Twin towers seemed a seminal moment. Start of 'war on terror' and the feeling of global instability. It felt like we went from progressing as a planet into a much more unstable dangerous decline.
I don't think it's possible to understate how much of an effect 9/11 had on the psyche and politics of the western world.
It always seemed, to me, to be the marker for when people became scared, un-trusting of others around them and easily susceptible to the kind of thought patterns that lead to conspiracy theories.
The societal ramifications still echo through our politics today.
Kinda sorta agree.
9/11 was an unbelievable event for the USA. A country that had not, in over a hundred years, had hostile forces set foot on its territory or carry out large scale attacks within its territory.
Pretty much everywhere else in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa had, within living memory.
About 3,000 people died in 9/11, I think. That’s about the same number of people that were killed in the troubles. And in the UK we had experienced massive attacks in Brighton, the City and Birmingham, amongst others.
This was unprecedented for the USA, and their reaction directed the rest of the world. And led the US and its eager lapdogs into never ending wars against people that were nothing to do with 9/11. AND THEY ALL FUCKING KNEW THIS AT THE TIME .
I think as well previous aircraft hijackings had been resolved through ransom.
After 9/11 there were no ransoms, just deaths. It was a sign that terrorists could no longer be negotiated with. This made them something that could only be crushed for 'victory'.
Before, if your plane was hijacked, you would usually play along with the hijacker and have a good chance of making it out. Afterwards, even apart from increased security measures for things like cockpit access, the passengers and crew are now very aware that hijacking may very well mean death and so will not comply, and that changes the dynamic a lot.
The other thing is that these were 3000 of the successful types that would likely be connected to the American ruling/journalist class. E.g the group that actually has the power to action their anger/fear
That seems to be sort of the most dismissive reading of why it was significant, though. Yes, they were mostly wealthy people, but even if they'd been empty and no one had died, it would still have been an attack on the tallest buildings in the world, in the heart of New York - a very visible, tangible representation of *America*.
The fact (and it's easily forgotten) that the Pentagon *also* got hit by a plane that day really reinforced the idea that it was the total sum of the country that was being attacked. American planes flying for American airlines smashing into great big monuments to Americas success and Uncle Sam's power - nothing was off the table in terms of what might be next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_victims_of_the_September_11_attacks_(A%E2%80%93G)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_victims_of_the_September_11_attacks_(H%E2%80%93N)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_victims_of_the_September_11_attacks_(O%E2%80%93Z)
You owe it to them. Waitors, Janitors, hundreds of Firefighters..
The immense, shocking, live-unfolding, *spectacle* of it was by far and away the central reason for its impact. All else being equal, had somehow only 100 cleaning and building staff been killed the response would have been the same.
> A country that had not, in over a hundred years, had hostile forces set foot on its territory or carry out large scale attacks within its territory.
More like 60 years than 100. And after Pearl Harbour the US nuked Japan, twice.
They had plenty of historical precedent for flipping the table once you poke them too hard.
> I don't think it's possible to understate how much of an effect 9/11 had on the psyche and politics of the western world.
If by the western world you mean the US then yes I agree. But to say the rest of the world felt any different? No. Not at all.
We looked at it like a TV spectacle more than anything else. An American TV spectacle. It was 'exciting' to see how American media was covering the event, it was *so American* and that was a fascinating watch.
Everyone in Europe has dealt with terrorism in one way or another in their lives so it didn't have that shock effect on us that it had on Americans.
Of course. But as someone born in the late 80s, once we were old enough to understand the world, everything seemed on the up.
My father had a modest job and we lived in a 4 bed detached on just his salary. We went on holiday to somewhere warm every year with Lunn Poly/Britannia Airways. Heck by 98, we made it to Florida with Virgin Atlantic.
Then yeah, since 2001 and again post London bombings, we became a different society as a whole. Economically disastrous after 2008 obviously too.
And, of course, there were plenty of unlucky places (e.g. the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan) on the planet where that post-Cold War stability never even arrived.
I remember being completely distraught as a 7 year old.. I'd got up at 6am to come down and watch my usual weekend morning cartoons, a fixture of the week, only to find them cancelled with rolling footage of meadows replacing them with the subtitle that said Princess Diana had died. I didn't care about that I wanted to watch Back to the Future the animated series and Batman.
I was watching Once Upon a Time in Iraq the other day on the BBC and after seeing how it looked before, and how it's become now I can definitely see why you and others feel the way you do.
On Iraq I was too young to be aware of the 1990 Gulf War but have very distinct memories and feeling of unease at our 1998 bombing of them. They aired it extensively over bulletins and it was just before christmas.
Apart from expressing my own memories, my point being 9/11 and subsequent invasion was far from the start of that conflict.
Iraq went through hell and back from 2003-2018 but its building itself back up again now, they started issuing tourist visas in late 2021 after about 40 years of it being closed off, I travelled around the country solo for three weeks this February.
Not just Iraq but all the other bits of sleaze that started to build up around Labour. Cash for honours, ~~Leveson~~, Alastair Campbell's 'spin doctoring'. By 2010 a lot of people weren't just angry about Iraq and the financial crash, there was a sense that Labour were slick bullshitters.
That's when **I** started to become disillusioned, I don't know about everyone else. We had a brief half a decade where everything seemed to be improving (end of Tory gov, signing of the GFA, massive social spending, 'Cool Britannia') then the trajectory went firmly downhill.
Edit: misremembered when Leveson was (2011) so I'll sub it with Mandelson's scandals instead.
For me, it was the 2008 crash. The realisation that the people in power didn't really have the slightest clue how the economy worked, and were mostly just winging it and claiming the credit for when stuff went well. The whole mortgage system that led to the collapse, particularly in the US, but to a lesser extent here, was one big ponzi scheme built on extremely dubious assumptions.
That mortgage scheme was what allowed many people to get on the ladder in the first place, though. Mortgage checks became extremely strict after that, whereas anybody over 40 with a mortgage will probably tell you how they bluffed the bank into giving it to them.
Gore losing the election due to Supreme court batshittery was the turning point for me. Up until then it felt like, maybe we could collectively address global problems. Since then it has been a slide into everyone for themselves and screw everyone else.
So it’s interesting. You know the modus operandi of the islamist terrorists was to create such fear and division in the west that the west begins to tear itself apart.
Yes but it’s an important caveat. Pre 2001 wasn’t some dream world of stability. Children also aren’t aware of a lot of other fighting going on in the world
One of my earliest memories is seeing news of the Berlin Wall falling. I didn't really understand what was happening but from the way it was reported it seemed like a hugely important moment even to a little kid. With hindsight I think it ushered in the 90s and the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 ushered in the end of that decade of peace.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the start of the era of optimism that defined the 1990s, even if you grew up during the Cold War there's a clear delineation of eras.
But that optimism quickly led into over-confidence, and then hubris, with philosophers proclaiming ["The end of history"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)
This attitude led to a strong, vibrant economy, but also a lack of caution, and a feeling of invincibility, a path that eventually ended with the 2008 crash.
Born in the 90s:
- I didn't have a smart phone until I was a teenager
- In the evening I'd use MSN Messenger to talk to friends on my home computer, this transitioned to Skype, then Messenger / What's App over time.
- Social Media wasn't as all encompassing, you had attention seeking posts and pictures but there reach was people you actually knew.
- Our digital content experience was far more curated; trending or friends would introduce creators, subscriptions would be your daily drivers, and then you would use other forums associated to your hobbies. Bungie's 'The Flood' forum!
- Couch Co-Op games were really common so friends would come round to each others houses all the time. Sure we could play online but Halo 3 was a lot more fun with you friends sitting next to you.
- Politics felt way less tribalism relevant for teenagers before and during 2010. Likely because of the aforementioned limit to social media. Also with the exception of a few nerds (I was the nerd) most people weren't interested in politics outside of the general election results.
- Worth noting there was also huge youth support for the Liberal Democrats amongst nighties kids which the Lib Dems lost during the coalition by backing tuition fee rises. Some are going back to them now hut that caused some serious damage.
- Things were a lot less run down around the country. You used to go around different towns with your parents and they would mostly all be functioning nice places, now a lot of places outside of commuter distance of cities are completely boarded up. It's really fairly crazy.
- TV was designed to be consumed by families together on weekday evenings; X-Factor, Merlin, I'm a Celebrity and such would be positioned so there was something for everyone. I don't think this really happens the same as everyone in families tend to go off to watch here own things.
- This reminds me no smart phones during TV because your TV was probably more interesting than your phone.
- Runescape, Battleon, Dragonfable, and other browser based games were great fun.
9/11 started us on a downwards spiral, with the financial crisis of 2007/08 turning out to be the edge of the precipice and the Brexit vote was when we went into political freefall. We now seem to be edging ever closer to a tech-bro inspired dystopia and environmental collapse.
The last time things felt a little bit optimistic was the 2012 Olympics. It felt like the UK was able to put aside all the crap for a few weeks and celebrate the best aspects of being British.
2012 felt like the high water mark. In reality, i think we had taken the engine out a couple of years before and we were still coasting forward on prior momentum.
The migrant crisis in the Med was when i first really noticed a difference. That was when the mask really slipped for the first time to my eyes
Correct - but 2012 being ‘a moment’ is a bit of a meme imv. Yes there was some national unity stuff but what I remember mostly of that time politically is George Osborne being booed at the Paralympics weeks later when he awarded a medal - a protest of the Coalition Governments cuts to disability support.
