Under a labour government shocker

There were definitely worse things, but we all had way more money. In the 90's a person on a minimum wage job could get a mortgage, can you imagine?

So life was better when e didn't have a tory government absolutely fucking everything up that makes the country worth living in? Colour me shocked. (yes there are international factors at play, and factors beyond the government's control, but they have absolutely exacerbated every single one of those things)

I mean, I was pretty young at the time, but good god even I can see how we've been obliterated by inflation. There's a specific chocolate here in the UK, a tiny little one for children called Freddo the Frog. Just a little cartoon chocolate frog, nothing fancy.

Their price has multiplied by a factor of TWENTY in the past 20 years. And I know pretty damn well that the amount everyone is getting paid has not increased by a factor of 20. Sure this is just a small irrelevant little chocolate bar and other things have inflated less, but like. It's probably the easiest thing to notice.

But yeah also playing in the street or taking a bike ride around town with your friends was a thing when I was a kid. Sure we were all probably a nuisance, but these days... I don't think I've seen anyone playing outside in ten years. The places we'd ride bikes got bought up and removed. And even the idea of allowing children to play outside feels... socially unacceptable.

Also early Youtube and Facebook were COMPLETELY different beasts that just didn't have the millions of hours of design work put into them to suck people in and keep them there. Oh, and flash games were a really big thing too if you wanted to play on the computer. They were amazing. And big-name games were in a really good spot, paid DLC and the pay-to-win blight hadn't really started, and stuff like World of Warcraft, LAN Halo, and other games you could play over at a friend's house were at their peaks from a social point of view.

...I know nostalgia is a trap, but god, it really isn't hard to think of things to be nostalgic for from that time, and I was only born in the very late 90s. At least I've got plenty of friends online these days though.

I didn't ache in the morning, hairline was better, skin smoother...

Every boomer comic is about old people saying life was better when they were young, or that they hate their wife.

The strapline says "nostalgia" but we are in a cost-of-living crisis, the climate apocalypse is starting to kick in and there are conflicts happening that some have said resemble the precursors to WW1 and WW2.

And while things have been worse since the noughties (what are we calling the 2010s? The Blunder Years? The Enshittening) we seem to have fallen off a cliff half-way through. The Weaselverse was a funny idea thrown out there but it would explain a lot.

I wondered whether it is just some recentist bias, so, being a masochist, I went through every year and came up with a "shit years" list:

1. 1997 and 2020
2. 2019
3. 2021 into 2022
4. 2018
5. 2017

Now that's part of the 20-25 year (generational) cycle of The Reckoning, so is personal to me, but that weasal fucked me up good and proper.

[X] Member of the EU. [X] One of the wealthiest nations on earth. [X] The best healthcare on earth. [X] One of the strongest higher education sectors on earth.

All sounds good to me.

The first was lost to the old voting for the young. The second fled with austerity - slowly eroding the wealth of a nation. The third succumbed to a slow cancer of underfunding and an unfolding demographic crisis. The fourth is about to fall due to nationalism and massive underfunding.

Edit: corrected nationalisation to nationalism because sleepy hex is slow hex!

Life was better

Picture of the Spice Girls

Pic non related

In what decade was life best for people? Britons typically say that it was whenever they themselves were young

I seem to recall reading similar material about non-British positions as well.

I wonder what might have happened in 2010 to stunt the progress.....

When asked to think about their own lives, Britons are most likely to say that the best years of their life so far have been their twenties. Three in ten Britons aged 20 and older (30%) nominate that decade as their best, a figure which is largely consistent however old they are.

While the 90s was a bit of geopolitical stability, these findings seem to be more influenced by people enjoying the freedom of their youth

2012 was peak britannia in the last few decades