To think our quality of life can’t keep going up forever?

[Wildflowers99]

I saw a post on a thread which said if you have 3 children (for example) you NEED 4 bedrooms, because children sharing a room is unacceptable in terms of their quality of life. And another saying being able to eat things like peppers out of season is essentially a right, and therefore they should have a price cap.

It got me thinking because what we expect as a basic quality of life seems very very different to even 50 years ago. But the problem is with the advent of climate change, cost of living, ageing population and so on, is it realistic for expectations to keep going up? Have we now reached a point where our quality of life will have to plateau or even reverse a bit because the economy and world cannot support what we have come to expect?

Hope that makes sense, I’m a bit zombified after a 5am start with my toddler…

it Depends how your measuring quality of life.
mine is significantly lower than my parents and my childhood. Same as dh’s
for us, it all comes down to housing.

We are looking at doing this at some point in the future! We're considering selling our houses and having me, DH and DS live with my parents and possibly even my brother.

People think we're insane for even thinking about it, but it makes a lot of sense logistically and like you say, it's so common in other parts of the world.

I do agree on the jobs. And it’s such a shame you learn so much from a Saturday job. They just don’t exist anymore because of zero hours. There’s also an issue within my teens, one does have a job the others don’t, so the one that does always feels like they are missing out.

I don’t recognise the benefit comment at all within my teens and their friends though. Their school is in an affluent area though.

Young people need to be taught financial literacy, including investing etc. when they are young. Still doesn’t really happen in state schools. Then they need to be encouraged to look for opportunities to maximise their wealth in the market. Move the focus away from “what do you like/enjoy?” to “what are your strengths? And where should you go/what path to maximise their potential?”

What I notice is that most of what you describe here - the expensive nails, new outfits for a night out etc. - are an exclusively female thing. No GenZ or millenial man I know spends money on stuff like that.

So is this a symptom of rising materialism and material expectations in general, or has it just arisen from the fact that more women are working and have their own money?

I think yes more women have more money, and there are very different standards of beauty now in terms of grooming so treatments, brows, lashes, nails, tan etc have become normalised.

The biggest difference is surely property to income ratios. My grandparents had a 5 bed semi in SW London purchased for £2500 in the 1950s. Grandad worked as a printer and grandma didn’t world after getting married. The house sold a few years back for over £2M! My partner and I could never afford anything like that no matter what we cut out. Also car prices have been hiked so much with PCP’s. I bought a nice new Golf GTi in the late 90’s for £9000; todays equivalent is over £40000 Salary’s just haven’t kept up with inflation and property prices have gone crazy!

If you reframe the argument "people expect too much" as "overconsumption" it sounds a little different?
Surely the argument is a good one, that we should not expect eating in restaurants, foreign holidays, imported food out of season? Restaurant food is typically full of unhealthy things, such as sugar and fat and high in calories. Inhabitants of West London would surely agree that foreign holidays damage the environment.
As an older person it's hard to avoid noticing that people expect so much more as a right these days and see it as true, not relative, deprivation if they don't get it.
As an example it was totally normal to budget carefully from the wages in your purse in the form of coin and bank notes. If you had no money in your purse, you couldn't make a purchase.
This isn't rose tinted nostalgia, just real-life observation. I don't think it has anything to do with the health services, which were completely different in the absence of much technology.

I read an article this week that suggested that this was the first generation that at best ignores the fact that their kids aren’t doing better than them (or argues with them about whether or not this is true), and at worst doesn’t think their kids should do any better than they did.

It clearly isn’t everyone but there are plenty on MN who fit the description. My parents are certainly in that category too (they think they worked harder than any of the following gens and so deserve to be better off and have a better quality of life, and yes that includes all their kids).

I think young people do have higher expectations for their lifestyle but also do need more to balance the impact working has on them.

Working used to be more 'fun' and certainly less stressed induced. Workloads were more reasonable, work offered more of a social life, coworkers became friends for a long time. Going to work was ok, and even fun. Ambition was encouraged and doing extra was often rewarded.