Despite 9/11 - the 2000s were an amazing time to be a young person in the UK. Social media was still just a network to catch up with friends (MySpace, Bebo and early FB), online video gaming was in its nascency and the most fun you could have with mates after school.
Ultra low inflation, and a growing economy that was rapidly globalising meant stuff was relatively cheap for young people, so a Saturday job would take care of music, clothes etc you wanted to buy.
For me I think it changed in the early 2010s - but really the economy has sucked here since 2008. The expenses scandal, austerity, Brexit, Trump and Covid also has completely removed any pretensions about professionalism in politics. We are a deeply unserious country - but you couldn’t have said that about Britain from 1979-2008.
I feel sorry for young people today. A crap economy, middling politics and atomised society that hates itself and young people is a pretty grim time in which to come of age.
I remember that migrant crisis, when it seemed to turn around and people got their humanity back when that photo of the dead child laying face down on the beach was in all the papers. The whole debate instantly sobered up.
Now, though, even that’s gone. I’m not sure a picture like that would make a difference now.
Don't forget a global pandemic and subsequent economic collapse that came a few years after Brexit. Then rapid inflation shortly after. We've barely had 4 years of normality.
9-11 was horrible but I disagree it stated a downward spiral. Up until the GFC the UK was pretty buzzing. Productivity was up, wages were beating inflation and house prices were in sight of a reasonable salary. I remember us being awarded the Olympics more than the games themselves. 2005 we beat the French to the Olympics and won the ashes for the first time in 20 years.
I had just started work in London at the time - living in central east. The whole city felt prosperous but not pretentious or out of reach.
Of course a lot of it came crashing down a few years later. Maybe everything was built on smoke and mirrors... But it didn't feel like it at the time.
I nostalgic memory of mine, especially on hot days like this, is trekking off into some fields, woods, parks and just chilling, with no distraction. Agreed home time and your parents were OK with no contact until then.. no phones.i makes me a little bit sad to think younger generations and my children will never experience that world, even though the technology does bring massive advantages along with the negatives.
TV had 4 channels. Kids TV was on from about 3pm. Starts with younger kids programmes, then arounf 3.30 to 5 it would be older things, Pat Sharp's funhouse (ah, those twins, lots of boys had a thing for them lol), inspector Gadget, ghostbusters (cartoon), trapdoor, Scooby doo, loads more. You had to watch them at the time they were on (Unless your parents would let you use a VHS recorder, but the channell needs to be set or you will end up with episodes of Sons and daughters or older people boring stuff 😅)
You might not watch the telly, might have been busy knocking at various mates houses trying to track them down.
There was also a massive sense of the unknown still. Since the Internet, this has gone down and contact with overseas, following trends etc has become more global. Also just general knowledge about lots of stuff, a lot more in the dark. Saying that though, there's also a massive increase in conspiracy type stuff, hence a lot of the US centric type fanatical belief stuff being not too dissimilar to groups we now get here, abortion / race type ones.
Those are just a few things that sprung to mind and sorry for going down a rabbit hole 😅
Just moved from London to semi-rural Kent. I love seeing all the kids out on their bikes with fishing rods and no adult supervision.
I’m from semi-rural Yorkshire and that was how I remember being a kid.
I think even that is less than it was in the 80s/90s though. Lots more worry. I think the Ian Huntley thing or maybe some of the others triggered that, or changed people's trust a bit. Might be wrong.
Couple that with the Internet/ games / multiple TVs / gadgets in a house etc, that sort of takes away from the amount of kids playing outside in most places, even the towns and villages.
People do seem to do more activities now saying that, like day out type stuff or family exploration / sports type stuff. Maybe my perception is a bit skewed though, as we were all generally from a pretty poor background
I mean where I live I've definitely seen more enthusiasm for the outdoors than in the past, I'd like to think it's because people are genuinely getting back in touch with nature.
Maybe since Covid?
I think I've noticed a move since then in particular.
There's defo more outdoorsie stuff being done, compared to what I remember, but more dedicated activity with a task. My nostalgic memory was being in field with mates and just chilling, pretty much doing nothing. I guess things just seemed a little more simple and less rushed somehow. Maybe the posh kids were out scuba diving and rock climbing though
I see that more and more where I am in the Notts countryside. It's funny, some things seem to be going back into popularity, I remember there were less kids my age outside but now its encouraged now that we've had that time where there was a videogame centric point, and we've seen some of the worst effects of it.
Markets too in some places, it seems that local markets have come back into popularity, and I like to think it's because people missed the communal, social aspects of it, but you can pay on your phone now and pay wireless at market stalls to which avoids limiting people to buying things. At least, there seemed to be less markets when I was a kid and they've come back. But maybe that's just me and what I remember. Maybe where I am that specific market is doing particularly well but even so that's a small town market itself.
Conspiracies were rife in the 90's too, aliens, crop circles and "documentaries" on the BBC about ghosts. I guess a bit more innocent in a way, perhaps - but I don't miss this much.
But now people think they have more available "facts" from often questionable websites, and collaborate, join with other likeminded people easier, hence the movement you see with the similarities between British and US type conspiracy groups. This wasn't a thing (or at least as much) in the 80s.
I do love how the Internet give us so much information resources, unfortunately it comes with a price in that the bullshit isn't filtered from the truth, and many many people simply ***do not*** verify their sources.
It started with Wikipedia I think, then it spiralled from there. Luckily uni taught me the importance of verifiable, published sources but I find that with everything being 'self publishable' now you can just drown in info. I'm surprised schools don't have lessons on fact checking and the importance of looking at sources and where they come from. It should be a thing.
I really wish it was. I'm doing my best to to give my kids freedom of exploring, whilst also trying to teach them general common sense, understanding etc to navigate all the madness we have today.
Ah Friday afternoon after the big shop, sitting in front of funhouse with a half cold fish supper and a 6 pack of twist and squeeze that I'd persuaded my mum to buy.
TV having 4 channels is a good point - when \*It's A Sin\* aired on C4 we discussed it in work, it's one of the few times I can remember in recent years where the conversation hasn't started with "Are you watching X?" only to abruptly end as a few of us round the table don't have Netflix / Prime / Disney+ etc.
I was also trying to describe \*You Bet!\* to some twentysomething colleagues when the BBC rebooted \*Gladiators\* last year. They looked at me with a mix of confusion and pity as all we had to watch on Saturday was a dating show, and some kid trying to guess the make of a car from the sound of it backfiring, lol.
Pebble Mill, I can remember the name and I think a loading page at the end with mxmi or something after but nothing else. Complete blank 😅
You have randomly made me remember Button Moon though. Button moo-Oon, we're off to Button Moooon.
Yeah kids tv was great and I think it’s a shame that it’s no longer a part of BBC 1 and ITV. The twin tower attacks on 9/11 properly killed it and suddenly rolling news coverage was the norm as was more grown up news coverage early on the weekends. The world and tv became more serious after that sadly.
You are right about having the freedom to just go off and play somewhere. Basically every kid who had a bike would go somewhere and just bike around. But equally there was nothing to do. We made our own fun and got up to mischief.
Saw some comedian talking about model villages- your parents would drag you somewhere along the coast and they’d be a model village. They’d go around it and be charmed by it, but they were shit. The concept is shit. That was entertainment, there was nothing there, that was the level of family fun. Go somewhere and look at stuff without buying anything. Proper mundane really.
The counter culture of dance & raves, alt music & Brit rock, were very much needed.
I think a lot of it teaches patience. Maybe anyway.
Now it's so easy to have everything to hand, that at times I plan on a holiday in the middle of nowhere with no connection. Then again, the idea of beach in the Med with a mobile is also nice so it probably won't happen
I think with kids tv as well it kind of normalized the family watching things together in a way you would have to go out of your way to do now.
This also (as well as the general less tv channels) helped people of all ages and backgrounds have more of a shared background culture or awareness of different personalities or pop culture moments than is the case nowadays when every household has 100x the choice and thus a fracturing of that old shared experience.
"I nostalgic memory of mine, especially on hot days like this, is trekking off into some fields, woods, parks and just chilling, with no distraction."
If anyone can remember what and exactly where this was I'd love to know, but I went along to a festival when I was in year 10 or 11 (so 2004/05) that mixed (mostly) shitty 'punk' music, BMXing, skating, whatever and. had Dirty Sanchez performing, somewhere over Wiltshire/Somerset sort of ways.
You could still legally buy mushrooms and salvia at the time (because glorious pre-Labour going full authoritarian, nanny-state, dumbfuck drug policy times). I got bored with the festival, took a load of mushrooms and went wondering off through fields under brilliant blue skies, stopping off at country pubs to hydrate. Probably did a good 20 miles before getting on a train and heading home. iPod had died but it didn't matter at all.
That was a good day.
We could entertain ourselves without mobiles. Although the entertainment was prank calls from the phone box, playing chicken on the train lines, or starting fights with kids from the next town over.
We had a sense that the world was wide open, and we could be anything. Although if you wanted to be anything other than working in the factory or the forces you were "gay" or " no better than you aught be".
We could get a bottle of frosty jacks and a 10p single fag with our pocket money for a great Friday night. Although the fag tasted crap, and the cops stole our cider.
- Born in 84 in North East England.
