to think that modern life is utter shite

[OfCourse]

EVERYTHING is expensive; food, cars, houses, utilities, travel for work and the service is crap.

ANY GOVERNMENT PROVIDED SERVICE IS FUCKED; education, NHS, social welfare, police.

None of the above are in any particular order. Is it me? Am I just having a bad day?

SELL ME MODERN LIFE

Actually TheLovelyBoots has the winning argument. Modern life really is utter shite!

I love contactless payment! One of the great bits of modern life!

Modern life has its disadvantages but who would want to go back to living say in the 1500s?

We have modern medicine! We don't have to die from minor infections or from childbirth! You don't have to go to the barber to have surgery with a swig of whiskey for anaesthesia.

Women and minorities are treated much much better!
We aren't someone's property to be abused and have to just shut up about it.

Modern sanitation! We can use a toilet and the results go to a mysterious place. :) People aren't pooping in the streets and spreading diseases.

Education! We learn to read and write.

Travel! We can ride in a comfortable car or plane and go pretty much anywhere.

Heating and cooling. Our homes have heating and cooling. We don't have to freeze to death.

Lots of fun things to do. With the internet, you can learn to knit, bake something new, play an instrument, or just about anything.

YABU try spending a little more time counting your blessing and a little less time whining and you might find life less crap.

YAB very U and needlessly negative. We have it rather good these days.

modern life is a vast improvement on the past, I look forward to the future

Although fresh water shrimps in the bath did delight me as a child.

It is baffling though, that remote working hasn't enabled more people to live more, well, remotely.

YABVU.

Motherinferior .......I really don't see it as demeaning to cook for the family. It doesn't matter if it's the man or the woman, whoever is at home surely. Now it seems that a lot of women are having to do both. Tbh I think a lot of women would absolutely love the luxury of being able to stay home and enjoy their babies instead of having to rush round dropping kids in childcare, going to work, shopping on the way home, making tea, homework with the kids, bath time, bit of housework, then fall into bed knackered. All this just to get by and pay the bills. Years ago she didn't have to do all that, was that such a bad thing?

There are all sorts of examples of how modern life hasn't developed the way we hoped/thought.

My company had a large % of it's workforce working remotely in the late 1990s but it really didn't work. Mostly because those people were miserable. It turns out going out to work (rather than staying home to work) dealing with the commute, seeing our colleagues, moaning about the air-conditioning is actually pretty good for us.

Pistone. I don't think that has changed actually. My mum was a SAHM, we had one car, no holidays, never ate out, very few clothes, hobbies and children's activities involved working in the garden/cooking or making things out of scavenged materials etc. That was all fine at the time because it was the way all our friends lived.

Now, many of the people who claim they "need" both parents working really mean, they both need to work to pay for the music lessons, foreign holidays, adrenaline fueled sports, multiple cars/takeaways/weekend breaks /coffee shop visits that have almost become necessaries.

Remembering the life my grandparents lived, the life my parents lived when I was a child and thinking of life now modern life is full of things they couldn't possibly have imagined.
Grandparents lived through the first world war. Many women who lost their 'sweethearts' and weren't able to marry because there weren't enough men.
They then lived through the second world war, as did my parents. Rationing didn't end completely until after I was born.
People with special needs being shut away in schools for the 'backward' or for schools for people with behaviour problems. Mental hospitals where girls were sent as degenerates because they had babies out of wedlock.
No washing machines so wash day Monday could mean all day at the sink or the copper.
My grandfather cycling 26 miles a day in hope of casual work because there were no benefits to fall back on and sometimes finding all the places had gone so he had to cycle back again without even earning any money.
My grandmother boiling up bones because they couldn't afford meat.
My other grandmother joining Women's Suffrage because women didn't have the vote.
DH and I struggling to feed our two children and going to the shops every day in the seventies and finding the prices had gone up.
Every generation has its ills but things we take for granted now, such as the NHS, State schooling, cars, washing machines, even televisions, were things that previous generations within my lifetime couldn't have imagined.

That was my whole point to highlight that my generation didn't have to pay for uni at all and it was there for anybody regardless of their background to take advantage of. That has now been somewhat closed off for working class kids like I was back in the 90's, thereby reducing social mobility. Whether you took advantage of it or not the point was that free higher education existed unlike today.

Obviously there are other factors at play, but in my day uni was more accessible for working class kids to get to because there wasn't £9000 a year in fees plus loans to pay back once you got a graduate job. Factor in these debts with also trying to save for a deposit on your first property that imo this generation seems to be having it harder than others.

You have perspective issues. I suggest you read a newspaper other than the dm to understand the shit most of the world live in.

