What are you doing to bring positivity to our increasingly desolate lives?

[UsernameInTheTown]

To counter my recent threads expressing my pure anger and despair over the way life is heading in the UK in 2022, I am trying to do what I can to improve things and safeguard my family and community over the hard times ahead, however futile this may seem

I grow much of my own food as I am lucky enough to have land (an acre, so not a huge amount). I always over plant to share produce and give others the chance to grow their own food.
I am aware that buying the stuff to get growing can be ridiculously expensive, with no guarantee of success. As such, I have set up a seed library, where folk can take what they need or fancy for free, and if they have and spare seeds, can leave them in the library.
I am over planting tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, rhubarb, micro greens, peas, beans, rocket, many herbs and also peonies, bleeding hearts, hollyhocks, dahlias and more. I can lose myself in growing and find it so good for my mental health, so am a bit evangelical about it.
I am adding to our local towns' community orchard stock and giving away surplus plants.
I am also making draft excluders from our old pillows and bedding and will make a few extras.
This is certainly not a "when I was a lad we had one candle and a lump of coal to last us a week" type thread.
Positive and upbeat vibes only please!

I don't feel desolate.

Whatever the failings of our government we do not fear the knock of the secret police on the door in the middle of the night nor arbitrary laws. We do not have civil war. We do not have another state invading us and rolling their tanks over the border into Dover. We are not at the mercy of the horrendous diseases you get in the third world. We don't have mass drought, flooding, earthquakes, famine.

My children are well fed, have an excellent free education with extra activities and excellent free healthcare and lots of nice friends.

We live in a beautiful safe rural area with a lovely garden.

I have benefited from some incredible opportunities in life.

I have a good marriage and many friends.

And I am healthy.

We are so lucky to live in the UK.

@BarrowInFurnessRailwayStation

I crochet small toys and leave them for people to find, same with painted pebbles.

How amazing!! This is such a great thing to do.

Well im getting quite a lot of positivity from giggling at hyperbolic thread titles....

Like other posters my life certainly isn't desolate, it's better than it has been for the last 2 years! I can see all my friends and family again, can travel, my summer is booked full of all the weddings and housewarmings that were postponed during covid, I've got a new job I like and pays more, I started a few new hobbies during lockdown that I like, medication for my anxiety is working brilliantly....life is good and even if it isn't I don't have to look far to see people whose lives are actually "Increasingly desolate" and feel very lucky by comparison.

The media makes it sound as though everyone apart from the 1% is going to be plunged into poverty, but from the majority of threads on MN and my personal experience (with friends and family very far from affluent backgrounds) most people's versions of cutting back will consist of putting a jumper on rather than the heating when it's mildly cold, turning the hot tub off, maybe missing 1 mini break a year or keeping a handset after their contracts expired rather than spending £45 a month on new iphone, limiting food waste because its more expensive...pretty much all of which are actually good things if you care about the environment....

Of course that's not to say I don't care about those who are already struggling and will be forced to choose between heating or eating so I suppose I will be concentrating my efforts on how best to help them rather than bemoaning my own "increasingly desolate" life....

For those of you that practice gratitude or count your blessings- how do you actually do it?

Do you sit down with a notebook or is it in your head? When do you do it? How many blessings?

Get a notebook and write down ten things to be grateful for every night before you go to bed. Write down why you’re grateful too. Another idea is a jar.
Write down on pieces of paper what you’re grateful for and put it in a jar. At the end of the year open the jar and read them all. One thing a day.

@Bumpsadaisie

I don't feel desolate.

Whatever the failings of our government we do not fear the knock of the secret police on the door in the middle of the night nor arbitrary laws. We do not have civil war. We do not have another state invading us and rolling their tanks over the border into Dover. We are not at the mercy of the horrendous diseases you get in the third world. We don't have mass drought, flooding, earthquakes, famine.

My children are well fed, have an excellent free education with extra activities and excellent free healthcare and lots of nice friends.

We live in a beautiful safe rural area with a lovely garden.

I have benefited from some incredible opportunities in life.

I have a good marriage and many friends.

And I am healthy.

We are so lucky to live in the UK.

To be fair a lot of that is specific to you, not U.K. life in general.

I don’t think life is ‘desolate’ here but I think we are becoming increasingly detached from nature and family; tiny gardens, living in flats, moving away from family at 18 and never returning.

@FlipFlops4Me

My life isn't increasingly desolate. My DH survived his stroke and although he's disabled (very) he's still here, we still talk and laugh and both of us agree that our love hasn't been affected one jot by his stroke. I retire in 11 weeks and even though I wfh part time I am very much looking forward to it.