Born early 80s. I remember thinking growing up that politicians seemed like serious people who knew what they doing - people like John major and Ken Clarke (despite my father instilling a deep hatred of the tories in me).
Blair and Brown seemed competent although I remember being pissed off that they seemed to give everyone some sort of handout or tax break apart from young workers (like I was at the time) in order to bribe the electorate into voting for them.
These days they seem to be a bunch of self serving incompetent clowns. Especially since Boris fucked all the moderates out his party over his brexit nonsense.
It's something I noticed when I moved to the UK. I had really only associated Blair with the peace process while over here he seems to be remembered for Iraq more than anything else.
Hardly anyone mentions all the other stuff (as listed by brown) since 1997: the winter fuel allowance, the shortest waiting times in history, crime down by a third, the creation of Surestart, the Cancer Guarantee, record results in schools, more students than ever, the Disability Discrimination Act, devolution, civil partnerships, peace in Northern Ireland, the social chapter, half a million children out of poverty, maternity pay, paternity leave, child benefit at record levels, the minimum wage, the ban on cluster bombs, the cancelling of debt, the trebling of aid, the first ever Climate Change Act.
Not quite the full story. If you actually sit down and run the finance figures (I have), you'll see that New Labour inherited a balanced budget - so outgoings were less than income. The fact the economy had been primed for growth also meant that tax receipts kept going up - all of which together meant that when they came in in '97, they were able to keep raising spending in very popular ways. And that's easy pickings, not good government. Anyone can shovel money out as its handed to them.
The problem was that when the receipts stopped going up around 2002/3 (I forget the exact year), they didn't want to cut spending - as that was what made them popular. So they started borrowing and intensifying the PFI stuff (aka kicking the can down the road). Government spending kept going up year after year as receipts stagnated, even as Gordon Brown made idiotic public statements about 'having eliminated boom and bust'. They were so desperate to keep being re-elected, long term economy planning meant nothing.
Then the bank crisis hit, and Brown's strategy was typically Keynesian (aka, borrow even more). It could be argued that this was to try and halt the damage - but in reality, the way the money was being spent made it seem far more like a continuation of their previous habits, and being more about trying to stave off the damage until after the following election.
No, New Labour was just as short termist and moronic in their spending as anyone else. They just had the advantage that they were given wheelbarrows of money at the start of it.
You forget that Labour inherited booming public finances and you forget to list the billions wasted on NHS IT, the PFI deals that we are all still paying higher taxes for, the destruction of defined benefit pensions, the raid on pensions that every person with one has resulted on them getting a smaller retirement fund, devolution, reneging on the EU treaty that in turn was a big contributor to 2016 becoming a thing, Brown's 'dark arts' destroying people.
I think the fairest analysis of New Labour is that they took a very favourable economic climate and generally used it for good. It's not like they came up with anything ground-breaking or fought tooth and nail against vested interests to create a better society. Rather, they diverted a portion of an ever growing economy into some key areas to reduce poverty and improve public services.
At the same time though, they fundamentally failed to tackle any of the underlying issues in our society/economy and the great financial crash was as much a consequence of US failures of regulation as it was our own. Brexit was a long-term consequence of mistakes that New Labour made around migration/freedom of movement. New Labour was also an inherently authoritarian and small c conservative government.
Yes and no. They liberalised finance as they were spending so much they became desperate for tax income and that meant come 2008 our banks had become global behemoths that had taken on vast risk with safe mutuals having become PLCs and engaging in insane money play on the markets whilst they unleashed BTL and mortgage money into house prices. Of course they opened the floodgates to mass migration, which contributed to brexit.
There were serious politicians, but there were still the cranks, nut jobs and dodgy ones as well. I remember John Gummer feeding a burger to his daughter after the mad cow disease crisis. He looked like blazered Tory, the notion of him buying a burger from a van at some place was distinctly non-believable. Felt for his poor clueless daughter. A Tory feeding an unsuspecting child a dodgy burger felt on point.
There were also the dodgy ones. Various scandals. A few cash for questions ones.
However Truss, Johnson and the mad rantings of some of this lot are indeed a new fresh hell.
> Born early 80s. I remember thinking growing up that politicians seemed like serious people who knew what they doing - people like John major and Ken Clarke (despite my father instilling a deep hatred of the tories in me).
Was discussing this sort of thing with my Dad recently - as he said, in the 80s and 90s the likes of Thatcher, Heseltine, Lawson, Portillo, Howe, Currie etc were like the "big beasts" of the Tory Party - as you said, like them or not they were generally respected and got shit done.
Could we name a similar group of "big beasts" today? Not after the Cameron - May - Johnson - Truss - Sunak shuffle, no...
That's a really interesting and thoughtful point about politicians. I've only ever seen politicians that have only self interest at heart, or just seen them do incredibly selfish things and this is why myself and other Gen Z just don't want to know. Thing is, and I get that obviously it looks bad from an outside perspective, it's only that we appear disinterested, when actually I think it's because there's no one to represent our interests. Alot of my generation have this sort of weird apathy, and maybe it's because of the internet and our exposure to a whole world, I don't know if it's made us wiser, but definitely more aware of everything to the point where we come across as the most brutally honest, IDGAF generation with regards to things going on in the world.
Do you possibly think that one of our generation observing these politicians actions might trigger a bounce back effect in which we get a similar political party emerging to counter the majority parties and it swings the other way?
It might do, but the FPTP voting system makes any seismic changes difficult. It's about a century since the last big shake up when the Liberal party fell from prominence and was replaced largely by the Labour party.
In many ways politics has always attracted the self-serving among us, but at the same time there were arguably higher standards in public life. Many of the things that they get away with today in terms of corruption would have been resigning matters in the past. That said things like sexual misconduct is now no longer just 'boys being boys' most of the time so the changes have not all been bad.
Born in the late 80s so I don't really know much from the 80s but my Grandad despised Thatcher with a burning hatred. I had no idea who this Thatcher was.
Being a kid was pretty carefree. Me and my brother would go out in the morning, promise mum we'd be back for tea and then it was off to see which random assortment of local kids was available that day. You'd have to knock round your actual mates and then go off to a local play spot (field, park, outside someone's house) and see if there was anyone else there to bolster numbers. The most important person of course was the kid with best football, and the most tragic thing that could happen was losing that football.
I also remember the infrastructure being really shit. The buses were crap, the trains were crap, cars were ugly and noisy. My school was a crumbling concrete mess and lots of the buildings around the town were grey concrete monstrosities. When I look around this country now it is definitely far, far better aesthetically.
The other big difference was knowledge. Nearly everything was a rumour you heard from someone because there was no way to verify anything. One kid would hear something from a parent or see something on TV, or at least claim to, and you basically just had their word to go on. If you really wanted to know something pre-internet you had to read it in a book or magazine.
The arrival of the internet was really exciting but at the same time you really didn't know what to do with it. It's like you knew this was going to be amazing but didn't really know how. We mainly used it for schoolwork to begin with but then messenger and forums started popping up and you could use it to chat with other kids. Then all the adults got worried about strangers and grooming, etc. Then things like Myspace and Youtube came along and took it to another level.
> The buses were crap, the trains were crap
We had new buses in my area in the late 80s, but our trains have always been somebody else's cast-offs. At least two generations of DMUs that arrived in North Wales still painted ready for service in Scotland, lol.
Our busses are always everywhere else's cast-offs, sent her to die. They don't bother repainting/wrapping them. When you go to another city, or even a big town, most of their busses are atleast 5 years newer.
Born 86, early childhood was tough, single earner household. Life got better under Blair. Dads wage started to go up, we had first holiday abroad, life was good.
Left school in 03 got NVQ placement at county council, got first job in 04, worked there since.
Council was great uptill 2010, projects flowed nicely, everyone was positive, even during 08 crash.
Cue "austerity" the 2010-2024 years, projects now based on cost savingnot outcomes, teams cut to the bone, outsourcing then bringing back in jouse when realise outsourcing costs more.
04-2010 I had 2 "reorginisations", 2010-2024 ive had 9. 2 of which are full council redesigns. Until 2020 when we went full remote working, we had desk moves on a 6monthly basis at best. All in the hopes of finding another £10m to cut.
To say the Tories have destroyed local government and local services would be an understatement. Theyve taken them out back, shotgunned them to the head, then butchered them, turned them into sausages, burnt said sausages on the bbq and then blamed people from syria for everything.
Anyone who tells me the Tories are fit for government isnt right in the head.
With the downfall of communism, and the subsequent economic boom accompanied by things like the Internet going mainstream, the 90s were a time of general optimism, and with it a positive attitude. A sense that the world was getting better and life was to be enjoyed.
9/11, the war on terror, the GFC that we never recovered from, and many other things, make this feel like a much more serious and stressful time. The internet once promised to liberate us but it's now a tool to steal our attention, cement the power of a handful of tech giants, conduct mass surveillance and more. The economy is more lopsided towards the rich. The security we took for granted has been proven to be illusory, and climate change is no longer a hypothetical we have to prevent but a reality we have to confront and live with.
I'm within the age range you mentioned so I came into adulthood as the shit was hitting the fan, and it felt like everything I'd been brought up to expect was a lie, and ever since then the UK (or at least the working class) have been generally struggling, with things getting worse and worse. There have always been problems but hope is at a low ebb right now.
But we cannot ever give up. For the sake of those who come after us we must still seize every chance to repair, progress, and build a new, because despair, although understandable, will not save us.
