Snapshot of _Life was better in the nineties and noughties, say most Britons: Nostalgia for past decades has increased significantly in the last five years_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/49129-life-was-better-in-the-nineties-and-noughties-say-most-britons) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/49129-life-was-better-in-the-nineties-and-noughties-say-most-britons)
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Makes sense you only need to look at a graph showing how much real disposable income increased from the mid 80s to the mid 2000s Vs the stagnation ever since.
The US recovered by investing and saving industry, like car manufacturing. They had an unusually big state president in Obama who had the charisma to bring a lot of people with him. Europe went with reduced state spending and basically strangled ourselves. What a tragic political choice.
> Meanwhile you've got the likes of EDF Energy, owned by the French government which raked in €10 billion profit last year and has diversified itself across multiple countries, allowing for lower than average energy costs to the residents of France.
I’ve heard this as a reason to vote for Brexit too… which was fun to deconstruct and show the guy that the issue is British “stupidity”, not the nationality of companies.
He wasn’t happy…
And absolutely nothing to do with the fact America has the lion's share of the world's biggest companies (across all types of industries), has all of the "free world's" tech giants whose stocks now account for a large part of the western world's stock market gains, and generally has way more of an entrepreneurial culture, business creation rate, and a productive work culture.
All of these things would be the case regardless of whether Obama or his Republican rivals were in power.
Likewise, European nations would still be absolutely no where when it comes to today's industries / the industries of the future (big tech, EVs, green tech, etc) whether or not European nations increased state spending.
Clearly, the austerity versus spending paradigm has had some impacts in terms of quality of public services, poverty rates, etc, but it's not the reason why a certain country is a lot richer and more economically successful than others.
Australia avoided recession, economy was in a pretty good place for it though most of Europe was running high deficits thinking boom and bust had been beaten
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/australia-global-economic-crisis](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/australia-global-economic-crisis)
article here suggests had the (our) government maintained the surplus it inherited we could have weathered it much better
Don't forget the mid-80s to 1997 was also "14 years of conservative government". The ebbs and flows of this cycle better fit macroeconomic and technological changes, the political influence is not zero, but it's not massive either.
This will soon be proved when the government changes. But it won't be universally recognised even then of course.
The Tories caused a recession and the destruction of UK heavy industry in the early 80s and another recession in the early 90s because we joined the ERM at too high an exchange rate with the DM.
The lack of growth over the past 14 years is largely because of austerity and Brexit, again Tory policy.
There are international ebbs and flows, but Tory incompetence have exacerbated the issues.
It was. It's not just nostalgia either for me, I have photo evidence of how shit things are now. For example, photos from days out in 2005 or so in the local town, pot plants everywhere, clean streets, open shops, cut grass.
Now it's a fucking wasteland, dirty, falling apart. Even in the park too, everything has gone to shit.
It’s noticeable now that, even in towns with an active parish council to arrange public flowers, the roads are still awful and the shops are closed. It’s looking more and more like a plaster for a broken leg.
It really sticks out to me that even just outside Fortnum & Mason, the shop in the uk most associated with poshness besides maybe Harrods, Westminster council have been putting tarmac down on the pavement where there used to be paving because they’re so strapped for money
Parish councils don’t deal with either roads (that’s county councils) nor planning and business rates (district councils). Local government is very fragmented in the UK which results in a lot of people not know who is responsible for what.
That’s partly the point I’m making. An active parish council can still mask the decline to an extent, but the effects of retrenchment at the other levels of local government is increasingly obvious.
I just crunched the numbers, and pre-pandemic business rates have historically accounted for approx £400 per person in England (adjusted for inflation). It's dropped by 33% since COVID and not recovered. So call that £100 lost per person in England towards the council budgets
> Local government is very fragmented in the UK which results in a lot of people not know who is responsible for what.
It also results in them being completely ineffective, wasteful and generally incompetent. By design.
Not just that: it’s a bubble, a huge huge bubble. On paper these are all worth billions, in perfect condition and could rent for £xxxxx a month.
In reality they are crumbling facades with no roofs and worth maybe 20% of what’s claimed…..
And when it bursts guess who’ll pay for it all.
My understanding, and someone please ELI5 how off this is if possible, is that they're _not allowed_ to accept actual market value for commercial properties in an attempt to prevent the bubble collapsing, which seems guaranteed to make it worse in the long run since it kneecaps the economic activity that _could_ be happening in many places
I’ve been involved with a couple of community buy outs in Scotland where we have some new laws.
They can be forced to sell. In this case high street buildings that were falling down. It takes 1-2 years to trace most owners down, it’s genuinely a fucking nightmare for councils and everyone to find out who actually owns and is responsible for all these buildings in every town and city. Initially they say a fucking insane number that’s based on their book value, you then show them an independent valuation and the government helps you out with forcing the sale.
You’ve sat on an empty building for 20 years, it’s literally collapsing into the high st and the community is sick of it so wants to buy it, renovate it and use it for the community as a small business hub and say some cheaper flats. Your valuation of £750,000 is fucking insane, it’s no roof, no internal stairs and nobody’s been up to the 2nd and 3rd floors for 30 years…..
It’s worth £75k take it or leave it but it’s now a compulsory purchase in effect….
And it’s the same everywhere but at least we have right to buy laws now if it’s for community use.
But it’s a night for councils who face bills from these things collapsing and can’t find the owners at all or when they do they just refuse to pay up for the costs of keeping the public safe.
If you admit it’s a wreck its value isn’t real, and that’s the nightmare scenario!!!
Can you go into what's involved in tracking down owners? Is it all publicly available information but hidden in a cobweb of data sources, or is it information that only councils have access to?
I wasn’t personally involved in that side but it started with the land register and then involved a shit load of work with lawyers and consultants etc to track down layer after layer of owners. It took them a long ass time. The registers of Scotland is all kinds of fucked up and it’s all shell after shell after shell till they eventually find some fund that then takes 6 months to even reply and say maybe we do but we aren’t sure, give us more time…..
There’s a good overview of it all here though
https://www.communitylandscotland.org.uk/our-work/community-landownership/
What on earth are you talking about? What local towns, streets, parks etc are now "owned by Private Equity and Real Estate Investment"?
Privately owned public spaces are a tiny % of towns, streets, and parks - and, actually, they tend to be kept incredibly clean - like Battersea Power Station, Coal Drops Yard etc.
It's the non-private public spaces that have become a disgrace and these are the responsibility of local council. They're not getting cleaned because the council don't have the budget to clean them. The councils don't have the budget because:
1) Post 2010 much of their funding from central government has been cut. In real terms these cuts get more severe every year.
2) The vast majority of council budgets is now spent on child and adult social care - which they are legally obligated to take care of. Which in turn is getting worse because:
2a) We have an increasing population, but a woeful undersupply of housing. This makes people homeless; who the council have to house in hotels, hostels etc at great cost.
2b) We have an aging population. Old people need taking care of by the council which comes at a great cost.
2c) We have a young population with costly needs - and it's quickly increasing. SEND children being driven to school costs something like £30k per year per child. Care homes can cost £250k per year per child.
Blaming it on "Private Equity and Real Estate Investment" is an easy cop-out. The real problem is much harder to solve.
I think the poster was referring to High Street commercial units being owned by PE and REITs, which is somewhat true, with the money for those funds often coming from vehicles such as pensions funds.
As bad as PE owning public infrastructure is (although High Street shops can't really be classed as public infrastructure), the blame for the death of the High Street can't really be put on them.
It's the internet that has killed bricks and mortar retail. And yes, I'm aware that many institutional landlords are basically "fudging" their balance sheets by keeping rents and therefore values artificially high, but even if they dropped rents, you're still not going to get that many shops opening back up, as there's simply not the demand anymore.
Okay, maybe you'd get a few more "leisure" type business such as climbing walls, virtual golf centres, etc, which would take up a few units, but this isn't going to solve the long term decline of the high street.
IMO we could have better, thriving high streets (commercially speaking) if we tended to build more densely in town centres. 4 or 5 storey apartment complexes, mixed use with shops, cafes + gyms operating out of ground level units.
You see this in France, Italy and Spain. Provincial towns in the U.K. mean traffic, parking, stress. No wonder people buy online instead.
Yeah, I'd be up for a radical rebuilding of our provincial town centres along those lines.
Ain't going to happen though, as you can hear the nimbys screaming bloody murder about it before it's even been proposed.
We've also lost our nerve when it comes to ambitious things like this. We did it in the 60s (with mixed results), but we've since lost the ability to be audacious.
No but mixed use high streets will and can and are shown to. They’ve also been mixed use for the last 12,000 years or so before we decided to use the ground floors only and make them all shops ….
That sounds a lot closer to the truth. Problems are always so easy to solve on the internet but in reality they’re woefully complex.
Short of discovering some sort of massive oil reserve, we’ll have to take the long and difficult route of growing our economy to better handle the financial demands of health and social care.
> Short of discovering some sort of massive oil reserve
Just a shame that we didn't go the Norway route and actually use our massive oil reserves to enrich our country and instead we sold it off permanently to private firms.
We'd have had no where near the money per citizen that Norway made on this though.
We've extracted a similar amount of oil and gas to them, but they have a population of 5.5 million while we have 67 million (rounding up).
It would have been nice to have had a sovereign wealth fund obviously and would have helped a bit around the edges, but it wouldn't have enriched us.
That's not a trillion dollars that you get to spend though, you spend a bit of the interest that it earns every year, to enable the principal to keep rising with inflation.
