To feel our quality of life in the UK gets lower every year?

[Playingvideogames]

Off the back of another thread where I mentioned my childhood homes being bought by my parents for under 300k in the late 90s/early 2000s, and are now all selling for 700k+.

I feel like our quality of life just dwindles every year. Everything becomes more expensive. Housing is low quality, small and extortionate. The weather is awful 70% of the time. Everything feels so overcrowded with fewer green spaces and natural beauty as more housing estates go up. The roads are awful, choked with traffic and potholed. Constant roadworks here yet nothing ever seems to get solved. Customer service is a bit rubbish, nothing really works as intended. More and more rules about what you can and can’t do. People just seem stifled and stressed.

I’m sure people will rush along to say how wonderful the NHS is and similar, but I sometimes feel really envious of people living in places where (although not perfect) they have something reliable to enjoy - great weather, a nice big house, just more space and less overcrowding.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable but I wonder if you do!

In some ways I feel I live like a king. Access to food transport and so many opportunities that other humans don’t have. We can either talk ourselves into a pool
of misery or celebrate the good.

My mum and her friends also didn’t join gyms, meet with friends other than for coffee in the mornings when husbands were at work. Definitely didn’t have nights out unless with husband and theirs mothers babysat, no travel with friends, hen do’s, spa visits, beauty treatments, days out alone, let alone access to own car.

honestly I would swap for the sake of cheaper housing and a better pension ( unless of course their husbands left them) hell no

So only the needs of able bodied,
mentally able, heterosexual and, lets face it, probably white and middle class,
people matter?

So only people like you, OP? It doesn't
matter that other people's lives are dramatically better, all that's relevant is that your parents could afford a nicer house than you can?

What on earth are you on about?YOU literally said in the title "gets lower
every year.' YOU were the one comparing to the past
in the first place!

If you wanted go compare to other
countries then you should have titled the thread "to think our quality if life is so
much worse than Spain/other similar countries?"

You can't blame people for answering the actual question you asked instead of
whatever you meant inside your head!

The press has a lot to answer for in this country. Doom mongerers

If you are wealthy or extremely wealthy things are going great.

Unfortunately, if a few people get ever wealthier the vast majority will have to subsidise them.

If anyone notices this transfer of wealth from those who need it the most to those who do not need it at all, you can always blame foreigners.

Where is the evidence that these men, as you say are getting free private healthcare? I am interested to know.

It’s true that people are out for themselves and don’t care about the country, but that’s because many of them no longer feel they have a country. Mass immigration has destroyed any sense of a shared history or a shared culture. A speechwriter for Blair said Labour’s plan was to use mass immigration to “rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

Fine. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t destroy people’s identity, tell them their history is shameful, demonise their national heroes, deprive them of a sense of shared culture, and then expect them to care about the ‘nation’. This isn’t a ‘nation’ any more. As two tier Keir put it, it’s now an “island of strangers”. My ancestors fought in both WW1 and WW2, but I wouldn’t lift a finger to defend Britain. And I really mean it. I will help any good people I can, and I will pay my tax, but I have no loyalty to the nation. I just care about myself and my family.

Being honest about the history of the UK, how it built up its wealth, who helped it survive two WW, and not hiding the unpalatable bits, that they don't wish for people to know, has been long overdue.

Over one million immigrants entered the UK per year from 2022-2024 and before that over two-hundred and fifty thousand entered every year for more or less the twenty years before that! Over ten million immigrants have come to the UK since the millenium and there has been more immigration to the UK in the last twenty-five years than there was in the thousand years previous to the millenium. If that isn't mass immigration, I don't know what is.

You clearly don't live in the SE. Every postage-stamp size piece of land in my town has already been built on, with hundreds more planned in the neighbouring town to meet our council's housing target set by the govt. The roads are already a nightmare - traffic-choked during peak hours and wherever I drive they're full of potholes - I've never known them to be so awful.

The OP is right - every year it gets worse. Brexit was economic suicide for this country, we have unchecked levels of migration, nowhere for the people to live who are already here, let alone hundreds of thousands more who arrive every year, the NHS is a money pit that never seems to improve, yet our medical school graduates can't get training places in hospitals (I don't understand why this is), a soaring benefits bill, a shortage of jobs for people of all ages from the unskilled to new grads to skilled middle-aged people, it's no wonder that large numbers of people who have the ability to move OS are doing so.

Yes I mentioned this earlier - we looked round some great big purpose built apartments when we lived in Copenhagen , admittedly you had a balcony at best but they certainly were not poxy -

There is a really unhealthy obsession on here with seeing everything through a prism of how useful it is to the disabled/SEN.

It is not selfish to prioritise things that directly affect you and your own family.

Of course I want very disabled people to have a good life and be well cared for, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have other and more personal concerns.

agree! when I was13 and got a paper round and a part time job in a cafe (around 1985) I had to buy my own toiletries and clothes from my mums catalogue and pay her each week! Before that I had £1 a week from my mum and £1 from my nan and that was it.

I can't begin to list the expensive stuff that a lot of people younger than me spend shedloads on that my contemporaries and never did as young adults, middle aged adults and older adults. And it's not just technology (I'm including new cars every very often in that) - the need to have perfect kitchens, bathrooms, furniture and furnishings, etc is a relatively new thing.

I don’t think quality of life is declining but expectations are continually increasing, fuelled by ever-more intrusive advertising/influencing/aspirational TV etc. It’s much harder to feel content, even though generally we all do eat out more, go on more holidays, have more clothes etc than a generation ago.

It is not selfish to prioritise things that directly affect you and your own family.

Literally the definition of selfishness, OP.

No it isn't.

Its basic economics.

Then are the disabled ‘selfish’ for prioritising themselves over, eg, environmental issues?

What would happen if you got seriously ill? Would you lose your house or would there be some financial support which kicks in? Having no insurance would terrify me!

I don't go to work to provide for anyone else except my family.

I’m happy for my taxes to support the severely disabled and to provide a basic safety net for those out of work, but I don’t want to provide those out of work with the same (or better) lifestyle than my children have. This isn’t selfish at all. If you think it is, then by definition it’s selfish to prioritise yourself by expecting others to provide you with a lifestyle. It does feel like in the UK the gap between those providing and those being provided for is very very narrow.

Yes. And this makes rational economic sense.

1. Work to earn in order to probide for oneself and loved ones.
2. To contribute to society in the form of taxes to support the vulnerable.

Its bizarre that the poster flips (1) and (2). Most likely explanation is personal bias. They are in receipt of benefits so they see that as more important.

Agree.

Saying somebody is selfish for not prioritising what is important to you is hypocritical.

And not prioritising is not the same as ‘disapproving of’

Yes and with zero irony don’t see why it’s ‘selfish’ that they prioritise themselves! Just that it’s ‘selfish’ for other people not to prioritise them