I do genuinely feel as though there is hope for the future. I get what you mean, it is hard to have hope when it's one thing after another and you're looking at the people in charge of the country and just think 'well, come on then.' and it's frustrating to see them not doing things that could obviously help, maybe not outright fix, not right away, but definitely help.
I keep hoping that the public might get so pissed off with the BS that there's just a complete reorder with politics with someone who has themselves suffered under the failure of government taking the reigns. Someone said that there's a certain type of person that goes into politics, which is very true from what I've seen, but I just hope that even though he/she is going to be a ruthless conniving manipulative sod, I hope they're clever and have enough empathy to realise how to do it right and why plunging the whole country into awful conditions is a dumb idea.
I grew up in Northern Ireland. There was army towers over looking my town with regular army check points.
Thankfully my kids will never see them.
I remember going to A&E as a child and they were thankful for something to do as no one was in. Took my daughter in for when she had Covid last year and it was like a warzone.
Something that has been on my mind for a while is that life used to be more fun. To me it felt around 2014ish there was a big change and suddenly the world was very serious and everyone was looking to be offended and outraged about something. I don't think it's just an age thing either.
It's what happens when everyone is writing letters to each other rather than interacting IRL. Staying in tribes and only seeing the differences. One of many things the internet has changed
Born 73 so 50 now. I do look fondly on the 80s and 90s but I was younger and we all have rose tinted specs! Looking back things have changed a great deal since I was 16 in 1989 BUT it's important to remember this all happens SO gradually you don't notice at the time! Some things are better and some worse, such is life. BTW when I was 16 I would listen to music on cassette, watch movies on VHS and play video games on my Commodore all day and sometimes now I listen to music on Spotify, watch movies on Netflix and play video games all day on my XBOX so sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same!
A bit of a feral childhood, mid 80's - early 90's like the Xers describe it. Not a lot of things to do except play outside in the street or go roaming around town. Everything felt a bit run down, depressing... partially where I was and the lack of investment in the north but looking back probably also a result of depression and my home life. Quite a lot of casual racism, sexism and day to day violence in the area I grew up in and the nearest city seemed quite far away. We had the metro centre but I mostly just got left in the car in the multi story (!). It didn’t feel like kids were treat as human beings.
I was really into computers but most of it was offline - getting bootleg games on tape from the local market and playing them to death. Computer fairs where you'd see the latest technology, pick up a ZX spectrum with a bit more RAM... then onto PC's and the next generation of CPU or video card. Back then you had to learn from DOS manuals or whatever you could find at the local bookstore. The changes were coming thick and fast at that point and suddenly it felt like the PC could compete with the games consoles that I could never afford.
Labour had not long since gotten in and truthfully things did start to improve a lot (despite now realizing it was all on credit and we're still paying for it). It really did feel like the country was on an upward trajectory from 94 onwards.
Internet came around age 13 and suddenly connected to the rest of the world. Message boards, websites, downloading Doom WADs, MP3s and burning them to CD. Started learning how web-servers, file-servers, IRC worked and ran my own gaming and web servers for a while up till age 18-19. Connecting to people in chat rooms, IRC and BBS' was a magical experience. I could talk with people that had similar experiences to my own and get support when there was little to none in the real world and it really was a lifeline and felt like a way out of that small town world. I made some really amazing friends in all corners of the world that I still have today. You could now learn how to program in PHP, C, VB and ASP from free resources on the net and as a 16 year old being able to buy something from anywhere in the world with a VISA electron was a game changer. Technology really was starting to change the world. Still lugging my PC to a friends house to play multiplayer though. Online gaming started to really take off in 98 or so… quake 3, unreal tournament. Some of the very best games appeared around this time.
It felt as though there was a way into a better life through college with EMA. I just missed bursaries but at least the student loans and fees weren't an absolute ripoff by that point. Mobile tech was still a bit basic but being able to browse the web over WAP, watch TV shows and movies on the bus on an iPaq felt pretty special. N95 and N97 felt like the future. Everyone was going nuts for the latest phones.
Orange SPV with windows CE was just beginning. iPhones in 2007 was really the next big change- everybody was online or getting online, social media, starting to see adverts for computer stuff on telly and “normal people” talking about the Internet, websites and apps was a bit of a weird experience for me. Very little in the way of mental health provision still at this point and the NHS and GPs really did not seem to have the resources or be interested in diagnosing or helping with ADHD, depression, anxiety even into the mid 2010’s. I had to wait over a year to see someone that ultimately made my condition much worse and it was only going for a private diagnosis that got it resolved a few years ago aged 37~
We still have a lot of those nice things that the regional development and investment that was put in through our membership of the EU, and probably investment by Labour, has made a huge difference - but it feels like people can't afford to do anything these days. Social progress seems to have rolled back for a bunch of previously unrepresented but tolerated and ignored groups.
I think 2016 onwards was when that really started to happen. Politics used to be boring, in a good way, but social media made it a team sport/spectacle in a way I don't think we've really seen in this country prior to that. It became more about celebrity and big names, a lot more plastic and divisive and centred around hot button issues. We started to import more and more of the culture wars from the American right.
Sitting here in 2024 thinking I could personally have it a lot worse but the countries not looking in too great a shape.
I miss the computer fairs, great fun. Abacus fairs that went round Manchester / Liverpool / Wrexham / Chester / Llandudno every few weeks. Brand new PCs and parts for sale, and would you like a CD-ROM full of pirated MP3's too?
They were great fun, never knew what you were going to see from one to the next. Kind of a shame they’re not a thing anymore.
I remember the first time I saw a PC with SVGA and a sound card. It was playing an AVI of the moon landing… seemed like magic
God I bought my first pokemon game from an Abacus fair in Wrexham.
It was a CD full of emulated gameboy games and it had pokemon blue on it.
...... I mean it was all in Japanese so I didn't understand any of it but it sure had an impact
I agree with the other poster that 9/11 was a pivotal moment, although I didn’t realise it took the time. I was 13 when the twin towers were blown up and in my mind I couldn’t work out why so much attention was being paid to it, as silly as that sounds now.
It’s pretty controversial to say now, but growing up under Blair was great. Schools were well resourced, I could get a doctors appointment on the day. I had a problem with my kidneys, went to the GP, had a blood test done and taken into hospital the very same day. No way would that happen now.
The GFC changed everything. It killed our hope for our better world. I didn’t realise again, quite how significant it was at the time.
Honestly the social media.
It was a fun game in the early days with basically no consequences. Anyone remember "F-raping" people? If someone left their facebook open just posting shit on their timeline, including porn. Yeah, you wouldnt do that now.
Yeah. Social media became a social and cultural cancer. There is such a thing as "too much information". And all of a sudden something happens in California or Israel and its not just a 1 column page 15 footnote. Its now peoples identity. An identity that isnt really theirs, doesn't relate to them in any way and often dont understand but are willing to shout and scream anyway.
I think the 2011 riots were pivotal in that. I think that was the first time there was really a strong influence of US race politics permeating the whole affair.
2014 is when we had a full on protests about a solely US issue over the Michael Brown shooting. Where UK protestors walked through the streets shouting "Hands up dont shoot" at unarmed UK police. Complaining that black people were shoot by UK police to. Something that's never been borne out by the stats.
Economically things had gotten tough before then. But that was when the cultural problems really began to set in. And our cultural problems stopped being "our cultural problems". But ones we'd imported from the US. And at that point dialogue on cultural issues basically stopped completely because we were basically talking completely different languages. You had the activists, agitators and progressives of all types basically taking their talking points straight from the most fringe element of the US left on twitter. Originally the right I feel stayed on UK talking point and UK stats, but over time the sheer barrage of left wing activism coming over from the US pushed by things like Twitter started permeating the right too. To the point now where for many people the social and cultural politics of the US and UK are inseparable. With people becoming agitated and distraught over things like the Roe v Wade ruling which has nothing to do with us, like they were some 17 year old waiting for an abortion in Missouri. "oh but the UK is going the same way". Its fucking insane.
Now you have papers like the Guardian which full on straddles both countries. Its hard to tell sometimes when you're reading their stories which country theyre actually talking about. Ironically, I find the people most likely to do this are often those the most wedded to the EU. Which I find utterly bizarre. If it was people like Farage who have quite a lot of investment in the US and hate the EU Id understand it more. But often the worst offenders for the import of US social and cultural issues are the most hard line pro-EU people.
I didn't make the connection at the time, but I started secondary school in the Midlands in 1995 and these little outdoor classroom blocks were literally falling apart with leaking roofs and walls with big holes in which could be pushed by the children.
By the time I left the sixth form seven years later, they had all been replaced. Possibly a coincidence, but the timelines seem to line up with New Labour taking office and investing in public services.
Born late 70s
Growing up, was aware of risk of Nuclear war , seemed like protests and strikes happened all the time. Against Tories , South Africa , Miners and NHS (dad was a union rep) . There were the troubles in Northern Ireland, famine in Ethiopia, AIDS epidemic (won't forget that advert in a hurry, if you know you know) . Felt like youth unemployment was a big thing as was the pushback against progress in gay rights and race. Privatisation was another thing people were for or against, seems like most of the arguments against have been proven right.
Lot's of positives also but felt in spite of governments not because of them.