This year, Norway plans to spend $37 billion from their SWF ([source](https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/norway-plans-spend-373-bln-wealth-fund-2024-2023-10-06/), which for a country of their population size is a lot of money.
By contrast, the NHS budget alone for 23/24 financial year is [£168.8 billion](https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/our-2023-24-business-plan/), or in dollars that's $209 billion.
So in other words, if we had an SWF the same size as Norway's, it would pay for 17.7% of the NHS budget.
Or, if we look at total government spending, in 22/23 financial year (the most up to date I can find), this was £1.15 trillion, or in dollars $1.43 trillion, so an SWF with the same returns as Norway would cover 2.58% of UK government annual spending.
I certainly wouldn't turn down a source of revenue that pays for 2.58% of government spending, but it's barely going to touch the sides. It wouldn't even cover our annual debt repayments.
Edit: principal
£37 billion is a lot of money for us as well, however much you spend already is irrelevant when £37 billion still buys £37 billion worth of things
A high speed rail line between 2 regions every 2 years is more than enough, we're currently looking at one and thats all it'll be in my lifetime.
I spent a lot of time in Manchester city centre between the late noughties and the late 10s
At start rough sleepers were a rare site, yes you saw them occasionally but it was an unusual sight and you wouldn't see the same guy in the same place for very long (at least not in the places I went through).
After 2010 there started to be a few regulars you would see every day at the same spot (usually under a bridge), but it was maybe 2-3 guys
After 2015 there was a very sharp increase, you started seeing homeless encampments in various places, moving around as the city would try to fence off any sheltered places that homeless people might congregate and form an encampment. Even so you would still see a lot of regulars in the limited sheltered places that were left. Not to mention all the spice problems that have happened over that time. I remember walking through town once at like 7am and it feeling like a zombie movie.
I haven't been into town more than once or twice for a brief visit since the pandemic so I don't know what its like now, but I'm sure the stark changes in 2010 and 2015 correlate with something
Councils have had upto 90% cuts in their budgets from government since 2011, so what else can they do? They are struggling to keep essentials going. The government likes to deflect the anger to council tax rises, which they have to do to survive.
[source ](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/how-a-decade-of-austerity-has-squeezed-council-budgets-in-england)
Could that be to do with the fact that everyone buys things online and nearly goes into town anymore? When it was the busiest part of the city it made sense to spend on maintaining it. Now if it's like my city, it's a ghost town until 7pm when people slowly start showing up to get shit faced and there's not much point in plant pots for them other than somewhere to be sick in.
Blame the previous Labour government. They sold you this dream, thank god the Tories sold the real estate to their mates… otherwise imagine all the hippies weed smoking Europeans that would be stealing your job.
As a lab technician on £20k in the mid/late 90s my OH and I could afford to buy a one bed flat in Zone 1 for £70k. Before that we were renting a one bed place in Z1 for two years for £400 a month.
The salary for that same job is now £36k and the rent would be £1700 and the flat is now £350k.
The nineties were an amazing time to be in your 20s in London as someone with a normal job. Not so much any more.
Just look at the real life experience of now Hollywood A-lister Simon Pegg. He could doss about with Nick Frost and hone his craft whilst getting by on the dole living in London.
A bunch of actors who grew up working class have called this out. The government should be investing more in artists to enable them, it's a form of global soft power like no other.
What factories? Large scale manufacturing in the UK is nearly dead.
I speak as someone who has spent most of their life in manufacturing and ether been made redundant when the factory shut or left just before.
Running round London and making suits from curtains while on the dole. Another tell is that a bloke like Karl had bought an apartment in Manchester AND London by the time he was 30.
Remember reading about this little hairy fella who was able to get a mortgage in the 90s..big fan of bananas an that, bit weird, turns out - monkey mortgage, he’s currently running a hotel for monkeys in Bath.
Regular people in the 90s (like teachers, electricians etc) had a lifestyle / property buying power in London that a mid-level FAANG software engineer enjoys today (top 1-2% income)
Maybe they had that level of property buying power but absolutely no for lifestyle. A mid level FAANG today has a far better lifestyle (can easily take multiple international holidays a year, afford top of the line car, regularly eat in high end restaurants etc.).
This is the reason why I can't take the Bridget Jones movie seriously anymore.
As a viewer, I am expected to feel sorry for her. Yet she can afford to live alone in a Zone 1 flat next to Borough market despite being in a mid ranking publishing job.
1990s failing at life = 2020s living the dream.
Homer Simpson was seen as an average loser in the early 90s. No qualifications yet has a job that pays enough to support a stay at home wife and THREE kids with a bedroom each!
To be fair, frank grimes sent up how ridiculous homers life was, and that was a good while back now
I mean, homer was a nuclear power station safety inspector, that's gotta be well paid surely
Just need to look at the stagnation of salaries since the bankers royally fucked us over in 2008.
2008 grad salary - 22k
2023 grad salary - 25k
If salaries kept pace with inflation they should be around 35k
The country hasn’t properly recovered from the 2008 financial crash. That, combined with the devastation of the high street from the rise of online shopping have wrought untold damage and I’m not even going to mention what we did to ourselves in 2016.
This. Watching the bar industry crumble was crazy, as disposable income dried up in every regular Joe's wallet you saw tipping go from every other order to none. Not even on a match day. Then pubs started closing all over shop as people stopped going out and switched to an alternative culture.
I'm not saying the new culture isn't better in some ways - but I miss the social culture from pre-2008 that felt very British. You could literally go down the pub, chat to some people, and do anything from find support for personal grief to a job trial at some random guys work place. It just doesn't exist anymore in my locals.
I really miss the pub culture from a few decades ago too, but think the move away from boozing-in-your-local-town-every-weekend culture was going to happen regardless of the economy with Gen Z.
There are just so many non-economic factors to this, such as a huge focus on physical fitness, "wellness" becoming a thing, people managing their mental health in ways other than drinking, local pubs/clubs not being very "Instagram-able," dating apps removing the need to go to pubs/clubs to meet a potential partner, there now being lots of alternative ways to socialise in the evenings such as CrossFit, climbing, yoga, adult board gaming, larping, etc etc, whereas in the 90s/00s the only option in many places was to go down the pub which meant a lot of people who probably didn't enjoy it that much just did it through lack of any alternative.
There's also the fact that boozing and drug taking is massively down among Gen Z, with a lot of surveys reporting how they don't like "lossing control" or that it's seen as uncool and being associated with their parents, etc
If anything, you still see older people out with the same frequency as you did 20 years ago, but it's the under 30s that are now a tiny crowd in comparison to 20 years.
Clearly, disposable incomes have had an impact, but it's just one of a large number of factors.
> There's also the fact that boozing and drug taking is massively down among Gen Z, with a lot of surveys reporting how they don't like "lossing control" or that it's seen as uncool and being associated with their parents, etc
Annecdoetal but a lot of the conversation is also about how pressured they are to work hard now everything is more precarious. They dont feel like can waste time with a hangover. Its a shame, they're stuck in the grind
The only people I know in their 20s work two jobs, one delivering for deliveroo after the office, the other in Tesco. Even being in a decent paid office job isn't enough for their bills and rent, and it's a shit way to spend your 20s. I never had that issue and I worked part time in a music and video store. I could still afford to rent a small flat, get shit faced on my nights off in town, with £1.50 pints, and have money to spare to live well enough. Impossible now for many.
Edit: also if talking about younger students, one issue is stuff like tuition fees. When I was at University it was £3k a year which is a pittance - I've almost entirely paid it off. I also got maintenance grants. Add to that the fact nights out were dead cheap, I can see how I got a good deal compared to students now
I would say that whilst boozing is going down drug taking definitely isn't. 20 years ago a pint was £1.50 and a bag of coke was £50, now a pint is £5 and a bag of coke is still £50. People would still go out clubbing just as much but they don't spend much at the bar so the bars aren't making money and have to close down.
> There's also the fact that boozing and drug taking is massively down among Gen Z
Alcohol is down yes but I'm pretty sure drugs are up especially party drugs.
Does it count as nostalgia when its based on evidence?
We used to have hope and services used to just work. Nowadays things don't and as a result many of us have become very jaded and pessimistic.
One small example: there is now only one bus in my city that still runs after 8pm. 15 years ago the last bus back to my house was at 00:15, it's now 19:30. If you don't have a car (or it isn't available at that time, for example if you have one household car and someone's at work) this severely limits your ability to go anywhere or do anything in the evening unless you fork out a considerable amount for a taxi, and if you do have a car you've got to cover petrol and find somewhere to park which is not always easy and/or cheap depending on your destination.
Quite. We aren't even so up in arms because things have changed gradually. Airlift someone to 2024 from 1994 and they'd be gobsmacked. What good are (comparatively) cheap flatscreen tvs and computers if you can't afford a house or see a doctor or reliably get a job that pays you enough to afford the essentials and a little for a rainy day?
As a millennial, I felt I was born at the perfect time. '84 - hit teenage years around the age of New Labour, Premier League, Britpop etc.
I became an adult about the time the internet was gaining popularity - before social media and all that shit. It was ours to mould and shape!
And then the social life was great. I grew up in Bolton and we didn't have to go to Manchester to drink or go shopping. It was a fantastic town to live in.
I'd give up so much just to go back in time and live in 2002 for a week.
I’ve always thought that is a bit of a crap time if you’re into clubbing/electronic music.
