Are we going to have to adopt the way our grandparents etc lived?

[heartbroken22]

Give me a tip you learnt from your grandparents.

A lot of people nowadays have a bit of a skewed view of "how it used to be" stay at home mum, one wage coming in etc. Unless you had a very well paid job, a one wage household was not the utopia people imagine. We were always skint but luckily my mum was a talented seamstress who could take in work to earn extra money. If she hadn't been able to that we would have been up shit creek

Love within your means ...cheerfully. Decide what are your wants and what are your needs ...and keep a firm self discipline regarding what you spend on your wants.
Save for a rainy day.

Don't know what he would make of today's issues though. He was born in 1902. Saw 2 world wars .Served in one but I never saw him worrying about heating or eating 🤔 of course heating was one coal fire in the living room. Looks like we are going back to maybe heating one room at a time. 😱😭

Live within your means ...never heard anything about his love life 🤣🤣🤣

When the air raid sirens go off and the bombs start dropping make your way to the shelter.

Have your babies at home with no pain relief because you can’t afford the maternity home.

Be prepared to give up work and stay at home to raise your children because there’s no such thing as widespread reliable childcare.

Etc.

Oh yeah, and spend many hours knitting jumpers so your family can wear them in your freezing homes.

Wouldn't boiling knickers ruin the elastic pretty quickly?

Reading this just clarifies to me that some people have no understanding of the difference between want and need, luxury and necessity.

Putting heating one room and holidaying in the uk on the same level as pain relief in childbirth, air raids and dying of childhood illnesses is trivialising the situation.

Some people's situation will be improved by learning old fashioned ways of coping.
Heating the people not the room is perfectly reasonable, not a desperate hardship.

Some of this is needed for eco reasons, not just cost saving. We can't keep consuming at recent rates.

Hmm my paternal GM was one of 13 of which several died in infancy and maternal GM's mum couldn't afford to keep any of her 5 kids so they were all in and out of children's homes.
I very much hope we don't go back to living like that!
It's all very well making soup and filling hot water bottles but there are basics that everyone needs. A warm well insulated house is one of them.

My grandparents moved into a newly built council house the month after they were married. One year they decided that instead of going on holiday abroad with their friends that year they'd go on a uk holiday and put the saved holiday money down as a house deposit. After buying and selling a couple of times they'd paid the mortgage off in their 40's. They grew fresh fruit and veg in their massive garden. They both retired in their late 50's. They are still alive and well in their 90's and regularly lend their grandchildren money to pay for food and bills. They are so confused why all the grandchildren have 'chosen' not to get on the property ladder but also haven't got a council house. Why do we keep wasting so much money on rent? I'm not sure I can learn anything from them except try and be born in a better era.

Not to mention kids leaving school as soon as legal to contribute to the family income. The younger kids got a much better ride than the older ones.

My grandparents were adults before WW1 and basically had an Edwardian mindset. My grandmother accepted wartime measures like rationing as a necessary evil but slapping half a pound of butter in a cake and meat focused meals always came more naturally to her. However, actually wasting food was regarded as sacrilegious.

The wage earner (usually a man) was prioritised in a way we would consider strange but was actually about survival; they are not fed enough to function or get ill, everyone goes under. The workhouse cast a long and enduring shadow even over families who were always lucky enough to evade it.

Always use the full tea set for afternoon tea. Why buy a lovely shiny metal trolley if you aren't going to use it on the daily for a full afternoon tea?

Always shut the door behind you.

Always have something nice to give guests in, biscuits, hard sweets etc.

Always let people know when they've gained weight. Oh I miss my Grandma, I wish she could tell me how healthy I was looking with all that extra weight and that I'd save on the heating now 🤣

Just tell your relatives they are getting ‘porky’ so they eat smaller portions and thus save money. Or maybe that’s just my Nan 😬🤣

Nobody said they were on the same level, did they? It's you lacking in understanding.

Slightly off topic but could anybody recommend an electricity power generator to use to run a low power electric heater all night?

No, it’s not trivialising anything. Putting on an extra jumper, reducing the amount of goods you buy or turning down the heating is perfectly sensible - but if you want to talk about things that our grandparents had to do then you absolutely need to look at the wider picture. My grandparents were born at the start of the 20th century. They lived through times that I hope we never had to see - my mum’s parents both died in their late eighties and were delighted at the progress that had been made and they loved their few holidays abroad (when they were finally able to afford them after raising their five children on one small salary). My dad’s parents worked in the mills when they left school at 14 - a step up from the mines their fathers worked in when they left school. All this whimsical talk of the good old days with the jumpers, pots of soup and singsongs round the piano of our grandparents is what trivialises the hardships that our grandparents lived through. The fact that we appear to be going backwards with one of the worst Govts in memory at the helm is appalling.

A dishwasher is supposed to be more economical if you use it full.

Do you mean stop being materialistic, renting a car etc?

Pearls of wisdom I gleaned from my Granny:-

"Always tuck your vests into your knickers to keep your kidneys warm"

"Never swap from long-sleeved vests to short-sleeved vests until 1st June"

"Never go out without a petticoat on"

"Never put a milk bottle on the table"

"If life is getting you down, read your hymn book - you will always find comfort and inspiration in hymns"

She also once told me that during the war, if you had a tin of ham and a tin of pineapple, you could celebrate Christmas - I doubt many people would agree with this nowadays!!!

My grandfather held down 3 jobs (day job, evening job, Saturday job) to make ends meet. Grandmother too unwell to work.

Neither of them drove so no car expenses. Stuff in their house didn't match ( eg carpet, curtains) - just had what they could get and rarely got new things.

we have as a society hit the peak of excess and wastage. We cannot sustain this level of living and luxury for much longer, especially as previously 3rd world countries also want the same standard of living - fast fashion, cars, electric power, non-seasonal food etc.

During history great empires have fallen and i am beginning to suspect that like us they hit the peak of excess and could no longer sustain that lifestyle so their society imploded!

Its not about going back to how our grandparents/great grandparents lived with all the bad things too but more about thinking about our impact on the world, reducing wastage (not just of tangible things like food and clothes but wastage of power and space etc). If we dont we will soon be living much further back in history eg no power at all!

Paper in your shoes when the soles wear through ?

Not seeing a doctor because you can't afford it and having a lifelong disability as a result ?

In one of the richest counties in the world ?

I do hope not but o do fear so

I agree. This isn’t about living as our grandparents lived, it’s about thinking how we can live more sustainably in a world that has changed massively and moved on from the days of our grandparents.

This screams Daily Mail article.

Run away from your first husband at the age of 28, go to the big city and meet your second husband at a dance.
Be the life and soul of every party.
Take up chewing tobacco in your nineties.
Have six surprisingly uptight children. Shock them repeatedly.

I think the lesson here is that one can live one’s best life without central heating and ready meals.

Clothes and bed linen do not need to be washed as often as people think they do. If they don’t have visible dirt and don’t smell = no need to wash.