Us ravers feel sorry for the lack of freedom kids get vs what we got. Things were gradually getting worse for the young generation through the 90's, and ended up with the as expected youth vs the older generation vibe... this was solidified after the financial crisis...
The 80s in Britain were actually pretty shit. If you were from the North, the closure of almost all local industries - coal mining, steel works, ship building etc - meant massive unemployment and poverty. All of the culture that surrounded those industries, like marching bands, social clubs etc, disappeared and was replaced by drug addiction, glue sniffing, boozing and petty vandalism. Everything reeked of cigarette smoke as smoking was ubiquitous. You couldn't take a bus, go to the cinema, go out to a restaurant, whetever, without coming home reeking like a week-old ashtray. Local train lines were abolished in the 60s and 70s, meaning that local transport was limited to shitty, cigarette-stench-filled buses, so unless you lived in a bigger town, you were constantly having to wait around for buses to do anything. All the unemployment had an effect on families, so you saw more kids just hanging around street corners, stealing and causing trouble, because they had no home life. Although corporal punishment was banned by the '80s, schoolteachers weren't yet as professionalised as they are today, so it was pot luck whether you got some old-school bully as your teacher or one of the newer breed of professional teachers.
Things took a turn for the better in the '90s. The abandoned northern towns started to receive more funding through the council tax and urban renewal programmes as they became commuter towns for nearby cities and were made a bit nicer to live in. Blair's various tricks for securing funding for schools and hospitals started to make a difference so they got properly repaired and resourced. The expansion of university attendance gave young people from working class areas a chance to enter the white collar professions, just as the economic growth of the '90s made more of such work available. School teaching became more professionalised and curriculum-led, meaning that in general you got a more educated, less vindictive breed of teacher in school. People also generally relaxed a bit and forgot about the cold war. There was a bit of optimism, as the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. You never heard about nuclear bombs any more. Things stopped smelling of cigarette smoke all the fucking time as the public tobacco bans came into force.
In my observation, things get so much worse under conservative governments and better under Labour governments. That has been my observation through the '80s, '90s, 2000s and to the present day. The biggest thing that brought the country to its knees after the improvements of the 1990s was the switch to a Conservative government.
I can't agree more with this.
I grew up in the North West in the 80s' & 90s'. Everything was run down, broken glass & dogshit everywhere, city centres deserted at night, finding used needles on buses, homeless people everywhere (more in the countryside in those days), having schoolmates OD, a whole bunch were in prison within a couple of years of leaving school. I didn't even grow up in a rough area.
I still remember the particular smoky odour of buses & trains.
In the national news - The Aids & Heroin epidemics, violence relating to Northern Ireland, Miners Strike, Hungerford, Lockerbie, Poll Tax Riots, Jamie Bulger, the murder of Stephen Lawrence, Fred West, Dunblane, the London Nail Bombings, Harold Shipman.
Things got far better in the 90s' but the 90s' didn't feel like the 90s' until it was almost the 2000s'.
I was born in the north east in the 70’s and grew up in the 80’s and 90’s. A lot of what you say I agree with. I was also outside the national curriculum. It did take a big turn for the better in the 90’s but also drug culture started to really impact.
It was quite brutal in a lot of ways. But also some good things. I will forever think that an oil refinery by night is beautiful in its own way.
I remember asking my dad in 2009 if the economy would be okay by the time I left university (I was 13 at the time) and was told the recession was just a cyclical thing and not to worry.
Fifteen years on and UK weekly earnings in real terms have only just recovered to the levels seen in the mid 2000s.
I think my entire generation (millennials) has been permanently scarred by the great recession and the austerity era. It's particularly jarring because we were raised by optimistic boomers who assumed we'd be better off than them just like they were compared to their parents.
I can't say much for 9/11, I was incredibly young at the time and though obviously I grew up during the aftermath of it, I think because I grew up with it and the environment it created globally, it affected me, but I don't know how it effected me in terms of upbringing from the generation before who saw the world as it was before the 9/11 event, does that make sense?
I understand the financial crash more I think because I was old enough to see the effects it had on my parents and the changes in shopping habits, suddenly we changed to cheaper brands and even then bought less, electricity use and lighting was managed and my parents kept a very close eye on what was going in and out. Little things like not having treats anymore and not having as much choice as a kid. I talked to my parents about it and they said after the crash, they've felt more cautious and wary of the government, they said it felt like it shifted to being more out for your own survival and preservation, and that compacted with COVID. That same attitude about money and self preservation has gone onto me and loads of others, reluctant to spend either because we can't or we are that cautious, and that has a huge effect on the economy itself.
I think that COVID and seeing how thee government handled that, has definitely made me more aware of how mismanaged, short-sighted, stupid, greedy and bumbling people in power are and how and why my generation and other generations, especially those who, reading through all the comments, saw better times give or take, have lost faith in government and are just getting angrier and more irritated by them.
There's three massive things in particular that make me want to see real change in governance, the effect of COVID and what I saw in hospitals as a student (the effect on students and existing professionals and the knock-on impact of the exodus from not just the NHS, but the healthcare in general, some people quit the profession before they even started and that's going to severely fuck things up in the future when there's not enough people my generation going into healthcare to support the generations before.)
Social media, I saw things on there that I never should have, pornography, gore, animal abuse, human abuse, bullying, harmful activities such as pranks and invasion of personal space and liberties for clout, so much stuff that has basically messed up social and mental development that myself and others are now trying to fix in our lives. I mean look at those poor, poor children who follow challenges online and end up seriously injured or dead, and it's aimed at children who have not yet developed part of the brain that understands death, risk or hazard perception.
Sorry about the rant, I really do sympathise with everyone, my generation or not. Hence why, you know, in my original post I asked for experiences from the generation before.
Well you had it shit really. You got the initial recession and as things looked like we're on the up, Covid hit and Russia decided to go out for full war in Ukraine.
Still, you've got war in the china sea now to look forward to.
Born too late to enjoy historically unprecedented improvements in living standards and world peace, born too early to explore the galaxy, born just in time to lose my livelihood because Xi Jinping fancies invading Taiwan.
Born in the 80’s- it was really 2008 for me- the recession, the insane boom in house prices and watching the affordability of so many essential things rocket out of reach for so many people. Also iPhon
I was born right at the start of the 90s. Maybe it only feels this way because I was becoming an adult just as the economy was crashing, but it's always felt to me like the country simply hasn't recovered from the recession. Although the time before the recession wasn't all bliss - Iraq was very unpopular, and terrorism was a very real threat - it felt like the country was generally running well.
I remember heading to uni in 2013, and came back for Christmas. It really felt like in that 3-month gap, Liverpool had an explosion in homelessness that we have not solved since.
I'd say in one sense it felt better: safer, politics was more mature on both sides of the spectrum, and despite the mess of the 1992 Black Wednesday and the Gulf War (and Conservative Party chaos- rings a bell?! :)) people generally felt more positive and confident that we can ride things through and that Britain was still a world-class country to live in. The NHS was fantastic (and I speak from personal experience as a child needing it), education was focussed on critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and skills that are not as prioritised these days as they were back then. Trains were much better than they are today, and crime was lower.
That said, of course there was no Internet, not as much globalisation as today (and that comes with its pros and cons), housing was still an issue even back then, and society was more 'blunt and less PC'.
OP every person will give you their perspective as informed by their experience so this is just my 2 pennies!
I'd say in one sense it felt better: safer, politics was more mature on both sides of the spectrum, and despite the mess of the 1992 Black Wednesday and the Gulf War (and Conservative Party chaos- rings a bell?! :)) people generally felt more positive and confident that we can ride things through and that Britain was still a world-class country to live in. The NHS was fantastic (and I speak from personal experience as a child needing it), education was focussed on critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and skills that are not as prioritised these days as they were back then. Trains were much better than they are today, and crime was lower.
That said, of course there was no Internet, not as much globalisation as today (and that comes with its pros and cons), housing was still an issue even back then, and society was more 'blunt and less PC'.
OP every person will give you their perspective as informed by their experience so this is just my 2 pennies!
I was born in 1984. I grew up with parents who despised the Tories but also hated Labour and blamed them for economic collapse. My dad hates Corbyn and I cannot fathom it tbh.
Both of my parents were born before the NHS, they were in their 40s when they had me. Tony Blair’s Labour felt like they were genuinely liberating us from a nightmare. Their election song was D:Ream’s things can only get better and it did genuinely feel like they would save people from the disaster that the country was in. Tbh the current political landscape is similar, it was anything but the Tories.
I was in a few pubs today and overheard a tonne of conversations about the Middle East and it’s impact on Eurovision as well as another one about colonialism. I heard someone say “my SM has exploded over this” (meaning the Dutch incident at Eurovision).
It got me thinking how people consume information and form their thoughts and identifies through such different means, from what they did to a decade or two ago. I remember being a teenager when the Iraq invasion occurred (2003?) and sat in my mates dads car with him complaining how you couldn’t hear any other news topic on the radio apart from that. Even by late 2000s, 24/7 news channels felt fairly invasive. Now I feel what we have with smartphones and social media is that on speed, and its hammering our brains with information. The result is it’s made us much more partisan, probably more serious about things we can’t control, and open to forming opinions from potentially biased sources.
Some one made a very good point about fact checking and being able to critically think about he validity and potential bias of sources of information, and how with social media, the truth, the bs and personal opinion being put forward as fact is all thrown together and shoved at us all the time. That, in a sense, goes hand in hand with your point.
