run my life from I'd have thought you were mad.

Legal, widely-available contraception and abortion.
A lot of the last 40ish years of Irish literature.
Every hard-fought advance in women's rights, although those are in considerable danger at the moment.

This is a hard one for me because I feel I was born out of my time and should have been born much earlier. Consequently, most modern inventions I feel I could happily live without.

I am glad of all modern medicines, treatments and surgical practices.

Other than that, I can only think of sticky toffee pudding.

Definitely legalised same sex marriage .

The end of apartheid.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain.
Fantastic advances in medicine, especially in cancer treatment.

The Millennium. Felt quite privileged to be alive for that.

Computers and the internet.

When I was very little computers were the size of a room. Then we had the likes of the ZX Spectrum where being able to type in basic programs.
Now I have many times the computing power in my pocket and access to all the worlds knowledge through the internet.

I’m so glad I knew what life was like before the internet.

I think we are very fortunate now, internet is the best and worst thing in the world. But we do have so much convenience now, maybe we will pay for it in the future though. But I think life must have been really hard for many people years ago and it still is in some corners. It is easy to take things for granted but we have so much now that makes life great for us