Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. Child-safe in minutes.

Meet the Other Phone.
Child-safe in minutes.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Chat

Join the discussion and chat with other Mumsnetters about everyday life, relationships and parenting.

Original poster

Is anyone else just finding it's all too much lately? Everything seems to be becoming so unstable.

62 replies

GrogusMam · 19/02/2022 13:05

I've always had anxiety, so maybe it's that playing up but it just feel like the whole world is starting to crumble.

The price of living. Basic shopping. Everything is so expensive. Covid still hanging over us. Everything and everyone seems unsettled and on the edge of... something. I don't know how to explain it.

It feels like I felt the UK today was too progressive for us to be in such an awful place but it's all just been a false sense of security

OP posts:
Original poster
GrogusMam · 19/02/2022 13:07

Like we all think events like WW2 and famines are just in the history books. Like we are too evolved now for that to happen again because we have the Internet and technology but it's not true. It would take so little for things to get bad real fast, especially with a government who only care for their own

OP posts:
Glisil · 19/02/2022 13:12

It strikes me that our way life is completely unsustainable and we need to adjust our expectations massively sooner rather than later.
Climate change and it’s effects are going to be catastrophic to millions of people and their way of life. So best get used to it.

duvetdayforeveryone · 19/02/2022 13:14

I feel like we are living in a (GCSE equivalent) history exam from the 2100s. The syllabus will include Brexit, the pandemic, and WW3.

Such as:
Q: What product ran out in March 2020 at the beginning of the first lockdown during the early stages of the pandemic:
a) Paracetamol
b) Chicken
c) Toilet paper

BarrowInFurnessRailwayStation · 19/02/2022 13:27

@duvetdayforeveryone 😆😆😆

CourtRand · 19/02/2022 15:16

I think there are ebbs and flows of conflict and hardship in any humans life.

The Falklands, Miners strike, 9/11, the war in Iraq, the 2008 recession, Ebola, SARS, COVID...

Every 20 years or so things get bad and then we claw our way out of it and everything is peaceful for a while and then another thing happens that causes mass fear/ increase of costs etc. and then we grow out of it again and adapt.

Such is life... we will be ok. Just need to try and be climate conscious so that bad natural events don't start coming too often to recover from.

Oldtiredfedup · 19/02/2022 15:18

Yup. Ivd been struggling since Christmas. I just want to spend several weeks in a remote log cabin

TheSweetestHalleluja · 19/02/2022 15:23

It has definitely been a stressful time and full of uncertainty. I suffer with anxiety too and I think that makes it all feel a lot more stressful, worrying about things that may or may not happen. You're not alone OP.
I wonder how much prolonged stress and worry we can cope with, I think a lot of people will be struggling with their mental health as a result of going from one crisis to the next.

duvetdayforeveryone · 19/02/2022 15:27

@Oldtiredfedup

Yup. Ivd been struggling since Christmas. I just want to spend several weeks in a remote log cabin
@Oldtiredfedup
Kazzyhoward · 19/02/2022 15:28

The media are guilty of hyping up all the bad news and never mentioning the good anymore. TV news always used to end on a good new/humourous point so it was a lot more balanced.

CitrusPocket · 19/02/2022 15:33

Yes I feel like this too OP. I never used to be bothered by watching the news or worry about the future but I do now and I can’t get away from it. Basic food is more expensive, heating your home is so expensive, I live with a CEV person so Covid hasn’t just gone away yet. Storm damage a couple of months back. Now more. Potential war breaking out. I can’t switch off though I really need to.

EatSleepRantRepeat · 19/02/2022 15:36

@Kazzyhoward

The media are guilty of hyping up all the bad news and never mentioning the good anymore. TV news always used to end on a good new/humourous point so it was a lot more balanced.
I agree with this too - the press are on a concerted effort to get Johnson out and are fuelling the doom and gloom. They're going to hype us into a war that no-one wants, just like they hyped us into empty supermarkets and forecourts when they decided shortages were going to happen.
spleencoffin · 19/02/2022 15:42

And yet it's one of the best times to live in many ways

Cherrysherbet · 19/02/2022 15:43

I’m glad we live here and not in Ukraine right now….

gracedentssketty · 19/02/2022 15:44

Yep. And worry for my kids’ futures.

BestKnitterInScotland · 19/02/2022 15:54

@CourtRand

I think there are ebbs and flows of conflict and hardship in any humans life.

The Falklands, Miners strike, 9/11, the war in Iraq, the 2008 recession, Ebola, SARS, COVID...

Every 20 years or so things get bad and then we claw our way out of it and everything is peaceful for a while and then another thing happens that causes mass fear/ increase of costs etc. and then we grow out of it again and adapt.

Such is life... we will be ok. Just need to try and be climate conscious so that bad natural events don't start coming too often to recover from.

So much this.