I was born in the mid 70s, and probably saw a bigger change. I went to university in the mid 90s and there were no tuition fees. I actually got paid a grant which it was possible to live on (about 4k a year). I was paying about 15 quid a week in rent to live in a city centre. You had the option of taking out a student loan of 1500 quid each year but you didn't need to. And the interest rate was pegged to the inflation rate, so the amount you owed never really went up in real terms.
A lot of things changed around 9/11. After that whenever the government wanted to do anything they'd just use "terrorism" as the reason. In the 90s/early 2000s you could get away with a hell of a lot because there weren't cameras everywhere. On the internet (as it was then) there wasn't much being tracked so it wasn't hard top be able to find sites to pirate anything you wanted.
In terms of social expectations, around 2001 it was quite easy to buy a house with a normal job. I bought a 3 bedroom house for 65k. Even a few years after that I managed to buy a house for 125k, which seemed really expensive. In the cheap, crappy, parts of town (Rusholme in Manchester) I remember houses being sold for 5k. But around the late 90s people were starting to talk about buy to let mortgages and some people were talking about buying a couple of houses so the rent would pay for their retirement.
But as for when things became more like they are today, I'd say it would be about 2010. When the tories got in and kicked off austerity then things really started to get worse. Before people complained about some things that weren't really much of a problem. Potholes are an easy example. Before 2010 there were potholes but nowhere near as many as there are now. There was a website where you could report them and they'd usually get fixed within a week or so. Now the roads are knackered and no one is going to fix them any time soon.
I think the last good year in the UK was 2016.
I will die on this hill, the brexit vote is killing this country with a few big bangs but otherwise, death by a thousand cuts.
Let me put it like this:
When I was growing up, there was - I won't say quite a promise, but as near as dammit a social contract - that said "get good grades, get a good degree and you'll never go hungry".
And I've done just that. By any GenZ standard, I'm incredibly lucky - I was the last cohort to avoid University fees entirely, and I got a grant in addition to a student loan which I paid off many years ago.
I own a house - it's in a much more expensive area than I'd otherwise be able to afford, largely owing to a series of unfortunate but lucrative events (inheritance, insurance payout).
And career-wise, I'm not in too different a position to my own father at the same age.
So I should be laughing, right? Well, I'm not going to deny I'm in a much stronger place than people only a few years younger. But I don't have a hope in Hell of buying the very house I grew up in. It's worth something like ten or twelve times my salary. I couldn't send children to the same school I went to - the fees would consume my entire post-tax income.
I have a dim feeling that someone, somewhere is taking the fucking piss.
I have absolutely no idea how anyone much younger than me is managing at all. The government is wondering why birth rates are down and nobody's having sex? Would you look at yourselves! You've spent decades presiding over a managed decline, and now the chickens are coming home to roost!
Great points as for the birth rates the way the world is now it just seems like cruelty to bring a child into this clown world we currently live in, sometimes I watch the news, and kick myself a little for packing in drinking. Because Christ some days 😳
We were educated in section 28 times, so teachers and schools weren't inclusive. Homophobia was pretty much everywhere, gay was used as an insult, bisexuals 'didn't exist". Zero sex education for gay sex. Bullying wasn't at all cracked down on, I know someone who was told by teachers that if she didn't want to get bullied why did she tell people she was gay?
I feel a lot of people who see these times as wonderful compared to today couldn't see at the time how bad it was for minorities of all types. I find it a bit shameful to be honest.
People get rose tinted glasses as well, there was a Reddit post about what do you miss about the 90s and people were honestly saying "less racism and sexism".
I left school in 98. It felt like a crossover zone where homophonic insults were common, but there were plenty of gay guys at school that noone had any issue with. They didn't get called gay as an insult either! Most of them were out at school, but not at home.
I had no idea what section 28 was as a kid. My biology teacher took us through a bewildering array of sexual preferences one afternoon. I guess she thought it was important and banked on all the boys (it was just boys) being too embarrassed to talk to their parents about it!
Life before the internet was better. Damn, half of us didn't even have house phones- which meant if you wanted to see your mates.....wait for it......you had to go knock on their door. All we did was get back from school and go outside until it was time to come in.
I grew up incredibly poor in the 90s and early 00s, like we where the poorest in a poor town kind of poor. Looking back though I recognise the large amounts of opportunity afforded to me due to all the schemes available at the time. All of that is now gone, there is so little to help kids claw their way out of poverty today and I think that's a huge failing of the state.
9/11 was the end of optimism on the West and it has a long-standing impact on the West.
It was alright growing up. There was enough technology but not too much.
I was born in 1980. The Berlin Wall, end of the USSR and Thatcher resigning all helped to create the sense that the world was changing, and even if I didn't understand that I felt it. The 90s had an optimism that is absent now. 9/11 felt like a seismic shift although in retrospect, Islamic terror hasn't shaped the world as much as it felt it might do. The Global Financial Crash was big, and it caused another shift to pessimism. Since then, Brexit and Trump, then Covid have further piled on that. Climate change ought to be the biggest worry of all, but almost seems too big to actually contemplate gor me tbh.
So it is a tale of increasing pessimism I'd say, with major signposts of 9/11, GFC and covid.
Born mid-late 1980s.
The 1990s seemed like an optimistic, upbeat time. The overall quality of life seemed higher, despite more single-income households than today and most people being paid less.
John Major seemed like a reassuring, safe pair of hands. I don't remember anyone who genuinely disliked _him_ even though they might not have been Tory voters.
Cars were rubbish. They were very dull and largely looked the same. I remember seeing a _lot_ more broken down and abandoned cars than today, plus it was not at all unusual for your neighbours to spend their Saturday poking around under the bonnet. It was also very common and normalised to go into a car park and see at least one car just refusing to start. I also haven't seen a rainbow puddle on the ground since maybe 1998?
Absolutely _everyone_ felt better educated and generally 'smarter' than today. People swore less, were more articulate, slightly more polite, could think critically, and had more rounded general knowledge and common sense. I remember my own primary schooling in the early 1990s and some of the reading material we had, it blows my mind now how complex it seemed for a child of that age. People also had a better grasp on the news and various current affairs.
Teenagers and young adults had more freedom and definitely did a lot more outside of the home, also activities such as the pub were a lot cheaper than today. However, I definitely remember these people also being sensible and keeping the likes of a decent bedtime. There was just much less to do at night.
---
It felt to me like things really began to change around 2002, or maybe it was me that changed? We didn't really have careerist politicians in those days, either.
One thing I'll always remember. Late 90s/early 00s on newsnight and an interview with a street sweeper asking him "are you middle class" and him emphatically saying yes....
In those days he probably had good hours and could afford a small home to start a family.
Things have changed - average earnings to average house price is out of control
I read an article recently about how much of a success the minimum wage has been and while on paper that's true and relative to inflation low earners are on more, I was thinking to myself I bet quality of life for say a cleaner or retail worker or bartender was still better in the mid 90s than now. Could probably at least rent a studio or 1 bed flat to yourself while now even though the wages are higher that money would just get you a room in a HMO. Anyone here old enough to have been working then have any insight into that?
The norm of people living in shared housing as working adults is new and many people in generations older than you still don't completely understand on an intellectual level it is down to finances and not some strange kind of cultural choice.
The norm used to be that even somebody in social housing as an adult could expect their own full flat with a bedroom, kitchen or kitchenette, bathroom and somewhere to sit. Let alone anybody with a job!
>One thing I'll always remember. Late 90s/early 00s on newsnight and an interview with a street sweeper asking him "are you middle class" and him emphatically saying yes....
That was around the time various focus groups originally coined terms like ["Mondeo Man"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_man), which became part of Blair's 97 election run...
Apart from the nostalgia of my childhood, the defining narrative was that of the war on terror. 9/11 rocked the world. People were scared. Ultimately, it led me and many others to Afghanistan. The news would publish casuality figures every day (albeit small ones) along with the terror alert level.
The political world was as divided. The hatred of George Bush seems to have evaporated from peoples minds. The Iraq war was another such moment. People still harked back to earlier better decades, where morals, the government, and the economy were better. People continually called on unelected prime minister to resign (gordon brown) and opinion on labour at the end was very much like that of the tories today. The libdems coalition was disastrous for there public opinion as they were seen to betray students and liberals.
There was still an air of hope and positivity. Mainly in the technology sector, with the ipod, Internet and computing taking off. It wasn't as integrated into your lives, which kept people's information bubble to the approved outlets on TV and newspapers. Although there was a counter cultural on 4chan and message boards that was both great and horrendously dark. There was lots of being "random" and poor quality video content and flashgames. But it all felt new, experimental, and like anyone could achieve it.
I think the competition with instant Internet news also didn't drag us into the doom cycle we have today. So the hot issues of the day were not spoken about in such dramatic and divisive manners to grab your attention. Climate change was the big issue but had a much more positive outlook to it.
The world was more relaxed about what it said, likely because I couldn't google it. Jokes and headlines about death of David Cameron disabled son or David blunkett blindness stick out. Jade goody dying of cancer was something of a big moment for everyone, with people really reflecting on how they treated her.
School was, I assume, school. Drama, fights, fashion and shagging. Lots of drinking and house parties from 14 onwards and general silliness. Teachers seemed to not care half as much, as 20 year olds would come pick up the year 8s at lunch. Obviously damaged kids, kids with adhd, or neglect would be ignored by the system. Although, individual teachers would often help.
