Life was better in the nineties and noughties, say most Britons | YouGov
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/49129-life-was-better-in-the-nineties-and-noughties-say-most-britons
by 1DarkStarryNight
Life was better in the nineties and noughties, say most Britons | YouGov
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/49129-life-was-better-in-the-nineties-and-noughties-say-most-britons
by 1DarkStarryNight
40 comments
People always tend to look back with rose tinted glasses when it comes to nostalgia and the past
Blissfully ignorant of the effect we were having on the planet!!
People were at different stages in their life so it’s hard to say.
I remember that era and even then people (the electorate) complained about immigration, the economy, cost of living, the NHS being on its knees, housing being unaffordable and everything basically sucking.
The quality of life has been declining since the noughties for sure but you don’t even have to go back that far to find what seemed like an acceptable level. Life was far better even in 2016 (on the eve of the “forbidden word” vote) and not only better but seemed to be improving. There is just a huge drop in quality of life between the mid 2010s and now.
That being said, the huge difference is no doubt a compounding of big and small issues that were just amplified with “the forbidden word” and COVID.
And presumably a large chunk of voters just miss being a teenager / 20-something, so of course they’d say life was better in those years.
I’m more interested in why some 20 year old would argue that life was better in the 1940s… Do they want to go to war?
It really was better, but I have hopes for the future
At least people were hopeful in the 90s.
I swear you can’t even talk positive about the country now.
“Weather is nice today”… “We’re all going to die”…
back then when we said “britain is a bit shit” it was because we secretly knew it was the best.
now people kinda mean it
‘Life was better before the Tories 15yr asset stripping exercise’
While rose tinted glasses are true in the 90s I felt like I could go out and achieve things, own a home, live in nice area, get a degree etc.
Now I’m worried for my kids, my currently salary has same buying power as the salary I had 20 years ago. But everything has gone up in price, food, gas, electric and of course house prices.
How are my kids ever meant to afford a home? If they go to uni they’ll leave with a mountain of debt. I honestly don’t think my kids will have the same opportunities as I did and that for me is a massive downer.
Gay people can marry now though so swings and roundabouts
Well, I mean…look at literally everything. It’s not wrong!
Life was better before the Tories and the recession?
Well I be buggered.
In the nineties I was a kid hiding from bailiffs. Let’s not all wear rose tinted specs here.
As a millennial on the slightly older side (born 1989) they’re not wrong.
Life was far more optimistic in those days, we had our issues but society wasn’t as nearly as divided as it is today.
In the 2000s there was a sense that we could still have a better world, there was more hope.
Now in the 2010s & 2020s, this era seems to be the reverse of the 90s & 00s, very little hope, people are less happier than years ago
Life was always better in the past, no matter which generation you ask. You’ll find people tell you the 60s was best, or the 70s etc. It’s just getting older
OP, I want to understand how you can post so much on Reddit within a year.. and all so political! How is your mental?
Life in the 90s in London was pretty gritty from memory. Drug dens, dodgy Minicabs, run down everything. It was fun, but then again I was a 20-something single male, with no responsibilities other than somehow getting myself to work on a Monday after a weekend bender.
Almost the whole world would think nineties are better, except for Russians
This should be rewritten as ‘life was better when I was a teenager, say most people in their forties.’
Why doesn’t the teenage nostalgia get called out in these silly stories?
Whilst I was skint throughout that period, I was still in my prime, and society around me seemed more optimistic. There was something to aspire to at least. Now the future looks bleak in every direction, despite being better off personally.
Oh before the 15 year Tory run yea? Big surprise. I’m utterly shocked that the party that guts everything we tried to build for its people is also in charge of Britain’s great downfall. Shocked I say.
Well, we had the end of the cold war. Followed by a massive dose of liberal triumphalism. ‘The end of history’. We also had the end of a tory gvmnt for 13 years. Which saw much larger public investment, redistribution of economic gains downwards, and increasing living standards for most people.
It all started going a bit shit after the Iraq war. Which was majorly hypocritical and totally undermined any western legitimacy for moral supremacy. Which confirmed a lot of the global south’s view of the west. Not to mention the treatment of Russia with economic shock therapy after the collapse of the USSR. Which set the stage for Putin.
Well, then we had the 2008 financial crisis. Which was basically a depression, only staved off by a massive transferring of public money to underwrite excessive private sector risk.
This served to display how corrupted western democracy is by capital. It also reversed a key redistributive mechanism for popular support and the legitimacy of our governance. Which led to falling living standards and the rise of populism.
Which has led to much political instability. Both globally and locally.
In short, we have failed to tame a section of the populations avarice. We are paying the price.
People, (popular history?) massively underestimate the effect of the 2008 Financial Crisis. We’re still feeling the reverberations of that globally.
It’s affected everything from industry to credit to immigration to public services etc.
Basically the entire foundation of contemporary (post-1979) Western (Anglo-Saxon) capitalism was found to be deeply flawed we still haven’t addressed this. We’ve just papered over the cracks and continued on our merry way.
Debt is still exponentially increasing and we have no way to reasonably address that without massive restructuring of our economy (society). Debt fuelled consumption is still the only game in town. And we lap it up.
Sooner or later the whole issue will hit the public consciousness again, (Crisis) and we’ll have another historical event on our hands.
All this always boils down to personal circumstance. We were quite poor growing up, plus I was literally a child. I never get why people look back with fondness on their childhood. I didn’t have a bad or even vaguely abusive childhood. It was great really and my parents tried damn hard to provide everything we needed.