How old are you OP? I am old enough to have been starting secondary school in the early 80s and it was all imminent nuclear war, "99 Red Balloons" in the charts and "When the Wind Blows" as a set text reader for 13 year olds. Yet people fondly look back at the 80s as an amazing time to be a teenager.

ArseInTheCoOpWindow · 19/02/2022 16:12

*I think there are ebbs and flows of conflict and hardship in any humans life.

The Falklands, Miners strike, 9/11, the war in Iraq, the 2008 recession, Ebola, SARS, COVID...

Every 20 years or so things get bad and then we claw our way out of it and everything is peaceful for a while and then another thing happens that causes mass fear/ increase of costs etc. and then we grow out of it again and adapt*

I agree, but l can’t remember a period as bad as this since the Cold War. Late 70’s/early 80’s.

That’s 40 odd years ago, not 20! In fact l think this is worse. As bad as WW2

EatSleepRantRepeat · 19/02/2022 16:38

In fact l think this is worse. As bad as WW2

I think you may need to think about that one a bit more... our partners haven't been sent away for 5 years to a foreign war front, our kids haven't been evacuated to strangers in the countryside who will abuse them or use them for free labour. Thousands of people per night aren't sleeping in bomb shelters and losing everything but the clothes on their back.

For the vast majority of people in the UK we have shelter, food and access to warm places - we're not expecting a v1 bomb to drop out of the sky and blow us to bits.

EatSleepRantRepeat · 19/02/2022 16:44

I read this recently and it's fascinating - fewer people died overall from bomb raids that I expected, but the sheer amount of day to day inconveniences and uncertainties would finish a lot of us off these days. Even rationing didn't guarantee a food supply - if you finished your shift in a munition factory and were at the back of thr queue for the grocers, they still ran out of a lot of foodstuffs and you couldn't just swap an egg ticket for more butter (for example).

www.penguin.co.uk/books/109/1098105/the-battle-of-london-1939-45/9781847923011.html

Abra1d1 · 19/02/2022 16:52

And if you’d been in an air-raid shelter and went home in the morning to get ready for work you could well find the water mains had been turned off or blown and there was no way of heating it up even if you’d saved some or it was working.

And you wouldn’t have much soap to wash in, either, as that was rationed. So off to work with little comfort.

ParsleySageRosemary · 19/02/2022 17:09

@CourtRand

I think there are ebbs and flows of conflict and hardship in any humans life.

The Falklands, Miners strike, 9/11, the war in Iraq, the 2008 recession, Ebola, SARS, COVID...

Every 20 years or so things get bad and then we claw our way out of it and everything is peaceful for a while and then another thing happens that causes mass fear/ increase of costs etc. and then we grow out of it again and adapt.

Such is life... we will be ok. Just need to try and be climate conscious so that bad natural events don't start coming too often to recover from.

Ha ha ha. For most of us things have been steadily getting worse since the 80s events you mention.

When did the mining towns get any serious employment opportunities to match? Where did all the manufacturing from that time go?

Remember all the privatisations that steadily removed social infrastructure? Remember the insistence on services being centralised, effectively removed, and it becoming users’ responsibilities to somehow pay to access them? Transport, communications, healthcare all gone? Remember real living options being removed and replaced with choicey-choice propaganda? Remember buy-to-let bring intrpduced? Remember tuition fees being introduced and going up and up ever since so no one can train? Remember wages and working conditions going down while requirements for qualifications and skills in jobs go up? Remember inequality going up and up?

You might have been able to accept the lies and think things were rosy, but the consequences of all that is now coming home to roost. You refused to listen to the then-young and working classes when we needed you to. Now there’s no one left to listen to you, did you think the super-rich cared?

ArseInTheCoOpWindow · 19/02/2022 17:11

I meant, it was the second worse thing after WW2!

Lightning020 · 19/02/2022 17:37

Best do a 'media detox' for a couple of weeks. I think February is the worst month of the year in England. The weather and the dark get to us and the pandemic and the cost of living are big concerns. I am not going to watch the news until March.

JesusInTheCabbageVan · 19/02/2022 17:38

@duvetdayforeveryone

I feel like we are living in a (GCSE equivalent) history exam from the 2100s. The syllabus will include Brexit, the pandemic, and WW3.

Such as:
Q: What product ran out in March 2020 at the beginning of the first lockdown during the early stages of the pandemic:
a) Paracetamol
b) Chicken
c) Toilet paper

Actually it was a) AND c) (misses point of thread entirely)
Laiste · 19/02/2022 17:47

I feel like everything we are familiar with is like a fragile tower. We've always known this of course. We all know we live in bubble, artificially comfortable with pretty much zero ability to survive if society 'collapsed'.

Last couple of years we've really been shown how once one thing goes tits up the knock on effect is fast and goes in weird directions that the average person couldn't foresee.

It is unsettling to have seen it happen even if it was on a small scale for you personally.

Armadeus · 19/02/2022 17:51

@EatSleepRantRepeat the press are entirely justified in getting that useless oaf out, sooner the better.