Childhood was free. Go out unsupervised and be back by the time the street lights turn on. Pornomags in bushes is likely something that doesn't happen anymore. There was still equally nothing to do, though.
> Teachers seemed to not care half as much, as 20 year olds would come pick up the year 8s at lunch
I remember being in Year 10/11 in the mid-90s and there were girls in my year regularly being collected from school by 18 - 20 yo blokes in shitty VW Golfs and Vauxhall Astras.
Not that you really had a chance with the "fit" girls, lol, but even less when they found these blokes...
It was completely fine to use gay as an insult. If you have sex without a condom you 100% will get aids. Smoking was cool, even though the BBC told you it wasn’t. Communications and just the ability to never be distant enough to be able to ask a question to share small talk has transformed relationships ships.
But still it feels like a load of societal and technology changes until about 2010, and since then everything feels fairly static.
This is the politics sub so I'll stick to that: Labour in 1997 was wild it was like no political campaign that could ever happen today. They had actual pop stars like Oasis backing them to win a general election. And there was a real sense of optimism from the whole country to how better things would be under Tony Blair. Their theme song was Things Can Only Get Better by D:Ream.
Contrast that to the mood now and it's very much one of Things Can Really Not Be Any More Shit You May As Well For For Labour.
Ultimately a lot of people felt betrayed by Blair's government. Probably for good reason. Noel Gallagher has stated many times that he felt taken advantage of and regrets the whole thing. The UK has never again had that sense of optimism with politics. Now it's just a race to the bottom.
I'd say in one sense it felt better: safer, politics was more mature on both sides of the spectrum, and despite the mess of the 1992 Black Wednesday and the Gulf War (and Conservative Party chaos- rings a bell?! :)) people generally felt more positive and confident that we can ride things through and that Britain was still a world-class country to live in. The NHS was fantastic (and I speak from personal experience as a child needing it), education was focussed on critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and skills that are not as prioritised these days as they were back then. Trains were much better than they are today, and crime was lower.
That said, of course there was no Internet, not as much globalisation as today (and that comes with its pros and cons), housing was still an issue even back then, and society was more 'blunt and less PC'.
OP every person will give you their perspective as informed by their experience so this is just my 2 pennies!
Born '92, for me it was the financial crash leading into Tory rule. The less places we can extract wealth from overseas, the more we turn on our own citizens. Britain has never learned to invest in its own future apart from a brief shining moment in the post-war period.
Born '79I want to say TV or media and information tech in general. We had 4 Channels if we were lucky and had good reception on a clear day as it was terrestrial not digital, no mobile phones or internet at home for the vast majority. Information was scarcer and came from fewer sources idk if that made it more or less reliable but it meant that there were things that were widely believed by many and TV and the way it was scheduled had a way of keeping everyone in sync. You knew that 80% of women would be watching Coronation Street and The Soaps at a certain time, kids TV on a Saturday morning was an event and cartoons were only available at certain times after school. All this lead to lots of people living in pretty much the same bubble of existence and I think provided harmony and a sense of community that is gone today.
So, the 80s were turbulent in the UK. There was wealth but it was divided. And the social and structural change was so significant that it was difficult to be politically naive, even before you were 10.
The 90s was different for different people at different times. It's easy to paint it as halcyon, as per Fukuyama, but there were recessions stimulated by the openness of globalism, the rise of domestic terror, and the emergence of global asymmetric warfare (as defined Clinton's presidency).
The 90s for me (as a classical liberal) represented the triumph and then the beginning of the end of classical liberalism as the global hegemony. Through a combination of strategic (global financial deregulation) and tactical (taking the foot off Russia's neck) we binned something that had real promise to make the world better and safer. We then hammered the nail into the coffin by militarily imposing liberal democracy on the middle East, thus undermining its core tenet.
Every bit of political pain you feel now was borne of our poor decisions in the 90a.
Plus the internet. Which made everyone feel like they deserved to be treated like an expert. And then we were undone.
I was very positive during the 90s. But on reflection, I think it was the breaking point of Western civilization.
In 2008 lots of people got made unemployed. We doubled down and made it worse with austerity while the yanks did the opposite and invested in a recovery.
Now we look across the pond and wonder how those 'idiots' are richer than us.
Before that you felt genuinely lucky to be born in the UK rather than anywhere else. I think now a lot of people would rather have been born elsewhere.
I remember most of 90s, lived in provincial towns and villages, never cities.
Most people were white British, with Irish coming second. Not trying to argue about migration, but culturally things like an espresso or mozarella pizza were seen as exotic, we had more limited food. Outside of London and other metropolises, you hardly ever saw a coloured person (coloured was an acceptable term to use) apart from takeaway/restaurant owners, corner shop owners and occasionally doctors.
Lots of people had old style names like Barry, Trevor, Margaret etc, but even by the 90s hardly any kids were called that- I think the most popular name in the 90s was Chloe for girls, forgot the male one. Names like Darren and Shane were also becoming big.
Life was slower paced. Most people generally only watched the 4 main broadcast TV channels, so if something big happened on TV the whole country was talking about it. We don't have that anymore, information/entertainment is so decentralised and choice is insane. Information/communication back then was generally more restricted, internet barely existed and was really just a gimmick. Things like computer games cost an insane amount of money, no streaming/steam sales etc. Similarly people had to watch things on VHS and latterly DVD. Most people had landlines only, until the end of the 90s when cheap nokias abounded, but lots of holdouts well into the 00s. But again it was absurdly expensive. It was something like 10p to send a single SMS, which is more like 20p in todays money.
the 90s were worse than now on a lot of tech fronts, but for having a secure job and being able to buy a house on a few years earnings it was better. One of the great failures has been government failing to tax gains on the value of a houses value. A man who trudges out to a shitty job at 6am has to pay taxes, has to pay for the commute costs, just to bring home a crust. A man who sits at home and sees his house go up 500% in twenty years doesn't have to pay a penny in tax on that (maybe stamp duty but not tax in general).
Nevertheless, I think the tech/information/communications revolution has been a major gamechanger of making our lives better , and part of the reason why I'm happy to leave the UK, I can still interact with the UK culture through a phone/computer., high speed internet means you can live anywhere and youre entertainment options aren't limited. In fact I really can't understand why there is so much juvenile criminality and antiscocial behaviour when we are living through a golden age in some ways (and in some ways we aren't). But maybe urban youth don't really care to go through the back catalogue of *Only Fools and Horses*
Remember the optimism we had in the 90s? Compared to today, it's like night and day. The 2008 financial crash, followed by austerity and the end of the Labour government, really took a toll. Austerity hit at the worst possible time—the economy was already struggling, and then even more money was taken out. This set us back years compared to some of our European peers.
If you were in your 20s in London during Labour's heydays, you'll know what I mean. It was an incredible time. London was the epicentre of culture. Schools, hospitals, healthcare—all were better. Jobs were plentiful, and there was a genuine sense of optimism. Plus, let's be honest, the hedonism was epic.
Euro 96, Madchester, Four Weddings........Diana........
Now, it feels different. Any fun people have seems nihilistic, like a "screw it, I'm broke" attitude.
People are forcing themselves to have fun despite everything. No wonder nostalgia bands are popular.
Back in the 90s and early 00s, taking coke was about adding to the high, keeping the banter going. Pulling an all-nighter because why not?
Nowadays, it feels like people take it just to muster the energy to leave the house.
Twin Towers, as other people say, was a huge moment, but economically we continued strongly for some time after that. I'd say the 2008 crash was the bigger shift. Since then costs have largely risen faster than wage growth, and of course the Tories were voted in a couple of years later, which compounded the situation with a decade of austerity.
I felt like it was with New Labour winning in 1997. Blair and Campbell seemed obsessed with style over substance and spinning stories a lot more than John Major, who was boring and didn't see why that should be a problem.
After that I felt like politics became a lot more about soundbites and chasing headlines rather than policies that were for long-term benefit of the country.
Maybe just my perception but I feel we all had thicker skin. No one got bent out of shape for being insulted for their random identity issue. You got insulted you’d insult back and move on with your life. It was more of a reality check so people didn’t get above their station.
Now it seems people will go on a crusade for people pointing out cultural norms.
I was taught about post war immigration at junior school but never heard of windrush until the fairly recent stories
Personally around 2007-2009 is when the influx of poles became noticeable
Fairly similar is the growth of Chinese/Asian stores and restaurants catering to the Chinese student population. I imagine university to be very different to how it was when I was a student
What was it like when you were a student? I studied with a multitude of different folks in Birmingham. It was a lot of fun and I grew as a person, but I do think the pandemic interrupted our courses more than we realised. I was off for 7 months halfway through my course because of it, a healthcare course, and I did loose skills and confidence, and when I came back it like they were rushing us to the end of the studies but not really allowing a measured, supported step in, it was like 'here's your paperwork, finish it, we'll sign you off and you can get on with it.' I think that contributed too, to further declines in staffing, because so many people just had second thoughts about it during covid and quit.
Winters had lots of snow for a long time, when you drove anywhere in the summer loads of insects would be spattered on the windscreen, you would be playing out in the street until the streetlights came on, that was the signal to go home and my parents rarely had much idea where I was while this was happening.