Nowadays, young people find work just stressful. The expectations they put on themselves is super high whilst trying to do a perfect job is just almost impossible for most due to lack of resources. Bosses are stressed and don't have the time to dedicate to young people.

As a result, young people look to their life outside of work to compensate and bring some happiness. They seek instant gratification, and these activities are expensive put all together. They really struggle to go to work with the feeling that their aim is to have much disposable income to compensate for their hard stressful work. When reality faces them that they are left with little after paying all the bills, and that they will have to continue to give a lot to work with little rewards before they can hope to be promoted and finally have some disposable income, they feel depressed.

They have to wait longer in their lives to get there. Often early 30s after Uni etc...compared to previous generations who got there in their early 20s. They have also been raised in an environment where instant gratification was much more the norm, so having to craft and wait for the rewards is not so ingrained in them.

Huh?

I don’t understand the thinking that your kids shouldn’t do better. All things being equal my kids have benefitted from me doing better than my parents, which means they’re starting off from a better place than I did. My kids have some complex needs which will present life long challenges but they’ll still be better off than kids with similar difficulties did 20/30 years ago.

I think comparing at different life stages isn’t particularly helpful though - my experience as a new mum will likely be different than my kids. I had a long journey to motherhood, was in my 40s with a very well established career and a house that was largely paid off, I didn’t have nursery fees to pay because I adopted older kids. Compared to someone who has kids in their early 30s, I’ve not had the expense, have very flexible work that’s well paid so have been much more financially secure at the kids in school stage.

I expect things to be lean for my kids starting out - it is for most people - but I also expect them to be able to maintain a reasonable standard of living as they progress.

If you reframe the argument "people expect too much" as "overconsumption" it sounds a little different?
Surely the argument is a good one, that we should not expect eating in restaurants, foreign holidays, imported food out of season?

Well no because that's just a distraction and the real issue is housing costs if you are talking about reduced living standards. And ignores the facts that holidays & imported food are consumed by all generations.

The people I know who has done the best financially are those that come from financial literate families, so it’s just a way of life.

There is one out layer to that, and that’s someone who had a mis selling incident in the 90’s and part of the recompense was them paying for financial advice. They went through everything, over paying mortgages, increased pension contributions everything. it seems mad that normally that is reserved for the wealthy when it’s perhaps the lower income brackets that need it more.

We are in mid 60s and we are always saying that poor people today have a lot more than poor people who were growing up in the 60s and 70s.
I had school uniform and maybe two ‘best’ outfits, school shoes and PE pumps. You got new at whitsuntide (for church) and at Xmas or if you had a growth spurt. I shared a bedroom for 18 years til my sister moved out. Dad got his first car when I was 13. No central heating and ice crystals (Jack Frost) on the insides of bedroom windows on a morning. Waiting to go downstairs until the fire was lit.
Do we want to go back to those days, absolutely not, but I do see a lot of young adults where their priorities are in the wrong place ie beauty treatments and other extravagant spending

Exactly this! My parents always tell me to cut back etc but I can’t can’t back any more! Dad was an engineer and mum a secretary. They went on a foreign holiday most years and ate out several times a month, I can’t afford to do that.

@vivainsomnia age 50, work was never fun and always stressful. Bosses could speak to you in ways that aren't acceptable now thank god.

agree that instant gratification is weird. But I don't think it was a norm to have lots in the past. Only deeply posh people had tea sets and grandfather clocks and they were likely handed down.

NHS didn't offer anything like as much but I fondly remember getting a home visit from a GP! She's long dead but the reassurance of "a doctor is coming" - wow. (On a Saturday) Now parents would have to take that teen to A&E and wait for hours.

my sister was admitted to hospital in the space of about 2 hours - GP rang ahead to get the bed. I was scared out of my wits (she had sepsis) so I remember staring at the clock and then the hospital called us (me and mum, dad took her there) because no one had a mobile then.

but remembering that raises a lot of questions about quality of life.

