Modern life doesn’t work

[DeluluTaylor]

I say this reading thread after thread of people trying to work around nigh impossible situations.
I am sitting here with chronic IBS from stress, trying to get the kids out of the door, to a school which can’t meet their need, to go to a job where I’m firefighting as nothing is fit for purpose anymore. Finding care homes for younger and younger people. People who want to work but can’t as they have learning disabilities. Yet in the 20th century an estimated 40-70% of people with LD were employed.
I have 38p in my bank account and all my money goes on paying for a big house that we’re in from 6.30pm 7 the next morning, with a huge garden which none of us have time to do anything in. That I sit in on my own when the kids go to see their father in a bedsit at weekends. Yet there are families down the road with three kids and two parents in one room.

The whole thing is crazy. If you were going to arrive here from another planet and looked at late stage capitalism you would say why do you live like this? Getting in debt to spend two weeks abroad rather than making changes to make the other 50 weeks off the year more bearable.

The only thing is, social media has simply made us far more aware that a tiny minority benefit far more than others from human labour and exploitation of global resources.

For many millennia, life was basically quite hard for humans but in a different way. Hard work to acquire or produce enough food, build shelter, stay healthy, survive winter/droughts/storms, give birth and raise many children. But most of us are evolved to manage that & find meaning & satisfaction in that sort of labour and we lived in strong, stable communities where people had a lot of social support through harder times & lived near family. A young mum would be surrounded by aunties and grandmas, a man injured in work would be supported by brothers, fathers, uncles, sons while they recovered.

The type of work most of us have to spend our lives on now is far more mentally intense without the physical activity of the past. Office work, staring at screens, paperwork, it messes with our cortisol levels, we spend less time outdoors, eat the wrong food. We have far more material wealth but our lives can lack meaning and we've lost the ability to enjoy simple pleasures.

But we have to be careful not to view the past through rose tinted spectacles

For much of human history:

• loads of babies never made their first birthday
• loads of women died in childbirth
• loads of men died young in battle, or through working injuries
• lives were short, most people didn't see 50
• winters were hard and spring was a time of food shortages
• the disabled were often left to die

This is so so true. The work of the past involved meaningful tasks that were done to completion. Hoe that field, hunt that boar, make the bread, sew that tunic. We lack purposeful task completion and our brains and bodies need it.

You're not wrong. But we also have greater equality than ever before

I agree. Even if I wanted new stuff,I couldn't afford it.EVERY SINGLE PENNY goes on bills.
I think, unless you actually experience it yourself, you really can't imagine how difficult it is for us living on the breadline.

Honestly I think the answer is to abolish computers. Worldwide. And go back to basics. It would make things so more simpler and more people would be employed doing tangible work.

I believe that used to be the case but we are going backwards - the gap between the richest and poorest is getting worse not better

I can't ever understand the argument that people would be happier doing utterly meaningless work that a machine could be doing instead.

The answer is to value people and the planet we live on not put profit ahead of everything

the myth we were sold is that profit would lift everyone

ownership of anything probably is a bad idea also

send this to the Prime Minister. Serioulsy, they need to understand, and too many MPs are remote from this struggle.

It is about making the most of the time you are in.

Agreed. Mind you, I also agree (ish) that we had it very, very good in the last decades of the 20th and the first of this century. It spoiled us - collectively, in the UK - and people's expectations of 'normal' are way higher. Much higher than they were in my youth (born 1955) and unimaginable in my parents'.

We can live comfortably with less, and most of us will probably have to remember how to, starting around now.

I've got another gripe, though - things just not damn well working! Appliances genuinely do break down sooner, and the fix is rarely something you can do yourself with some instructions and a screwdriver. New-type appliances like LED lights are fab, but have to go in the bin when they conk out. New cars are computers, Practical Mechanics can't help you there. Systems & processes are rushed into operation with insufficient troubleshooting, they don't join up with the previous & next process, and there are no humans trained to assist with the failures. Let's ignore the robot assistants that are only able to tell you what's already on the goddamn website.