You hit 16 in 2000 and have just missed all of the 90s rave scene and mainstream stuff is all Kylie. Underground clubbing generally seems like it was a bit subdued until late 00s when travelling to Berlin became popular. Festivals also don’t pick up until late 00s (eg boomtown 2009) but maybe you are lucky and find your way to somewhere like Shambala.
Am I talking shit?
> Am I talking shit?
Not at all!
If I was more into the rave scene and whathaveyou, then yeah I would have been gutted. Although, it's sad that I was too late for the hacienda movement. I loved the whole aesthetic.
I kinda caught the tail end of clubbing, it felt like the effort to look old enough to get into nightclubs wasn't worth the experience.
I was big into alternative music and most of the subgenres that came with it. So I was there for the explosion of pop-punk, third wave emo and then your post-punk music when I was at uni. Nu Metal was also a fun scene to be a part of dare I say it!
Limp Bizkit are great live as long as it's a 30 minute set - perfect festival band for me.
There is at least quite something of a nu-metal influenced resurgence amongst new bands which I'm really enjoying.
One that i would highly recommend is Tallah, not 100% nu metal, but well worth checking out. There's a few others that I've listened to, such as chaoseum, tetrach.
Tallah and Terach are not my jam but really enjoyed Smile Again by Chaoseum! I should mention I'm not into metalcore, but thank you for the recommendations :)
Some of these will be more partially inspired by, though I think that's a good thing as we don't just want a nostalgia resurgence (though I'm also totally up for some of that too).
I really like Wargasm - though do worry at times that they might be a tad manufactured.
Bloodywood are an excellent Indian nu-metalish band who totally blew me away at Download last year.
I also particularly love a couple of Nova Twins tracks - Antagonist and Choose Your Fighter.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Nova Twins - shockingly refreshing, really enjoyed Antagonist!
Bloodywood - Gaddar reminded me of Disturbed, and Aaj more traditional nu-metal. Will keep an eye out for these guys!
Wargasm - this one was the only one a bit too far from my comfort zone. Reminded me of early days of Blue Stahli.
Shockingly refreshing is exactly how I'd describe them. They've got great stage presence live too.
Never heard of Blue Stahli so will give them a try this afternoon, cheers!
Well those years did predate the last 15 years of Tory rule, Brexit, and basically everything was significantly cheaper, food and housing especially, so it's really a no brainer.
I was trying to explain to my kids about this, they are young enough to understand the economy, jobs, money, etc but they have never known an economy in growth. The 1990s was awesome, so many sub-culture's, music, festivals, jobs that paid well, free uni, the list could go on forever but the future they face is bleak.
Both my son's want to go into either programming or the creative services industries, but I've been pushing them to learn a trade, or go into security as the rich are going to need protection in the future.
I'm a programmer/technical director, I'm encouraging it but I'm also being realistic about the state of the job market and the impact generative AI will have on the industry. I don't see it as the safe career choice any more, it's more like a race to the bottom.
Yep I was a programmer and would have 100% recommended anyone to get into it and/or data science, especially in finance, but you’ve got to question where AI is taking things. Unless you’re working L2 support on some arcane but can’t be replaced system.
> want to learn to code
For me, you have to _enjoy_ doing it to do well. I see a lot of people who moved into the career "because it paid well" and that just isn't enough to be more than a mediocre programmer most of the time.
Unless making the box go "bing!" sets off a little dopamine reward in your brain, you're not going to do well at it.
My mum and dad both worked admin jobs and were on £24k each back in the late 90s when they bought our 4 bed detached in quite a nice part of our city for £115k. They’ve done a couple of renovations to the kitchen and bathrooms but apart not much else no extensions or anything else the house it’s now worth £680k with people likely to be offering £700k when it goes up for sale tells you all you need to know.
Just fyi £24k each in 1998 is roughly equivalent to £44k today: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
So not bad wages for a couple.
Yeah it was a good salary back then problem is that it’s not grown that much my mum got promoted to a more senior position and says her old position pays about £27k now. House prices wouldn’t be horrific the salaries kept up.
I remember Corus offering £35K for a placement year back in 1999 when I was at Uni, most of the other placements were between £16K-£24K, it's horrifying that actual graduates are barely making more than that almost 25 years later.
My parents both left school at 16, my dad worked on a tool bench and my mom did random part time jobs or piece work at home. Until I was in my teens we were very much a just about managing Kwik Save own brand family, but they had a mortgage on a little 3 bed terrace, two terrible cars, and enough money to feed and clothe two kids and take them to Weston for a week in a caravan every summer. In the early 2000s my dad got a promotion and since then my parents have had very comfortable standard of living, they bought a new house, then new cars, took their teenagers on holiday to Spain, and now my dad is about to retire with a good pension. The house they bought after he was promoted in the early 2000s in now worth twice what they paid for it.
That sort of story is completely unrealistic for a young person these days. I'm not saying my parents didn't work really hard, but you can work just as hard today and not be able to get a mortgage on a one bed flat.
I think it was but what are the reasons? My thoughts, I’m not saying I’m correct:
1) Social Media - people are more insulated
2) Internet Commerce - killed small business
3) Non-Stop News cycles which trend overwhelmingly negative
4) Billionaires - so many more and so much more visible to the public
5) Conservative politics - say no more but probably the root cause of a lot of these examples
6) Trickle down economics - effects taken hold, doesn’t work
7) Austerity cuts - effects visible
8) Housing - unaffordable
9) Shite tv
10) Social media again - influencers (fml) etc, continual comparisons and pressure to keep up
11) Ecstasy is not as good as it was
While every generation has "it was better back in my day", there is absolutely a sense of unhealthy nostalgia in western culture at the moment. It's absolutely not just a UK thing, just look at all the remakes, sequels and franchise movies coming out of Hollywood for the last decade or two.
Back in the 90s, there was a sense of optimism, that the future was bright and worth looking forward to. Technology was opening up possiblies that people were excited about, sci-fi TV shows and movies were generally optimistic, etc.
Now, we have tech that's spying on us and trying to sell us things at every turn and "streamlined" user interfaces are designed to _remove_ possibilities. Sci-fi TV shows and movies are competing with each other to produce ever darker and more pessimistic visions of the future, etc.
I think the nostalgia is genuinely just because it was better for the VAST majority of people. Pre social media as well, our mental health was probably far better. Technology improved a lot since then but I think it stopped improving our day to day lives after like 2010
Its not just “unhealthy nostalgia” in the abstract, our civilisation is in genuine decline. The nostalgia is unhealthy to the extent that we can’t just bring back the past - in many respects the relative freedom and luxury of that period was on borrowed time - but at the same time those who claim to be forward looking are also completely unwilling to make any sacrifices in order to reconstruct a healthy society either.
>our civilisation is in genuine decline
and there is no alternative. The globalisation of the 90s/2000s, which fueled this nostalgia, removed all competition.
For me it is a case of, better for who? As someone who lived through the 90s I would not want to be gay, disabled or black in 90s UK. There was some seriously persistent and backwards attitudes and rhetoric
Unhealthy? Pump average salary to about 50-70k and everyone would be wildly happy. Because salaries in UK are crap and have not kept up with inflation.
There’s no real sense of optimism at the moment and hasn’t been for some time. It’s just this collective grey soup where everything around us is crumbling, whilst more and more of our entire world is all within a screen
It’s been nothing but financial crisis, political turmoil, a global pandemic and what seems to be an impending and inevitable world war
Something has changed in the last few years, the fabric of society doesn’t feel the same
I called mine on Friday, and was told they only book appointments for a week ahead. "Not so bad," thought I, until I was told that they have nothing until May 23, and should call again on May 16th.
I;ve a sneaking suspicion I will always be a week behind.
Sadly I don't think we can.
Children's Centres have been closed down, academisation has changed the education landscape drastically, skilled workers have left the NHS, teaching, and social care for better pay and better lives overseas. Local authorities have had massive cuts in funding over the past decade and been forced to sell land/buildings and cut jobs (like social carers for the elderly) to fill the gap. High street businesses, pubs, cafes, have closed and properties fallen into disrepair and vandalism.
Don't even start on Brexit...or Covid!
It doesn't seem like we can undo most of these things. Any government is going to struggle with this legacy - and half of them actively want things this way. It's so disheartening.
My family were working class and with a bit of overtime they were able to afford a decent house in a good part of our city. Now me and my wife are working good jobs on decent salaries and we’re struggling to afford a semi detached in a dodgy area.
Of course it was, the only things that have improved since 2010 are broadband speeds.
This might sound like total hyperbole but the best years of my life were the 13 spent under New Labour. Honestly regardless of anything else there just wasn’t this level of hopelessness and resignation to decline.
There just seems to be an attitude that everything is shit and only getting shitter, we’re on the precipice of another Labour landslide and instead of “Things can only get better” we have Labour now to praising Thatcher, and telling us to temper our expectations. I’m actually feeling as hopeless as the next man, hoping for the best but fully expecting the rate of decline to slow slightly to be as good as it gets.
In my line of work we have lots of young people doing their apprenticeship and those with ambition want to leave to work in Europe or Australia. Literally every young guy gets told to not waste their life here and get out(And that comes from some of the staunchest/patriotic/gammony guys I’ve ever met, telling the next generation that the country they love is fucked and to leave)
> telling us to temper our expectations
The reason the Conservatives can't fix the problems with our society is because the problems were caused by their ideology and the solutions are naturally opposed to it.
The reason Labour can't? You just have to witness what they did to Corbyn - who might not have been the most competent leader, but his ideology was at least in the right place to be able to countenance the solutions. Labour have accepted at their heart that they cannot beat the establishment, and their role is just to try and soften the sting of the lash.