But I look at what I can do now and it’s staggering. I have a car and freedom so could literally just drive to say, Derby for the afternoon. Wouldn’t want to, no reason to, don’t intend to, it’s just a dull Midlands city about 90 miles away. But there is literally nothing stopping me getting in my car and being there in about 90 minutes. Then standing around going “why the fuck did I drive to Derby?” But as a kid in the 90s if some TV show had made out Derby to be some magical place and I really wanted to visit it, it would have seemed like an impossible dream. Might as well have been Ulaanbaatar in terms of my chances of simply going there.
OK, so adults had cars in the 90s. That’s fair, I can’t use the fact I was a kid to dismiss it. But even adults didn’t have the technology we have now.
Say I want to watch a film or TV show, any film or TV show. In the 90s I had to wait until it was either shown on TV or go to Blockbuster to rent it. Now I could download pretty much anything, and be watching it in excellent quality, in about five minutes all in. I have a magical device that allows me to speak to people on the other side of the world, see a live map of traffic (indeed on the roads, in the air, or at sea), look up information about anything I want, find the most random obscure recipe, instructional videos about pretty much everything, speak on high quality video to anyone even on the other side of the planet, take professional cinema camera quality video (a recent development of Android phones and an app called MotionCam). Even my own “real” cameras have a little card where I can just pop them onto my laptop and edit the contents. No fucking around with film or tapes. One of my cameras *can fucking FLY.*
A lot of the above might be leisure and entertainment, but a lot of it has also given me my career. The entire genesis of actually getting to work in the music industry is thanks to contacts I made on music forums.
Even on things like transport, my car is much more comfortable and safe than cars of a similar price point in the 90s. A drive to say London would have been an exhausting 6 hour ordeal. Now it’s 3 and a bit hours at a lick and you feel like you’ve just had a nice sit down. You can fly to pretty much anywhere in Europe at short notice without either booking a package holiday or using an expensive national carrier.
That’s before we even get into stuff that doesn’t affect most people like my use of TRT which would have been near impossible to fix in the 90s.
I could go on and on. Sure things are more expensive, I don’t stand much of a chance of getting a better house any time soon. But there was still poverty, war, death, etc in the 90s. And a lot of it was much much worse.
I was utterly miserable in the 90s and 00s so I disagree. It might have been great for some teens and twenty somethings, I but I wasn’t one of them. You still couldn’t have afforded rental on the minimum wage where I lived. There were still wars going on Europe and the Middle East and the NHS was still under pressure. Plus ca change.
2008 was the downward trend, when we bailed out the banks, and wages just stopped growing.
Since then, we have been gaslit and brainwashed into be grateful to have full employment, at the expense of wage inequality increasing, and unprecedented wage stagnation.
As an old Millennial at 41, I have completely missed out on wage growth for the majority of my life.
Sure, I could have sacrificed more of my free time, saved more money perhaps, but the fact remains that most normal people have been priced out of independent living, home ownership, and dignity in most cases.
Brexit and Covid were the icing on the cake… And it wasn’t just an impact in the UK, the same if not worse was happening in the US too.
But everyone clearly likes everything being shit or they wouldn’t keep voting to make it worse over and over again.
My dear mum is in her 70s and she says this current era is the worst she’s ever experienced. Can’t get a dentist appointment, can’t afford to have the heating on, all the roads are falling apart, etc..
Couldn’t agree more…it wasn’t the best with terrorist attacks and war but…as a teen on the 90s, summers were awesome waking up with only 4 channels and we had plenty to watch. Didn’t have the internet till late 90s and even then it felt better, conversations on AOL felt more genuine. Dating was so much easier as well. Better music. If I needed an appointment to see a GP, could often see the same day (this was mostly during when labour were in charge)
I have friends I saw regularly, Gaming was great as every game shipped actually worked out the box, none of this 50+ GB updates, when gaming with friends actually meant being together.
Inflation, the printing of fiat money since coming off the gold standard in 1970s is the root cause of this
Most Britons have fucking eyes. Wow, news to me.
On the side, it’ll be a lovely way to reintroduce politicians from the good ol’ days. Fuck Blair, Cameron and other Neolib cunts.
I watched the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony the other day. I remembered how good that year was everyone seemed happy. Yes I got attacked by homophobes on two occassions but that’s because I was living my best life . But it felt like a good time back then. It seems a nastier place now.
2 libraries 3 youths clubs, a boxing gym, swimming baths and an indoor football facility have all gone in my area in the last 2 years
Try not to blame the internet challenge in this sub: level: impossible.
Jfc guys it’s a mix of everything, but mainly late stage capitalism reducing us towards feudalism
Since labours 1997-2010 reign the country is unrecognisable to what people grew up in the 80’s 90’s unpopular opinion or not
Life is better now. Look how big the numbers are on the Forbes rich list. If you can’t aspire to be a billionaire, than whats the point!
Life was probably easier for me back then because I was a kid having my every need taken care of by my parents. It was the Great Recession for me that did it – the one event that completely changed my worldview and made me think “holy shit I am not safe”. And it’s got worse since then with climate change, shit politicians (I know they’ve always been a thing but PartyGate? The Liz Truss Lettuce thing?), the, um… the certain “four letter word” beginning with B, and of course, the ever looming threat of nuclear war.
I don’t know if it actually *was* better.
And it’ll likely never be as good as it is today.
Express elevator to hell: going down.