I crochet and sew and plan on making pet blankets for my local animals home. We donate to several charities every month and are happy that we will still be able to do this. Occasionaly I'll use the really good yarn I've got stashed and make gifts for friends and family.

My DH used to be the house cook and we are looking forward to him helping me in small ways in the kitchen; he'll be able to stir things, and cut things if he's very careful. Yes we'll be hard up (very) but that's OK, we don't go out, drink, or smoke and our pleasures are simple. No, life isn't desolate. My fear was DH would die; how could life be desolate when I still have him with me?

I love this. Glad you and your husband still have each other. All the best for your retirement!

@justfiveminutes I agree!
Everyone seems to get shot down on Mumsnet 😞

I'm ignoring everything. It's nice in my bubble

What a crass OP.

Sounds lovely what you do OP, the only thing I'd say is please do not be evangelical about it, as that evangelicalism can add to the misery for a lot of people, as can saying you have an acre to spare when a lot of people are in high rises or small places with no garden whatsoever.

For me I do loads of positive stuff and am luckily a naturally upbeat type of person and I actively avoid negative things.

@SusanBland yes I also get this feeling sometimes.

@Blueeyedgirl21

You lost me an ‘an acre, so not a huge amount’….

Erm to take the post seriously though, I volunteer with Girlguiding. An association which gets roundly slated on here weekly but I give my precious free time to do lots of fun/learning things with girls and no matter how you are feeling about the world, a couple of hours doing an activity with them of an evening or a weekend at a camp makes you feel so happy and upbeat about the world and the future. There are so many gorgeous young people out there with so much potential.

I also get paid to work with (as in my career involves) working with vulnerable teens and young people, many with disabilities I like to think I make a difference in the trajectory of their lives and make their families lives a bit better by my work. Even when they tell me to fuck off and that I’m a dick etc they usually backtrack and it ends up that I’m just a punching bag/sounding board for what they’re going through. I hope that makes their lives easier and they achieve things they thought they couldn’t, in part because of my role 🙂

I absolutely agree about all the excellent young people out there. I only have to look around the university where I work. My niece going into nursing, my nephew volunteering at an animal shelter. There’s so much good in the world.

Ugh I thought this thread was going to be nice. Things do feel increasingly desolate to some of us, no I'm not in financial ruin, I don't live in a war zone but things still feel "bad".

I know how lucky I am, and I really really do appreciate how much worse it can be. But I don't think it's fair to essentially say well you can't feel down because you're not starving to death or being shot at.

Everything feels a bit shit right now, because of Ukraine, cost of living crisis. It can all feel a bit "what's the point" and I think (and please correct me if I am wrong) that's what op is trying to counter?

I note that a couple of posters are nearing retirement, I'm sure I would feel pretty good about that too, but being late 20s I'll probably never get to retire. It does feel quite desolate to think I'll have to work for literally the rest of my life and for what? I'll have nothing to show for it, no enjoyable retirement to look forward to. It's hard!

It's hard to look back on past generations, who yes had their own struggles but managed to buy a house on one income, were actually around to see their own children more than 2 hours a day and actually get to retire. A lot of us won't get that, and prices of everything are massively increasing so yes, I don't think it's unfair to say it does feel a bit desolate actually.

As for what I do to counter it, I came here for ideas. I wish I bloody knew.

I choose not to see my life as "increasingly desolate". That helps.

It's hard to look back on past generations, who yes had their own struggles but managed to buy a house on one income, were actually around to see their own children more than 2 hours a day and actually get to retire. A lot of us won't get that, and prices of everything are massively increasing so yes, I don't think it's unfair to say it does feel a bit desolate actually.

It's only for the a few generations that we've had antibiotics to stop us being massively at risk of dying in childbirth or from a chance scratch (under 100 years ago, the son of a US president, with the best care available at the time, died from infection after getting a blister when playing tennis).

Sure, you could get a house on one income, but domestic abuse rates were hugely higher, as were the rates of alcohol addiction - and social, legal and financial restrictions made leaving incredibly hard.

Sure, university was free, but far fewer people - and far far fewer women - ever had the option to attend.

Many generations not only had conflict in Europe but had members of every family serving, often conscripted.

People like to point out how lucky the boomer generation were, and in many ways that's true - but not every boomer had a house to get them rich, many of the less well off were hit by stagflation and poverty in the 70s, then didn't have the funds to catch the housing boom in the 80s. For migrant families like mine, or British families other than white, racism was endemic and often unquestioned, and sometimes lethal. Gay or lesbian people were often forced to live in the shadows.