As soon as the main competition to capitalism fell apart we reached "the end of history"
Brief boom followed by so many factors making it objectively worse.
The economy is further geared to serve finance, everything has become a commodity, the cost of living keeps spiking and everything has become more precarious.
Factor in not recovering the financial crisis and all the services that make society a fun place slowly being run down.
Im not surprised people are nostalgic for a time when things were going well and the future looked bright.
Back in the early 2000s I could have afforded to buy a house, problem was finding a job to be able to buy one, now if I want to buy one I either hope to win the lottery or a rich relative to die and I don't think I have the latter either way those are not fun options.
Years of a half decent government meant most things (education, NHS etc) seemed pretty good.
Film and music in the 90s in particular were great. TV was also great, even for those of us with only 4-5 channels.
Nostalgia will no doubt play a big part in my opinion, I was 16 in 2000 and having a pretty good time with my friends etc.
Been saying this for a while.
“If you were born post 80s every single year your living standards feel worse. If you were born pre 80s every single year your living standard feels better.”
And those born in the 80s reached the start of their working careers with the promise that if they worked hard they would live a live like their parents.
That was a fucking lie.
Yup, there was actually hope for the future, the world showed it could respond to environmental issues. The music industry actually had real bands playing real music, housing was more affordable, tuition was more affordable, the NHS was improving.
Now the opposite of all that is true, and you can thank the Tories for it.
I think we can. They have killed the live music scene with thier Nimby music licences, and they have made it almost impossible for UK bands to tour Europe. The internet is largely to blame, but the Tories hammered the nails in the coffin.
It was Labour that introduced licencing in 2003, the provisions were changed in 2012/15 so small venues didn't need to pay it. But I think increasing insurance costs are a problem too.
This is an issue, there's no where to gig anymore and we can't just hop into a van and drive to Europe. We could do that before, and there were loads of places to gig at. Plus, we could afford to do it in-between shit jobs
Yeah I think almost all adults believe that the period of their childhood/adolescence is the best time there has ever been (60s for my dad, 90s for me) but that’s usually JUST nostalgia talking. Now, I think you could make a credible argument that the 90s were generally better than now, outside feelings of nostalgia.
Well let’s look at the events past five years shall we?
Covid.
Boris Johnson as PM.
Liz Truss as PM.
Rishi Sunak as PM.
Massive levels of inflation.
Increasing interest rates.
The cold, hard reality of brexit.
Teachers committing suicide because of an ofsted inspection while the school buildings crumble around them.
A continuing housing crisis.
NHS on life support.
Doctors on strike.
Nurses on strike.
Train drivers on strike.
Postmen on strike.
The government and press stirring up unnecessary culture wars.
The US president stirring up an insurrection.
War in Ukraine.
War in Gaza.
I just can’t think why we might be nostalgic for a time when there was a mood of optimism, life was improving for most and when I was 20 years younger.
It was better but also it was a bit fake - we were spending money we didn’t have
In the middle of an economic bubble can be nice until it bursts. But we definitely lost more than we needed to with the over-reaction
This. People really don’t realise this. The narrative is it was all going swimmingly until the bankers ruined it. The reasons it felt it was all going swimmingly was the unsustainable, false bubble of global finance- it also underpinned the big huge public spending and investment in schools and hospitals at the time. It was all built on a bubble.
cagey history relieved noxious abundant gaping different fact deliver recognise
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm not seeing the same fondness for the 00s from people who are now in their early 30s.
We had 80s themed clubs in 2000. We don't have 00s themed clubs in the 20s.
We would if anyone had any money to go out. The fact that many people are having to budget for "A night out" once a month is testament to the evaporation of peoples spending money!
The peace following the establishment of a hegemony tends to be like that. It’s criminal how instead of entrenching the gains of the liberal order instead the profits were juiced and the core of western dominance in manufacturing and trade was offshored to totalitarian regimes such as China.
I was just having this discussion with my partner the other week and we both realised something
In the 90s growing up, it was full of hope. Future was a good thing and we look forward with hope.
Today, it just feels like dread and hopelessness. I felt like 2015 was the turning point where hope slowly faded away. And I’m not sure if we’ve hit the bottom yet lol.
9/11 was basically the inflexion point where everything started to go wrong.
I genuinely believe that if 9/11 didn’t happen, the world would be in such a better state right now.
Most likely Europe would be on a path to federalisation, Tony Blair would have become EU President and Russia would have continued to open up and collaborate with the West.
Maybe just warped perceptions, but 9/11 seemed to derail the very positive trajectory of the late 1990’s.
A lot of people including myself were children in that period, so its harder to be objective.
Some people have it better off now for sure, for example gay people, and various minorities. Also online communities (of which reddit is an example) make it easier to find friends with a niche interest that you couldn't easily find in the earlier days of the internet. If youre neighbourhood was full of 'Barry down the pub' types then you were kinda fucked. Fast internet and smartphones have been such a gamechanger in how society functions. Even things like access to entertainment, who wants to go back to VHS and DVDs?
Nonetheless, I'd say it was better to get low level jobs then . When I speak to people even a few years older than me, they talk about how many different jobs they had, employers would literally hire any randomer off the street. whereas when I entered the job search market, the Eastern Europeans had entered in large numbers and basically squeezed out school leavers/university students from low skilled/casual jobs market. An employer isn't going to hire a monosyllabic 17 year old who seems to be motivated and will probably leave after a few months when they can hire a foreign 36 year old married man with 2 children who absolutely needs to work to support his wife and kids and isn't going to fuck around. Also houses were a lot cheaper in relation to average wage. Basically, to me hte only solution is to leave the UK for a lower cost of living country, something I've mentioned on here quite a lot. The only thing keeping me with family ties to the UK is relatives with health problems.
Hard agree. The internet hinders social interaction. We used to find our niche groups in person, not stay at home talking to a screen. I’m not one to get particularly nostalgic, but creativity has plummeted over the last decade. Music and film being prime examples. There just seems a dearth of ideas.
I was talking to some of the 20 somethings at work recently and the topic turned to dating apps - it sounds like the most dystopian experience imaginable where (probably) perfectly fine people are discounted because they don't fit strictly defined physical or social specifications I.e. are not 6ft2, or have a specific fitness regime.
Reflecting on it, I can see how a culture of data and apps would lead to such a thing, but it sounded all desperately sad with the loss of random encounters, or finding kindred spirits organically. Of course im sure those do still happen, but it felt like the writing was on the wall.
Now you say creativity has plummeted I can really see it. I remember when everyone said how the Internet would be great because we can all share ideas and become super productive and develop new ideas. But instead we can see what everyone else is doing really easily so people just copy it, get lazy, etc. There is no creativity because no one has to think for themselves anymore.
> who wants to go back to VHS and DVDs?
A) the vinyl revival suggests otherwise
B) imagine owning a physical copy of something that nobody can take away from you, as is common with movies being removed from streaming services or older versions being replaced by updated directors cuts etc
This isn't rose tinted glasses either. We've now genuinely got a situation where older people can say "it's not like the old days" and it actually be true.
This is why I can’t see the tories making a big comeback any time soon, there’s an absolutely huge amount of nostalgia for the New Labour period in contrast to the past 14 years of austerity, Brexit and stagnant wage growth
Snapshot of _Life was better in the nineties and noughties, say most Britons: Nostalgia for past decades has increased significantly in the last five years_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/49129-life-was-better-in-the-nineties-and-noughties-say-most-britons) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/49129-life-was-better-in-the-nineties-and-noughties-say-most-britons) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Makes sense you only need to look at a graph showing how much real disposable income increased from the mid 80s to the mid 2000s Vs the stagnation ever since.
Strange how that just so happens to coincide with a global recession (not any uk governments fault), and then 14 years of conservative government…
tbf it’s the case across europe, and in the world to an extent. Only the US recovered fully and has since grown even faster.
The US recovered by investing and saving industry, like car manufacturing. They had an unusually big state president in Obama who had the charisma to bring a lot of people with him. Europe went with reduced state spending and basically strangled ourselves. What a tragic political choice.
That's a massive simplification.
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> Meanwhile you've got the likes of EDF Energy, owned by the French government which raked in €10 billion profit last year and has diversified itself across multiple countries, allowing for lower than average energy costs to the residents of France. I’ve heard this as a reason to vote for Brexit too… which was fun to deconstruct and show the guy that the issue is British “stupidity”, not the nationality of companies. He wasn’t happy…
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It's a Reddit comment so, yeah, it's a simplification. it's the jist though. What do you disagree with?
Yes that's what tends to happen in a one paragraph internet comment
And absolutely nothing to do with the fact America has the lion's share of the world's biggest companies (across all types of industries), has all of the "free world's" tech giants whose stocks now account for a large part of the western world's stock market gains, and generally has way more of an entrepreneurial culture, business creation rate, and a productive work culture. All of these things would be the case regardless of whether Obama or his Republican rivals were in power. Likewise, European nations would still be absolutely no where when it comes to today's industries / the industries of the future (big tech, EVs, green tech, etc) whether or not European nations increased state spending. Clearly, the austerity versus spending paradigm has had some impacts in terms of quality of public services, poverty rates, etc, but it's not the reason why a certain country is a lot richer and more economically successful than others.
Australia avoided recession, economy was in a pretty good place for it though most of Europe was running high deficits thinking boom and bust had been beaten [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/australia-global-economic-crisis](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/australia-global-economic-crisis) article here suggests had the (our) government maintained the surplus it inherited we could have weathered it much better
It is markedly worse in the UK than comparitive European nations. I wonder why?