I shall go & calm down now 😬

That’s the thing though, I think when parents split there’s an understandable desire to keep things consistent for the kids by either staying in the family home (at crippling cost to the woman) or to buy something as similar as possible. If all you could afford is a 2 bed home then your DD would need to share. It’s not ideal but neither is being down to your last penny.

We’ve been sold this story of what an acceptable life is, from homes to hobbies to clothes even down to how often we do our laundry and we don’t stop to think how sustainable it is until we’re trapped in it. Social media has so much to answer for - the living off grid, lentil weaving life style is no more sustainable (how many of those influencers fund their life style through content creation) than the affluent life styles sold at the other end of the spectrum. It’s all aspirational - but not realistic for most people.

Thanks for posting this. I've been feeling very despondent about the rat race and not progressing in my career but actually my job is very flexible and allows me to be there after school more days than not. That's something to be valued.

On social care, what happens if you have a joint asset eg house but only one partner needs the care? Do they still force you to sell?

I find myself humming "rocking the suburbs" from "Over the hedge" as I read these posts.

Children are a choice.

I don't have children and still struggle.

The reality is that completely deregulated capitalism rigs the game so much that it ends up eating itself as entrepreneurship and competition disappear. That's why anti-trust laws were introduced in the US a century ago. Today's reality though is that transnational big corporations (enabled by globalisation) have killed local businesses, communities and bankrupted states (not enough tax intake to maintain services) without offering viable alternatives. AI disruption is the latest iteration of this and will be the nail in the coffin. We are heading for a post-employment (and terrifyingly) post-human world in which we won't be able to justify our economic value anymore while still being trapped in a system that mercilessly rests on economic value. I'm worried for kids and my old age.

In the 20th Century many women were economically inactive or underemployed and divorce was rare for much of the century unless you were very wealthy. Wealth and class, as now, would have been key to your experiences. However, both my DPs lost a elder sibling in the war and most of us in the UK have not experienced that in our lifetime.

Lots of us immigrants started on nmw somewhere in gut of hospitality beast. So we are aware of low wage life. That's what I was describing on personal level. We had good lives😕
Yes, food is cheap in uk but other bills are more than for example where my family lives, let alone DHs.
I remember how often we used eat in nandos 😭

There used to be a big Remploy factory in our town that made electric heaters ,library furniture and school furniture and employed mainly disabled people, it was a fantastic place, all adapted for them.

It was government owned and supplied state schools and libraries.

Sadly gone

Other people in other countries routinely have to spend 50% of their income on food.

But you can’t look at in a vacuum. What are people in other countries spending on housing? childcare? utilities? what are their wages like?

Which jobs involving computers do you think aren't 'tangible'?

I think a huge part of it is awareness. There have always been loads of poorer people ekeing out an existence, hand to mouth, but they were surrounded by others like them and it was perceived as the norm. Ordinary folk saw the rich from a distance, understood them to be a tiny proportion of people & didn't really know a great deal about how they lived

Social media bombards us constantly with media focussed on the wealthiest minority and we are given a huge amount of detail about a lifestyle few of us can afford.

Switch it off. Get offline, stop following all this crap. You will be happier.

I'm a gypsy and we get so much criticism from others for our traditional lifestyles. We always say we don't want to do anything differently, we are happy with our lifestyle. Then it's people living like the OP who refuse to believe we could be happy and try to convince us we MUST live the "modern way" and "get out of the 1950s". No thanks. I'll keep my single income, nuclear family 100% of the time.

Sounds like hell OP, you have my sympathies, you were sold a lie.

Why not downsize if the home is too big and your children's father is living in a bedsit? The lower outgoings could mean you could work fewer hours allowing some quality time with your children. I'm not suggesting it will be easy but you seem keen for things to change.

As for more people with learning disabilities working in the 20th century than today they were mostly working in servitude and/or exploited toiling for very long hours on a very low wage.