Overall, we have higher life expectancy, better medical care and far more material goods and infinitely more access to education or even entertainment than generations before us. We have a lot of challenges too, but bewailing our lot as desolate isn't just rude to those suffering extreme hardship, but is bizarre when you consider that we have privileges compared with almost any group of people at almost any time in history.

I wish OP would come back and clarify.

@OverTheRubicon

It's hard to look back on past generations, who yes had their own struggles but managed to buy a house on one income, were actually around to see their own children more than 2 hours a day and actually get to retire. A lot of us won't get that, and prices of everything are massively increasing so yes, I don't think it's unfair to say it does feel a bit desolate actually.

It's only for the a few generations that we've had antibiotics to stop us being massively at risk of dying in childbirth or from a chance scratch (under 100 years ago, the son of a US president, with the best care available at the time, died from infection after getting a blister when playing tennis).

Sure, you could get a house on one income, but domestic abuse rates were hugely higher, as were the rates of alcohol addiction - and social, legal and financial restrictions made leaving incredibly hard.

Sure, university was free, but far fewer people - and far far fewer women - ever had the option to attend.

Many generations not only had conflict in Europe but had members of every family serving, often conscripted.

People like to point out how lucky the boomer generation were, and in many ways that's true - but not every boomer had a house to get them rich, many of the less well off were hit by stagflation and poverty in the 70s, then didn't have the funds to catch the housing boom in the 80s. For migrant families like mine, or British families other than white, racism was endemic and often unquestioned, and sometimes lethal. Gay or lesbian people were often forced to live in the shadows.

Overall, we have higher life expectancy, better medical care and far more material goods and infinitely more access to education or even entertainment than generations before us. We have a lot of challenges too, but bewailing our lot as desolate isn't just rude to those suffering extreme hardship, but is bizarre when you consider that we have privileges compared with almost any group of people at almost any time in history.

Again, none of that negates the problems people have now does it?

@Getyourarseofffthequattro of course people can be incredibly privileged on a global and historical scale and still feel bad, and in some cases, still be having a horrendous time, and focussing on those people is clearly important. But making sweeping generalisations about 'our increasingly desolate lives' is ridiculous and unhelpful.

If people truly believe that our overall lives in a place with (imperfect but existent) healthcare, benefits, access to education and peace is desolate, then I'd profoundly hope that they've been doing a lot to help others around the world, given that the majority have lived their entire lives in far more 'desolation'.

My life is pretty good tbh. Just went for a walk with my puppy and my husband and then got puppy classes later. I started a new job recently and been really enjoying the change of tasks. I'm getting to drive down and see my family at Easter and go shopping for some new gym and yoga clothes and the Spain at the end of the month!

I have been helping out with my local community garden and learning lots from the pros. I help at the local community larder (collecting from co-op and opening up in the morning). I am a guide leader and I agree with the previous poster it's so much fun and a couple of hours where it's just silly fun and the girls are so funny and eager to get involved and the teens are sassy and I try so hard not to laugh. All in all, good vibes only around here.

[quote OverTheRubicon]@Getyourarseofffthequattro of course people can be incredibly privileged on a global and historical scale and still feel bad, and in some cases, still be having a horrendous time, and focussing on those people is clearly important. But making sweeping generalisations about 'our increasingly desolate lives' is ridiculous and unhelpful.

If people truly believe that our overall lives in a place with (imperfect but existent) healthcare, benefits, access to education and peace is desolate, then I'd profoundly hope that they've been doing a lot to help others around the world, given that the majority have lived their entire lives in far more 'desolation'.[/quote]
I know what you mean, it's probably not a majority of people that feel like that.

I think it's a bit unfair to pick it apart though, things do feel particularly shit at the moment. That doesn't negate anyone elses experience in other parts of the world, I think we all know we could have it much worse. I'm sure op didn't mean to cause offensive to those in worse situations ..

@BrightYellowDaffodil

I choose not to see my life as "increasingly desolate". That helps.

True.

Op I don’t agree with the last part of your sentence as life is pretty good right now, which I do appreciate

@Getyourarseofffthequattro the OP chose to use such a dramatic and polarising phrase, I don't think it's picking things apart for a lot of us to find it off-putting. To me, it's an echo of the 'make America great again' crowd , or the people who insist that the Boomers had perfect lives, oblivious to the fact that for many people, but especially those who weren't white, straight, able bodied and with at least some cash, (a) the past was more desolate than now and (b) most of the world is still more desolate than here.

Not quite sure what you have to be desolate about. Please explain.