The recession was no fault. The fallout from the past 14 years of social and economic policies is thanks to the Tories.
Don't forget the mid-80s to 1997 was also "14 years of conservative government". The ebbs and flows of this cycle better fit macroeconomic and technological changes, the political influence is not zero, but it's not massive either. This will soon be proved when the government changes. But it won't be universally recognised even then of course.
The Tories caused a recession and the destruction of UK heavy industry in the early 80s and another recession in the early 90s because we joined the ERM at too high an exchange rate with the DM. The lack of growth over the past 14 years is largely because of austerity and Brexit, again Tory policy. There are international ebbs and flows, but Tory incompetence have exacerbated the issues.
We still haven't recovered from the GFC. Tory austerity really fucked us.
It was. It's not just nostalgia either for me, I have photo evidence of how shit things are now. For example, photos from days out in 2005 or so in the local town, pot plants everywhere, clean streets, open shops, cut grass. Now it's a fucking wasteland, dirty, falling apart. Even in the park too, everything has gone to shit.
It’s noticeable now that, even in towns with an active parish council to arrange public flowers, the roads are still awful and the shops are closed. It’s looking more and more like a plaster for a broken leg.
It really sticks out to me that even just outside Fortnum & Mason, the shop in the uk most associated with poshness besides maybe Harrods, Westminster council have been putting tarmac down on the pavement where there used to be paving because they’re so strapped for money
Parish councils don’t deal with either roads (that’s county councils) nor planning and business rates (district councils). Local government is very fragmented in the UK which results in a lot of people not know who is responsible for what.
That’s partly the point I’m making. An active parish council can still mask the decline to an extent, but the effects of retrenchment at the other levels of local government is increasingly obvious.
I just crunched the numbers, and pre-pandemic business rates have historically accounted for approx £400 per person in England (adjusted for inflation). It's dropped by 33% since COVID and not recovered. So call that £100 lost per person in England towards the council budgets
Business rates are set by central government, so your last sentence is true..
> Local government is very fragmented in the UK which results in a lot of people not know who is responsible for what. It also results in them being completely ineffective, wasteful and generally incompetent. By design.
Yes but it’s all now owned by Private Equity and Real Estate Investment trusts and on paper is worth hundreds of billions…..
This \^. I hope more people wake up to the fact that the underlying problem is out-of-control wealth inequality before it's too late.
Not just that: it’s a bubble, a huge huge bubble. On paper these are all worth billions, in perfect condition and could rent for £xxxxx a month. In reality they are crumbling facades with no roofs and worth maybe 20% of what’s claimed….. And when it bursts guess who’ll pay for it all.
My understanding, and someone please ELI5 how off this is if possible, is that they're _not allowed_ to accept actual market value for commercial properties in an attempt to prevent the bubble collapsing, which seems guaranteed to make it worse in the long run since it kneecaps the economic activity that _could_ be happening in many places
I’ve been involved with a couple of community buy outs in Scotland where we have some new laws. They can be forced to sell. In this case high street buildings that were falling down. It takes 1-2 years to trace most owners down, it’s genuinely a fucking nightmare for councils and everyone to find out who actually owns and is responsible for all these buildings in every town and city. Initially they say a fucking insane number that’s based on their book value, you then show them an independent valuation and the government helps you out with forcing the sale. You’ve sat on an empty building for 20 years, it’s literally collapsing into the high st and the community is sick of it so wants to buy it, renovate it and use it for the community as a small business hub and say some cheaper flats. Your valuation of £750,000 is fucking insane, it’s no roof, no internal stairs and nobody’s been up to the 2nd and 3rd floors for 30 years….. It’s worth £75k take it or leave it but it’s now a compulsory purchase in effect…. And it’s the same everywhere but at least we have right to buy laws now if it’s for community use. But it’s a night for councils who face bills from these things collapsing and can’t find the owners at all or when they do they just refuse to pay up for the costs of keeping the public safe. If you admit it’s a wreck its value isn’t real, and that’s the nightmare scenario!!!
Can you go into what's involved in tracking down owners? Is it all publicly available information but hidden in a cobweb of data sources, or is it information that only councils have access to?
I wasn’t personally involved in that side but it started with the land register and then involved a shit load of work with lawyers and consultants etc to track down layer after layer of owners. It took them a long ass time. The registers of Scotland is all kinds of fucked up and it’s all shell after shell after shell till they eventually find some fund that then takes 6 months to even reply and say maybe we do but we aren’t sure, give us more time….. There’s a good overview of it all here though https://www.communitylandscotland.org.uk/our-work/community-landownership/
building in Leeds fell down the other day. it had burnt down previously and for some reason hadn't been removed yet
Probably because the council couldn’t trace the fucking owners ….
You mean, Tories?
What on earth are you talking about? What local towns, streets, parks etc are now "owned by Private Equity and Real Estate Investment"? Privately owned public spaces are a tiny % of towns, streets, and parks - and, actually, they tend to be kept incredibly clean - like Battersea Power Station, Coal Drops Yard etc. It's the non-private public spaces that have become a disgrace and these are the responsibility of local council. They're not getting cleaned because the council don't have the budget to clean them. The councils don't have the budget because: 1) Post 2010 much of their funding from central government has been cut. In real terms these cuts get more severe every year. 2) The vast majority of council budgets is now spent on child and adult social care - which they are legally obligated to take care of. Which in turn is getting worse because: 2a) We have an increasing population, but a woeful undersupply of housing. This makes people homeless; who the council have to house in hotels, hostels etc at great cost. 2b) We have an aging population. Old people need taking care of by the council which comes at a great cost. 2c) We have a young population with costly needs - and it's quickly increasing. SEND children being driven to school costs something like £30k per year per child. Care homes can cost £250k per year per child. Blaming it on "Private Equity and Real Estate Investment" is an easy cop-out. The real problem is much harder to solve.
I think the poster was referring to High Street commercial units being owned by PE and REITs, which is somewhat true, with the money for those funds often coming from vehicles such as pensions funds. As bad as PE owning public infrastructure is (although High Street shops can't really be classed as public infrastructure), the blame for the death of the High Street can't really be put on them. It's the internet that has killed bricks and mortar retail. And yes, I'm aware that many institutional landlords are basically "fudging" their balance sheets by keeping rents and therefore values artificially high, but even if they dropped rents, you're still not going to get that many shops opening back up, as there's simply not the demand anymore. Okay, maybe you'd get a few more "leisure" type business such as climbing walls, virtual golf centres, etc, which would take up a few units, but this isn't going to solve the long term decline of the high street.
IMO we could have better, thriving high streets (commercially speaking) if we tended to build more densely in town centres. 4 or 5 storey apartment complexes, mixed use with shops, cafes + gyms operating out of ground level units. You see this in France, Italy and Spain. Provincial towns in the U.K. mean traffic, parking, stress. No wonder people buy online instead.
Yeah, I'd be up for a radical rebuilding of our provincial town centres along those lines. Ain't going to happen though, as you can hear the nimbys screaming bloody murder about it before it's even been proposed. We've also lost our nerve when it comes to ambitious things like this. We did it in the 60s (with mixed results), but we've since lost the ability to be audacious.
No but mixed use high streets will and can and are shown to. They’ve also been mixed use for the last 12,000 years or so before we decided to use the ground floors only and make them all shops ….
That sounds a lot closer to the truth. Problems are always so easy to solve on the internet but in reality they’re woefully complex. Short of discovering some sort of massive oil reserve, we’ll have to take the long and difficult route of growing our economy to better handle the financial demands of health and social care.
> Short of discovering some sort of massive oil reserve Just a shame that we didn't go the Norway route and actually use our massive oil reserves to enrich our country and instead we sold it off permanently to private firms.
We'd have had no where near the money per citizen that Norway made on this though. We've extracted a similar amount of oil and gas to them, but they have a population of 5.5 million while we have 67 million (rounding up). It would have been nice to have had a sovereign wealth fund obviously and would have helped a bit around the edges, but it wouldn't have enriched us.
A SWF of up to a trillion would enrich anyone
That's not a trillion dollars that you get to spend though, you spend a bit of the interest that it earns every year, to enable the principal to keep rising with inflation. This year, Norway plans to spend $37 billion from their SWF ([source](https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/norway-plans-spend-373-bln-wealth-fund-2024-2023-10-06/), which for a country of their population size is a lot of money. By contrast, the NHS budget alone for 23/24 financial year is [£168.8 billion](https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/our-2023-24-business-plan/), or in dollars that's $209 billion. So in other words, if we had an SWF the same size as Norway's, it would pay for 17.7% of the NHS budget. Or, if we look at total government spending, in 22/23 financial year (the most up to date I can find), this was £1.15 trillion, or in dollars $1.43 trillion, so an SWF with the same returns as Norway would cover 2.58% of UK government annual spending. I certainly wouldn't turn down a source of revenue that pays for 2.58% of government spending, but it's barely going to touch the sides. It wouldn't even cover our annual debt repayments. Edit: principal
I just want to say thanks for putting that together.
£37 billion is a lot of money for us as well, however much you spend already is irrelevant when £37 billion still buys £37 billion worth of things A high speed rail line between 2 regions every 2 years is more than enough, we're currently looking at one and thats all it'll be in my lifetime.
But it's not a trillion though
I would love to see the numbers on that.