Quality of life is going down in recent years. I was in a single parent family and my life now is similar to that standard of living in some ways being a dual parent family.

If I had lived in a dual parent family in the 80s and 90s we would have had a very, very good life.

Why would you want to live as we did in the 70s? What would the last 50 years have been for if we didn't progress to a better standard of living?

Sounds fine! I am always seeing houses for sale advertised as 'needing total modernisation' and look at the pictures and think, What? No, it doesn't. I'd just move in and be totally comfortable 😅

Exactly this! My parents always tell me to cut back etc but I can’t can’t back any more! Dad was an engineer and mum a secretary. They went on a foreign holiday most years and ate out several times a month, I can’t afford to do that.

At what life stage though - were they doing that with babies and pre-school children? My kids will remember being able to go on holiday etc but they won’t remember me having £10 for a weeks food shop, because that was pre-children in the early stages of my career and house buying with a high interest rate.

Why would I even think of upsizing? We have a bigger house than we need.

What would the last 50 years have been for if we didn't progress to a better standard of living?

The whole point of the thread is, why do we believe that progress to a better standard of living is the "point" of the passage of time, culturally.

The vast majority of humans in the West experienced very little "improvement" to their standard of living.

Many generations saw an astonishing decline in their standards of living - romans left, plague, civil war, enclosure, religious prohibitions, literal starvation due to appalling harvests, the decline of rural life and resulting decay of villages and markets, urbanisation, industrialisation, all left millions worse off than their parents had been.

I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties. My own family followed a slightly atypical financial model, but I can describe the lifestyle of my best friend’s family:

3 bed house with one car.
SAHM, who later got a very local pt job
DH in a middle management role, working for a government-type organisation that later became privatised
An annual holiday to Europe by car with a trailer tent
Colour TV and VCR, plus a Hi-Fi
They had a dishwasher and a tumble dryer
Haircuts from a home hairdresser
Eating out a few times a year, for special occasions
Shopping was not a big thing, just clothes for the DC who were growing
One pet cat, but I don’t think they went to the vet more than a few times
Furniture stayed the same for the whole time that I knew them.
Extra curricular activities were minimal and via school or the local authority

In later years they acquired a second car, probably because the mum was working (part-time) beyond walking distance.

It was a comfortable lifestyle but all just so much simpler.

On the topic of fashion, I think it was just seen as much more of a young woman’s thing? The local mums were only in their early forties, but there was absolutely no expectation that they should be keeping up with eighties style! They all seemed to dress quite conventionally: a top, a loose skirt and a cardigan. The general attitude seemed to be that you had clothes, you wore them and perhaps every so often you would buy ‘something nice’ for a special occasion like a wedding. As long as you looked pleasant and respectable, nobody expected anything more.

A mum keeping up with the latest styles and going to a salon get her nails done, false lashes put on or have her hair blow-dried to go ‘out’ would probably have been laughed at! This was in a middle-class area so people probably had disposable income, but it just wasn’t something that happened.

I think people’s individual expectations were lower but also what was expected of people was so much lower too.

I worked in the 70s, I had babies in the first half of the 70s but worked as we couldn't afford the mortgage if I didn't.

Agreed. My parents went down to 1 income when we were young but we still had UK holidays, nice food, days out etc. My mum went part-time when we were a bit older and then we had foreign holidays and ate out frequently.

I'm now at that same age and I haven't been on holiday since 2018, can't afford to go out to restaurants, have to save up if I want to go somewhere like the theatre or whatever. My parents just tell me that they made sacrifices and so I just need to do that but there's honestly very, very little I can now cut out. I don't do botox/fillers/nails/takeaway coffees/etc. I do visit a hairdresser maybe twice a year but I feel that that's not a ridiculous extravagance in 2025?!

Don't get me started on the differences between our respective mortgages...