My great grandmother wouldn't recognise my life.
We are unbelievably lucky.
Free healthcare and education for all.
Electricity and all the labour saving devices that brings.
As a woman I can vote, go to university, have any career I choose.
I own my own property and my husband is exceed to help me out with all aspects of domestic life.
If things go wrong then the welfare state provides a safety net.
Is it a perfect system? No, but it's a damn sight better than the workhouse.
Are things relatively much more expensive than they were 100 years ago. I doubt it.
As others have said I think as a country we've come to expect everything to be handed to us. And that if there is a problem it can just magically be fixed by moaning about it.
I know that many people have it much tougher than others but I don't believe for a second that life would be a whole load better if we turned back the clock 100 years.
My grandmother grew up in a house with no indoor plumbing or electricity. The washing was done weekly with nothing more than a range and a dolly tub.
She worked from sun up to sun down, any 'spare' time was spent making things to sell to boost the families income.
I'm very grateful for most of what modern life has given to me.

Obviously there are other factors at play, but in my day uni was more accessible for working class kids

So why are more working class kids (measured however you want, absolute numbers, percentage of cohort, percentage of group) going now than at any time in the past?

My company had a large % of it's workforce working remotely in the late 1990s but it really didn't work. Mostly because those people were miserable. It turns out going out to work (rather than staying home to work) dealing with the commute, seeing our colleagues, moaning about the air-conditioning is actually pretty good for us.

Ah but we have MN now

privatejourney I don't doubt that you will have friends who need a large income to pay for all the music lessons etc! but the reality for loads of people is different....2 incomes just to pay the bills, no holidays, no luxurys, just literally living day to day. Two people on national minimum wage....nothing left for any luxurys.

The past may seem rosy, but it is easy enough to look at parts of the world that dont have any of those government services to be reminded just how crappy it was, and still is. They may have failures, and of course they cost money, but overall, they keep us safe and healthy enough to bitch and moan sometimes.

Pistone, you're totally missing my point which is that you're assuming women are doing both. I like living in a society that (a) makes it possible for me to work (b) doesn't expect me to be the person putting tea on the table or rushing round with a hoover, what with having a fully functioning partner (who happens to be male).

And no, actually, I didn't want to 'stay home and enjoy my babies' and I wish my mother had had more support to go and work outside the home in the 1960s.

Ok Pistone I give you 2 people on NMW won't have much left for luxuries but in the 1950s/60s/70s no-one doing that kind of work (work that now pays NMW) was supporting a family easily on one income either.

The fact that you are complaining so much about the imperfections of things in your OP, shows how blessed we are in modern life. We have so much, that you can be annoyed by it not being perfect.

Modern life in Syria etc.? Yes, that really is worth complaining about.

Modern life us great.
Not brilliant, it could always be better.
But healthcare is free and accessible.
Education is free and co-ed. Parts of the world have education open only to boys or those that can afford uniforms and fees.
You can talk to any friend, anywhere, courtesy of an iPhone (FaceTime), email, text, phone, or Skype.
You can research anything instantly via the Internet.
Everything has an off switch (laptop, computers, tv, phones).
There are parks and woodland all over for long walks to clear your head.
You don't have to be outside at 5:30am in the wind and rain feeding animals, milking cows, collecting eggs etc because someone else chooses to do this as a living rather than everyone having their own little patch (it's not my idea of fun having farm animals).
You don't have to shiver trying to light a solid fuel fire first thing on a cold morning. We pop the heating on then get the fire going.

There's lots that's crap but I'd rather live now than at any other point in history.

Modern life isn't shite per se, but aspects of our culture make it so. In the 60's/70s people gained the freedom to air their views, satire was on TV, the Establishment could be mocked - fantastic. But over the years, a breakdown of class structure (good - people can move on based on merit rather than being restricted by where they were born) has led to a cheap culture of the lowest common denominator. I would hate to go back to a world where we stigmatised those who were genuinely hard up (I remember my mum working so hard to avoid me having to have the free school meals I was entitled to as she wouldn't "demean herself" to handouts) BUT without wanting to sound like a Daily-Mail-reading-UKIP-supporter there are SOME people in a culture of "if it's on offer we'll take it and stuff the rest of you". Our children are growing up thinking that the TOWIE/Geordie Shore bimbos and himbos are celebrities, and whatever people may say about the Brian Cox science-is-cool ideas, it'll take a lot to shift the notion that you can be famous for being cute and stupid.

And the freedom to poke funk at the Establishment and question decisions has led to a general lack of respect for genuine authority.

I'm turning into my mother...

YABU

Go and live in Africa for a year or so. Let me tell you, we are very very lucky to live in the UK.