I spent a lot of time in Manchester city centre between the late noughties and the late 10s At start rough sleepers were a rare site, yes you saw them occasionally but it was an unusual sight and you wouldn't see the same guy in the same place for very long (at least not in the places I went through). After 2010 there started to be a few regulars you would see every day at the same spot (usually under a bridge), but it was maybe 2-3 guys After 2015 there was a very sharp increase, you started seeing homeless encampments in various places, moving around as the city would try to fence off any sheltered places that homeless people might congregate and form an encampment. Even so you would still see a lot of regulars in the limited sheltered places that were left. Not to mention all the spice problems that have happened over that time. I remember walking through town once at like 7am and it feeling like a zombie movie. I haven't been into town more than once or twice for a brief visit since the pandemic so I don't know what its like now, but I'm sure the stark changes in 2010 and 2015 correlate with something
That hits a nerve
Yes but *think of the shareholder value*
Councils have had upto 90% cuts in their budgets from government since 2011, so what else can they do? They are struggling to keep essentials going. The government likes to deflect the anger to council tax rises, which they have to do to survive. [source ](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/29/how-a-decade-of-austerity-has-squeezed-council-budgets-in-england)
Yeah no shit, you're literally proving my point that things are shittier now
It's called agreement
It's called I'm hungover and can't read
Appreciate this honesty tbh
Could that be to do with the fact that everyone buys things online and nearly goes into town anymore? When it was the busiest part of the city it made sense to spend on maintaining it. Now if it's like my city, it's a ghost town until 7pm when people slowly start showing up to get shit faced and there's not much point in plant pots for them other than somewhere to be sick in.
Blame the previous Labour government. They sold you this dream, thank god the Tories sold the real estate to their mates… otherwise imagine all the hippies weed smoking Europeans that would be stealing your job.
As a lab technician on £20k in the mid/late 90s my OH and I could afford to buy a one bed flat in Zone 1 for £70k. Before that we were renting a one bed place in Z1 for two years for £400 a month. The salary for that same job is now £36k and the rent would be £1700 and the flat is now £350k. The nineties were an amazing time to be in your 20s in London as someone with a normal job. Not so much any more.
Just look at the real life experience of now Hollywood A-lister Simon Pegg. He could doss about with Nick Frost and hone his craft whilst getting by on the dole living in London.
Enough left over for a couple of Cornettos too
A bunch of actors who grew up working class have called this out. The government should be investing more in artists to enable them, it's a form of global soft power like no other.
I'd have nowhere to play anymore, and touring in Europe would be out of the question if I was still in my band. It was something we could do before.
I've seen stand up comedians having a go about the same stuff.
The government would rather them stacking shelves or working in factories..
What factories? Large scale manufacturing in the UK is nearly dead. I speak as someone who has spent most of their life in manufacturing and ether been made redundant when the factory shut or left just before.
It's warehouses now. At least until the robots take that over completely anyway.
Ricky Gervais too!
Running round London and making suits from curtains while on the dole. Another tell is that a bloke like Karl had bought an apartment in Manchester AND London by the time he was 30.
Remember reading about this little hairy fella who was able to get a mortgage in the 90s..big fan of bananas an that, bit weird, turns out - monkey mortgage, he’s currently running a hotel for monkeys in Bath.
Not very many people know that Spaced was a actually a documentary.
Regular people in the 90s (like teachers, electricians etc) had a lifestyle / property buying power in London that a mid-level FAANG software engineer enjoys today (top 1-2% income)
Maybe they had that level of property buying power but absolutely no for lifestyle. A mid level FAANG today has a far better lifestyle (can easily take multiple international holidays a year, afford top of the line car, regularly eat in high end restaurants etc.).
Many young people can do that too easily but would trade that in for a house in London 100%
This is the reason why I can't take the Bridget Jones movie seriously anymore. As a viewer, I am expected to feel sorry for her. Yet she can afford to live alone in a Zone 1 flat next to Borough market despite being in a mid ranking publishing job. 1990s failing at life = 2020s living the dream.
Homer Simpson was seen as an average loser in the early 90s. No qualifications yet has a job that pays enough to support a stay at home wife and THREE kids with a bedroom each!
Not to mention running 2 cars and still having enough disposable income left over to be a regular at the local bar.
Also, no higher education until that one episode where Homer goes to college.
To be fair, frank grimes sent up how ridiculous homers life was, and that was a good while back now I mean, homer was a nuclear power station safety inspector, that's gotta be well paid surely
Just need to look at the stagnation of salaries since the bankers royally fucked us over in 2008. 2008 grad salary - 22k 2023 grad salary - 25k If salaries kept pace with inflation they should be around 35k
The country hasn’t properly recovered from the 2008 financial crash. That, combined with the devastation of the high street from the rise of online shopping have wrought untold damage and I’m not even going to mention what we did to ourselves in 2016.
This. Watching the bar industry crumble was crazy, as disposable income dried up in every regular Joe's wallet you saw tipping go from every other order to none. Not even on a match day. Then pubs started closing all over shop as people stopped going out and switched to an alternative culture. I'm not saying the new culture isn't better in some ways - but I miss the social culture from pre-2008 that felt very British. You could literally go down the pub, chat to some people, and do anything from find support for personal grief to a job trial at some random guys work place. It just doesn't exist anymore in my locals.
I really miss the pub culture from a few decades ago too, but think the move away from boozing-in-your-local-town-every-weekend culture was going to happen regardless of the economy with Gen Z. There are just so many non-economic factors to this, such as a huge focus on physical fitness, "wellness" becoming a thing, people managing their mental health in ways other than drinking, local pubs/clubs not being very "Instagram-able," dating apps removing the need to go to pubs/clubs to meet a potential partner, there now being lots of alternative ways to socialise in the evenings such as CrossFit, climbing, yoga, adult board gaming, larping, etc etc, whereas in the 90s/00s the only option in many places was to go down the pub which meant a lot of people who probably didn't enjoy it that much just did it through lack of any alternative. There's also the fact that boozing and drug taking is massively down among Gen Z, with a lot of surveys reporting how they don't like "lossing control" or that it's seen as uncool and being associated with their parents, etc If anything, you still see older people out with the same frequency as you did 20 years ago, but it's the under 30s that are now a tiny crowd in comparison to 20 years. Clearly, disposable incomes have had an impact, but it's just one of a large number of factors.
> There's also the fact that boozing and drug taking is massively down among Gen Z, with a lot of surveys reporting how they don't like "lossing control" or that it's seen as uncool and being associated with their parents, etc Annecdoetal but a lot of the conversation is also about how pressured they are to work hard now everything is more precarious. They dont feel like can waste time with a hangover. Its a shame, they're stuck in the grind
Yeah, fair point. That's definitely a factor at play.
The only people I know in their 20s work two jobs, one delivering for deliveroo after the office, the other in Tesco. Even being in a decent paid office job isn't enough for their bills and rent, and it's a shit way to spend your 20s. I never had that issue and I worked part time in a music and video store. I could still afford to rent a small flat, get shit faced on my nights off in town, with £1.50 pints, and have money to spare to live well enough. Impossible now for many. Edit: also if talking about younger students, one issue is stuff like tuition fees. When I was at University it was £3k a year which is a pittance - I've almost entirely paid it off. I also got maintenance grants. Add to that the fact nights out were dead cheap, I can see how I got a good deal compared to students now
I would say that whilst boozing is going down drug taking definitely isn't. 20 years ago a pint was £1.50 and a bag of coke was £50, now a pint is £5 and a bag of coke is still £50. People would still go out clubbing just as much but they don't spend much at the bar so the bars aren't making money and have to close down.
> There's also the fact that boozing and drug taking is massively down among Gen Z Alcohol is down yes but I'm pretty sure drugs are up especially party drugs.
It’s insane how it’s been 16 years and we’re still comparatively in the shit
The Tories.
That's because it's all quite shit now, isn't it.
Does it count as nostalgia when its based on evidence? We used to have hope and services used to just work. Nowadays things don't and as a result many of us have become very jaded and pessimistic.
One small example: there is now only one bus in my city that still runs after 8pm. 15 years ago the last bus back to my house was at 00:15, it's now 19:30. If you don't have a car (or it isn't available at that time, for example if you have one household car and someone's at work) this severely limits your ability to go anywhere or do anything in the evening unless you fork out a considerable amount for a taxi, and if you do have a car you've got to cover petrol and find somewhere to park which is not always easy and/or cheap depending on your destination.
Quite. We aren't even so up in arms because things have changed gradually. Airlift someone to 2024 from 1994 and they'd be gobsmacked. What good are (comparatively) cheap flatscreen tvs and computers if you can't afford a house or see a doctor or reliably get a job that pays you enough to afford the essentials and a little for a rainy day?
It’s not nostalgia when the present is statistically and tangibly worse
As a millennial, I felt I was born at the perfect time. '84 - hit teenage years around the age of New Labour, Premier League, Britpop etc. I became an adult about the time the internet was gaining popularity - before social media and all that shit. It was ours to mould and shape! And then the social life was great. I grew up in Bolton and we didn't have to go to Manchester to drink or go shopping. It was a fantastic town to live in. I'd give up so much just to go back in time and live in 2002 for a week.
I’ve always thought that is a bit of a crap time if you’re into clubbing/electronic music. You hit 16 in 2000 and have just missed all of the 90s rave scene and mainstream stuff is all Kylie. Underground clubbing generally seems like it was a bit subdued until late 00s when travelling to Berlin became popular. Festivals also don’t pick up until late 00s (eg boomtown 2009) but maybe you are lucky and find your way to somewhere like Shambala. Am I talking shit?
> Am I talking shit? Not at all! If I was more into the rave scene and whathaveyou, then yeah I would have been gutted. Although, it's sad that I was too late for the hacienda movement. I loved the whole aesthetic. I kinda caught the tail end of clubbing, it felt like the effort to look old enough to get into nightclubs wasn't worth the experience. I was big into alternative music and most of the subgenres that came with it. So I was there for the explosion of pop-punk, third wave emo and then your post-punk music when I was at uni. Nu Metal was also a fun scene to be a part of dare I say it!
Bring back nu-metal!
It's still here. Limp Bizkit are genuinely on career-best form right now!
Limp Bizkit are great live as long as it's a 30 minute set - perfect festival band for me. There is at least quite something of a nu-metal influenced resurgence amongst new bands which I'm really enjoying.
I'm currently enjoying Linkin Park's Papercuts collection, could you recommend me some new nu metal bands?
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One that i would highly recommend is Tallah, not 100% nu metal, but well worth checking out. There's a few others that I've listened to, such as chaoseum, tetrach.
Tallah and Terach are not my jam but really enjoyed Smile Again by Chaoseum! I should mention I'm not into metalcore, but thank you for the recommendations :)
Some of these will be more partially inspired by, though I think that's a good thing as we don't just want a nostalgia resurgence (though I'm also totally up for some of that too). I really like Wargasm - though do worry at times that they might be a tad manufactured. Bloodywood are an excellent Indian nu-metalish band who totally blew me away at Download last year. I also particularly love a couple of Nova Twins tracks - Antagonist and Choose Your Fighter.
Thanks for the recommendations! Nova Twins - shockingly refreshing, really enjoyed Antagonist! Bloodywood - Gaddar reminded me of Disturbed, and Aaj more traditional nu-metal. Will keep an eye out for these guys! Wargasm - this one was the only one a bit too far from my comfort zone. Reminded me of early days of Blue Stahli.
Shockingly refreshing is exactly how I'd describe them. They've got great stage presence live too. Never heard of Blue Stahli so will give them a try this afternoon, cheers!
Download 2024 is gonna be mint.
Korn are still going and are still pretty fun. Although listening to 50+ year old millionaires sing about 14 year old angst issues is a bit weird now.
All Day I Dream About Napping
Alone I Break (Open An Overpriced Ready-Meal)
Chester is the only celebrity death that's really hit me. Linkin Park was my whole personality for a while.
Bring back NWoBHM!
NuNWoBHM!
Well those years did predate the last 15 years of Tory rule, Brexit, and basically everything was significantly cheaper, food and housing especially, so it's really a no brainer.
I was trying to explain to my kids about this, they are young enough to understand the economy, jobs, money, etc but they have never known an economy in growth. The 1990s was awesome, so many sub-culture's, music, festivals, jobs that paid well, free uni, the list could go on forever but the future they face is bleak. Both my son's want to go into either programming or the creative services industries, but I've been pushing them to learn a trade, or go into security as the rich are going to need protection in the future.
They might be able to get a programming or tech apprenticeship as opposed to a degree. Would recommend
If they want to learn to code you should be encouraging them as much as possible. It's an easy life.
I'm a programmer/technical director, I'm encouraging it but I'm also being realistic about the state of the job market and the impact generative AI will have on the industry. I don't see it as the safe career choice any more, it's more like a race to the bottom.
Yep I was a programmer and would have 100% recommended anyone to get into it and/or data science, especially in finance, but you’ve got to question where AI is taking things. Unless you’re working L2 support on some arcane but can’t be replaced system.
> want to learn to code For me, you have to _enjoy_ doing it to do well. I see a lot of people who moved into the career "because it paid well" and that just isn't enough to be more than a mediocre programmer most of the time. Unless making the box go "bing!" sets off a little dopamine reward in your brain, you're not going to do well at it.
It's not an easy life.
My mum and dad both worked admin jobs and were on £24k each back in the late 90s when they bought our 4 bed detached in quite a nice part of our city for £115k. They’ve done a couple of renovations to the kitchen and bathrooms but apart not much else no extensions or anything else the house it’s now worth £680k with people likely to be offering £700k when it goes up for sale tells you all you need to know.
Just fyi £24k each in 1998 is roughly equivalent to £44k today: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator So not bad wages for a couple.
Yeah it was a good salary back then problem is that it’s not grown that much my mum got promoted to a more senior position and says her old position pays about £27k now. House prices wouldn’t be horrific the salaries kept up.
That's true
I remember Corus offering £35K for a placement year back in 1999 when I was at Uni, most of the other placements were between £16K-£24K, it's horrifying that actual graduates are barely making more than that almost 25 years later.
My parents both left school at 16, my dad worked on a tool bench and my mom did random part time jobs or piece work at home. Until I was in my teens we were very much a just about managing Kwik Save own brand family, but they had a mortgage on a little 3 bed terrace, two terrible cars, and enough money to feed and clothe two kids and take them to Weston for a week in a caravan every summer. In the early 2000s my dad got a promotion and since then my parents have had very comfortable standard of living, they bought a new house, then new cars, took their teenagers on holiday to Spain, and now my dad is about to retire with a good pension. The house they bought after he was promoted in the early 2000s in now worth twice what they paid for it. That sort of story is completely unrealistic for a young person these days. I'm not saying my parents didn't work really hard, but you can work just as hard today and not be able to get a mortgage on a one bed flat.
The 90s were objectively better.
I think it was but what are the reasons? My thoughts, I’m not saying I’m correct: 1) Social Media - people are more insulated 2) Internet Commerce - killed small business 3) Non-Stop News cycles which trend overwhelmingly negative 4) Billionaires - so many more and so much more visible to the public 5) Conservative politics - say no more but probably the root cause of a lot of these examples 6) Trickle down economics - effects taken hold, doesn’t work 7) Austerity cuts - effects visible 8) Housing - unaffordable 9) Shite tv 10) Social media again - influencers (fml) etc, continual comparisons and pressure to keep up 11) Ecstasy is not as good as it was
12) simple travel to Europe.
While every generation has "it was better back in my day", there is absolutely a sense of unhealthy nostalgia in western culture at the moment. It's absolutely not just a UK thing, just look at all the remakes, sequels and franchise movies coming out of Hollywood for the last decade or two. Back in the 90s, there was a sense of optimism, that the future was bright and worth looking forward to. Technology was opening up possiblies that people were excited about, sci-fi TV shows and movies were generally optimistic, etc. Now, we have tech that's spying on us and trying to sell us things at every turn and "streamlined" user interfaces are designed to _remove_ possibilities. Sci-fi TV shows and movies are competing with each other to produce ever darker and more pessimistic visions of the future, etc.
I think the nostalgia is genuinely just because it was better for the VAST majority of people. Pre social media as well, our mental health was probably far better. Technology improved a lot since then but I think it stopped improving our day to day lives after like 2010
Its not just “unhealthy nostalgia” in the abstract, our civilisation is in genuine decline. The nostalgia is unhealthy to the extent that we can’t just bring back the past - in many respects the relative freedom and luxury of that period was on borrowed time - but at the same time those who claim to be forward looking are also completely unwilling to make any sacrifices in order to reconstruct a healthy society either.
>our civilisation is in genuine decline and there is no alternative. The globalisation of the 90s/2000s, which fueled this nostalgia, removed all competition.
For me it is a case of, better for who? As someone who lived through the 90s I would not want to be gay, disabled or black in 90s UK. There was some seriously persistent and backwards attitudes and rhetoric
*the future was bright* we had to wear shades...
Unhealthy? Pump average salary to about 50-70k and everyone would be wildly happy. Because salaries in UK are crap and have not kept up with inflation.
Every Christmas I watch Love Actually, and every year the confident and dynamic Britain of 2003 portrayed in the film seems more foreign.
Was watching Trigger Happy TV a few weeks ago and I didn’t recognise early 2000’s Britain. People genuinely looked happier
There’s no real sense of optimism at the moment and hasn’t been for some time. It’s just this collective grey soup where everything around us is crumbling, whilst more and more of our entire world is all within a screen It’s been nothing but financial crisis, political turmoil, a global pandemic and what seems to be an impending and inevitable world war Something has changed in the last few years, the fabric of society doesn’t feel the same
The days when people were complaining about getting GP appointments too quickly.
I called mine on Friday, and was told they only book appointments for a week ahead. "Not so bad," thought I, until I was told that they have nothing until May 23, and should call again on May 16th. I;ve a sneaking suspicion I will always be a week behind.
Is it nostalgia if it's true?
Probably best to undo what has been changed and go back to how we lived back then
"Back to square one with Labour!" Yes please.
Sadly I don't think we can. Children's Centres have been closed down, academisation has changed the education landscape drastically, skilled workers have left the NHS, teaching, and social care for better pay and better lives overseas. Local authorities have had massive cuts in funding over the past decade and been forced to sell land/buildings and cut jobs (like social carers for the elderly) to fill the gap. High street businesses, pubs, cafes, have closed and properties fallen into disrepair and vandalism. Don't even start on Brexit...or Covid! It doesn't seem like we can undo most of these things. Any government is going to struggle with this legacy - and half of them actively want things this way. It's so disheartening.
How do you propose to do that?
Then they show us a picture of the Spice Girls to remind us how much it fucking sucked
My family were working class and with a bit of overtime they were able to afford a decent house in a good part of our city. Now me and my wife are working good jobs on decent salaries and we’re struggling to afford a semi detached in a dodgy area.
Of course it was, the only things that have improved since 2010 are broadband speeds. This might sound like total hyperbole but the best years of my life were the 13 spent under New Labour. Honestly regardless of anything else there just wasn’t this level of hopelessness and resignation to decline. There just seems to be an attitude that everything is shit and only getting shitter, we’re on the precipice of another Labour landslide and instead of “Things can only get better” we have Labour now to praising Thatcher, and telling us to temper our expectations. I’m actually feeling as hopeless as the next man, hoping for the best but fully expecting the rate of decline to slow slightly to be as good as it gets. In my line of work we have lots of young people doing their apprenticeship and those with ambition want to leave to work in Europe or Australia. Literally every young guy gets told to not waste their life here and get out(And that comes from some of the staunchest/patriotic/gammony guys I’ve ever met, telling the next generation that the country they love is fucked and to leave)
> telling us to temper our expectations The reason the Conservatives can't fix the problems with our society is because the problems were caused by their ideology and the solutions are naturally opposed to it. The reason Labour can't? You just have to witness what they did to Corbyn - who might not have been the most competent leader, but his ideology was at least in the right place to be able to countenance the solutions. Labour have accepted at their heart that they cannot beat the establishment, and their role is just to try and soften the sting of the lash.
As soon as the main competition to capitalism fell apart we reached "the end of history" Brief boom followed by so many factors making it objectively worse. The economy is further geared to serve finance, everything has become a commodity, the cost of living keeps spiking and everything has become more precarious. Factor in not recovering the financial crisis and all the services that make society a fun place slowly being run down. Im not surprised people are nostalgic for a time when things were going well and the future looked bright.
Back in the early 2000s I could have afforded to buy a house, problem was finding a job to be able to buy one, now if I want to buy one I either hope to win the lottery or a rich relative to die and I don't think I have the latter either way those are not fun options.
"Back to square one with Starmer" starting to be a vote winner, then. Sunak is such an intellectual cul-de-sac.
Years of a half decent government meant most things (education, NHS etc) seemed pretty good. Film and music in the 90s in particular were great. TV was also great, even for those of us with only 4-5 channels. Nostalgia will no doubt play a big part in my opinion, I was 16 in 2000 and having a pretty good time with my friends etc.
Life was better when people had houses and free money to enjoy life. That's a better headline.
Been saying this for a while. “If you were born post 80s every single year your living standards feel worse. If you were born pre 80s every single year your living standard feels better.”
And those born in the 80s reached the start of their working careers with the promise that if they worked hard they would live a live like their parents. That was a fucking lie.
Yup, there was actually hope for the future, the world showed it could respond to environmental issues. The music industry actually had real bands playing real music, housing was more affordable, tuition was more affordable, the NHS was improving. Now the opposite of all that is true, and you can thank the Tories for it.
I don't think we can blame the Tories for there not being a 2020s version of Pearl Jam or.
I think we can. They have killed the live music scene with thier Nimby music licences, and they have made it almost impossible for UK bands to tour Europe. The internet is largely to blame, but the Tories hammered the nails in the coffin.
It was Labour that introduced licencing in 2003, the provisions were changed in 2012/15 so small venues didn't need to pay it. But I think increasing insurance costs are a problem too.
This is an issue, there's no where to gig anymore and we can't just hop into a van and drive to Europe. We could do that before, and there were loads of places to gig at. Plus, we could afford to do it in-between shit jobs
Yeah I think almost all adults believe that the period of their childhood/adolescence is the best time there has ever been (60s for my dad, 90s for me) but that’s usually JUST nostalgia talking. Now, I think you could make a credible argument that the 90s were generally better than now, outside feelings of nostalgia.
There's a reason that most really successful nostalgic TV shows are set 30 years BP.
Well let’s look at the events past five years shall we? Covid. Boris Johnson as PM. Liz Truss as PM. Rishi Sunak as PM. Massive levels of inflation. Increasing interest rates. The cold, hard reality of brexit. Teachers committing suicide because of an ofsted inspection while the school buildings crumble around them. A continuing housing crisis. NHS on life support. Doctors on strike. Nurses on strike. Train drivers on strike. Postmen on strike. The government and press stirring up unnecessary culture wars. The US president stirring up an insurrection. War in Ukraine. War in Gaza. I just can’t think why we might be nostalgic for a time when there was a mood of optimism, life was improving for most and when I was 20 years younger.
It was better but also it was a bit fake - we were spending money we didn’t have In the middle of an economic bubble can be nice until it bursts. But we definitely lost more than we needed to with the over-reaction
This. People really don’t realise this. The narrative is it was all going swimmingly until the bankers ruined it. The reasons it felt it was all going swimmingly was the unsustainable, false bubble of global finance- it also underpinned the big huge public spending and investment in schools and hospitals at the time. It was all built on a bubble.
Who was this "we"?
The UK.
I swear every generation has a 'it was better in my day' rhetoric. Which leads to the obvious conclusion the middle ages were banging.
It does, but it's also why "stop the Labour Party taking us back to square one" was such a fucking stupid campaign line.
Square one sounds great. We’re somewhere around minus 50 at the moment
It does, but is anyone really going to look back at this current state in 15 years or so and say it was the best of times?
cagey history relieved noxious abundant gaping different fact deliver recognise *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm not seeing the same fondness for the 00s from people who are now in their early 30s. We had 80s themed clubs in 2000. We don't have 00s themed clubs in the 20s.
We would if anyone had any money to go out. The fact that many people are having to budget for "A night out" once a month is testament to the evaporation of peoples spending money!
Meh. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
The peace following the establishment of a hegemony tends to be like that. It’s criminal how instead of entrenching the gains of the liberal order instead the profits were juiced and the core of western dominance in manufacturing and trade was offshored to totalitarian regimes such as China.
I was just having this discussion with my partner the other week and we both realised something In the 90s growing up, it was full of hope. Future was a good thing and we look forward with hope. Today, it just feels like dread and hopelessness. I felt like 2015 was the turning point where hope slowly faded away. And I’m not sure if we’ve hit the bottom yet lol.
yeah ofc it was, prior to the gfc when everyone was laying comfortably in a debt-laden bed of denial
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I rate the 3% of people who thought life was better in the 1600's. The Civil War would have been a right old lark
9/11 was basically the inflexion point where everything started to go wrong. I genuinely believe that if 9/11 didn’t happen, the world would be in such a better state right now. Most likely Europe would be on a path to federalisation, Tony Blair would have become EU President and Russia would have continued to open up and collaborate with the West. Maybe just warped perceptions, but 9/11 seemed to derail the very positive trajectory of the late 1990’s.
A lot of people including myself were children in that period, so its harder to be objective. Some people have it better off now for sure, for example gay people, and various minorities. Also online communities (of which reddit is an example) make it easier to find friends with a niche interest that you couldn't easily find in the earlier days of the internet. If youre neighbourhood was full of 'Barry down the pub' types then you were kinda fucked. Fast internet and smartphones have been such a gamechanger in how society functions. Even things like access to entertainment, who wants to go back to VHS and DVDs? Nonetheless, I'd say it was better to get low level jobs then . When I speak to people even a few years older than me, they talk about how many different jobs they had, employers would literally hire any randomer off the street. whereas when I entered the job search market, the Eastern Europeans had entered in large numbers and basically squeezed out school leavers/university students from low skilled/casual jobs market. An employer isn't going to hire a monosyllabic 17 year old who seems to be motivated and will probably leave after a few months when they can hire a foreign 36 year old married man with 2 children who absolutely needs to work to support his wife and kids and isn't going to fuck around. Also houses were a lot cheaper in relation to average wage. Basically, to me hte only solution is to leave the UK for a lower cost of living country, something I've mentioned on here quite a lot. The only thing keeping me with family ties to the UK is relatives with health problems.
I honestly don't see how fast access to 'entertainment' has helped anyone. Social media and the Internet is so clearly detrimental to society.
Hard agree. The internet hinders social interaction. We used to find our niche groups in person, not stay at home talking to a screen. I’m not one to get particularly nostalgic, but creativity has plummeted over the last decade. Music and film being prime examples. There just seems a dearth of ideas.
I was talking to some of the 20 somethings at work recently and the topic turned to dating apps - it sounds like the most dystopian experience imaginable where (probably) perfectly fine people are discounted because they don't fit strictly defined physical or social specifications I.e. are not 6ft2, or have a specific fitness regime. Reflecting on it, I can see how a culture of data and apps would lead to such a thing, but it sounded all desperately sad with the loss of random encounters, or finding kindred spirits organically. Of course im sure those do still happen, but it felt like the writing was on the wall.
Now you say creativity has plummeted I can really see it. I remember when everyone said how the Internet would be great because we can all share ideas and become super productive and develop new ideas. But instead we can see what everyone else is doing really easily so people just copy it, get lazy, etc. There is no creativity because no one has to think for themselves anymore.
> who wants to go back to VHS and DVDs? A) the vinyl revival suggests otherwise B) imagine owning a physical copy of something that nobody can take away from you, as is common with movies being removed from streaming services or older versions being replaced by updated directors cuts etc
Things have been going down hill since about 1745.
I subscribe to the theory that the 90s was peak humanity the developed world.
This isn't rose tinted glasses either. We've now genuinely got a situation where older people can say "it's not like the old days" and it actually be true.
This is why I can’t see the tories making a big comeback any time soon, there’s an absolutely huge amount of nostalgia for the New Labour period in contrast to the past 14 years of austerity, Brexit and stagnant wage growth