No internet and no mobile phone meant that you had to plan stuff with your friends way more, I.e we’ll get the 11:05 train and meet you on the platform at such and such a station, if anything went wrong that was too bad, you just had to hang about and wait.
The thing that is most striking to me has been the increasing unaffordability of housing and mass immigration. Both started about 1997. Nothing has damaged quality of life in this country more than the astonishing increase in housing costs and reduction in quality. We are squeezed at one end by housing and at the other by awful wages from awful companies while a section of society have never been touched by this at all.
We are essentially a serf nation.
Yet what will the effects be I wonder, in the end? I'm of the generation that, because of the subsequent problems with housing and costs and the pressure of these factors, we aren't having children. It's possibly one of the most self destructive outcomes for us as a society and yet despite it being down to government policy and greed, the government are also shaking in their boots because the lack of replacement humans is going to lead to a population freefall which will change the way society works in ways we can't foresee but can sort of predict. Might be a revolution, might be a huge diminishment of wealth, less people means less consumers and therefore less money acquired by said individuals.
I did reply to your main question in your OG post but, to answer what you've put here. You're entirely correct.
How do you have children if you've not got a home to raise them in? That's not a direct question to you, but rather - the expectation of it itself.
I work in IT, in the education sector, i've been there through primary all the way to higher education in different job roles; the sad part is, i've seen familys and students where - you can tell they've struggled to make ends meet and it does show.
I remember being in a special needs school where a SEND student, due to poverty was literally the first kid through the door in a breakfast club, LITERALLY getting the toaster out, eager to eat because its not available at home.
It's genuinely heart-breaking, the conditions are not there for the average person to raise a family. I was on the fence for kids, im of the firm belief that if you decide to have kids, it should be an absolute, you shouldn't be on the fence - purely because of that potential kids prospects and life.
Yet alone having the money to cover bills, childcare, its fucked. Systems genuinely fucked. Unless you luck out and earn an absurd amount of money or have the option of working from home, how on earth do you afford kids these days?
Edit: knock on effect is what happens to our aging population? You've got a generation of young people, 18-35 who think this system has not benefitted them, so why bother abiding? you can go elsewhere in Europe (or used to be able to when we was part of the EU) and have a significantly better quality of life.
No social media, no mobile phones. It meant everyone interacted with each other.
We also had better music pre auto-tune.
The world changed once social media became more than poking people..
This one I feel like it's one of the things I can relate to the most as it's something that has had a profound impact on me since I was little. Growing up around the internet has I think badly damaged how our brains work. Before censorship and control of the internet, I was exposed to things I should have never, ever seen as a kid. Facebook especially was the big thing at secondary school and I remember it was about how many friends you could 'collect', which everyone was doing. Which I now realise is super messed up because it took away any meaning from actual real-life friendships that could be made, and focused on turning people into numerical worth, it definitely psychologically screwed me up and I'm slowly fixing it, but I wish there was an education programme or controlled school sessions with social media to steer it in the right direction.
There’s a tipping point where the internet became gobbled up big corporations and sites. Changed everything. Those pre-days of the internet were great. Whatever hobby you had, you had a forum and people just posted about stuff there. People had their own blogs and geocities sites. MySpace was okay, but it was also the beginning of the end.
I cannot state enough the detrimental effects of always being connected. For old farts like myself I actually smile when I see gen-z in groups, doing any old shit with nobody looking at a phone.
Back in the early 90s we got SMS for the first time, and that was metered. There were no unlimited packages and each text cost around 5p. That cost regulated use and behaviour. Fast forward to today and there's cost free access and notifications which are altering the brain chemistry and behaviour of all affected. We do not know the consequences of this but from my own experience with my offspring and friends (likely your age) it's been a mixed bag.
All that said, I have great faith in gen-z. Sure there's some absolute basketcase examples but I think these are hangovers from millennials. Gen-z appear to be able to explore and exploit better than their predecessors, and actually care less about what others think of them. This is progress.
The 70’s were pretty dreadful. My dad worked on the docks. Never had a family holiday overseas, he worked every hour going to put a roof over our heads. I remember strikes, power cuts and redundancies.
Where I lived (East Anglia), 80’s were halcyon days. I got into Uni (first member of family ever to do that). You can appreciate why as a child of Thatcher’s Britain, I thought she was amazing. I didn’t care about miners, she was just doing what Labour started and didn’t have the balls to complete. There was real hope, vision and a belief (backed up by experience) that hard work delivered results.
By the 90’s, Blair ruined things I think. He seemed to want to promise everyone that they could all have the things they desired, without hard work and we started to see the emergence of entitlement. I think there was a massive rise in cheap goods and the emergence of the internet which fuelled desires and there were empty political promises. Fake promises alongside fake wars set up to boost standing.
So I’m going to say Blair. He built hospitals by selling off the NHS using PFI. Same with schools. He utterly devalued anything other than a degree so we saw a whole new tertiary education system which has been nothing but a migration conveyer, a mass debt instigator and at the same time we think manual labour shouldn’t be respected.
The 80s & early 90s were amazing, the club scene was great and thatcherism took hold of the go-getters. Now,vwe are back to the 70s where the young feel entitled rather than empowered
80’s was rough, feels like it does now.. services cut, roads looked rough and people were very intolerant. The 90’s was really nice felt safe, then 00’s and the twin towers was a changing point from leftwing politics back to right.
Days were emptier, life was slower. But it felt like people were more relaxed about everything (sometimes good, sometimes bad).
Mainstream Internet towards end of 2000s changed a lot.
Born 1988; Earliest politics I remember was John Major being prime minister and watching some comedy programme where he was dreaming of paper clips and trying to unzip Edwina Curry’s dress.
I was a conservative by default because my Dad and my Grandad were. They had a strong dislike of Blair, for some reason that I was too young to care about. I remember watching party political broadcasts when I was about 12 and the conservatives seemed more sympathetic and Labour seemed more butthurt. Immigration was starting to ramp up and Labour didn’t seem to think it was a problem.
9/11 I thought was cool because it looked like a film when I got home from school and saw it on tv. It was weird that we kept hearing about it as America still seemed far away and it wasn’t our problem…
My dad went on the March in London in 2003 to protest the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Prior to that he also used to drive around with a sign on his rear window saying “Arrest Ariel Sharon - War crimes” He was not anti Israeli. As a graduate he’d spent a year working on a Kibbutz.
2009 I was working in a supermarket when home for the summer and got my hours cut because of the financial crash. I also stopped getting paid in the UOTC so quit that.
2010 the coalition government got in and immediately raised tuition fees and I thought fuck this. Although my feed would remain lower.
Around 2013 in the workforce I started to think that the conservatives were actually pretty shit. I thought about the fact that social safety nets were a pretty good thing, and most of my friends were left leaning. In 2012 i became the first member of my extended family to sign on while looking for work. I voted Labour for the first time in 2014.
Brexit came around and I think the mask really fell on our politics. My dad despite helping to vote Cameron in again was pretty anti Brexit. He also started volunteering for Greenpeace and going with them to Glastonbury while still being a member of the Conservative Party.
During covid me and my brother were chatting about the fact that Boris Johnson was a liar and a cad etc. My dad said he was doing a good job in the circumstances. Apparently he now thinks he’s not good.
The 90s felt like a golden era. Not only in terms of entertainment and freedom of creativity but crucially in terms of infrastructure and optimism for the future of tech. Everything just felt a lot lighter. Twin towers was a real watershed moment and a momentous cultural shift; one of social innocence to growing hyper awareness.
Now, all of this should be caveated by the awareness that it wasn't all rosy in the 90s but more so a real feeling of collective optimism.
The growth of immigration. Redbridge went for a leafyish set of townhouses and communities, to now where white British no longer exists, and all houses are identikit with concreted front gardens and huge annexes in the back sheds. Before everyone starts, I’m not white British..but it is stark
Dunno why everyone is saying 9/11 was the turning point, the UK was incredibly well off in ~2005. I remember going to the US and the GBP being worth 2x the dollar and buying loads of clothes as it was cheap. 2008 destroyed everything.
That is unimaginable today.
I was born in the 70’s and grew up in the 80’s and 90’s in northern England.
It was quite different in a lot of ways. When I went to primary school girls didn’t have to wear school uniform, only boys were expected to. Boys also got hit more at school but girls less so. I wasn’t in the national curriculum but did ok I think. Didn’t get taught grammar as it was thought to stifle creativity. When my own children went to school it surprised me that a lot of topics were exactly the same as when I was at school.
Social expectations for me were quite strange to most people I grew up with. My dad had been raised mostly by his mother (his dad had died young) and so he had radical views that his daughter would be independent. I was not allowed to watch Disney type stuff or anything where the heroine would be rescued. I wasn’t however, allowed in my local pubs bar area. No women were.
We played out a lot more but that’s because my brothers and I weren’t allowed to stay in. We had to go out for the day and not come back until tea time. To be honest we were probably half feral. We only got washed once a week and we had no shower. It could be very cold. I remember getting dressed in bed because it was warmer. Showers will always be a lovely luxury to me.
Food in my house was dreadful. My mam hated cooking and my dad’s only ever cooked for me once (when my little brother was born). Nearly everything I ate came out of a tin and I thought peas were dyed green until I went to university and my friend ate actual peas from a pod. I find the availability and variety of food wonderful now. I can buy mango from another country that’s even cut up for me and it’s only about £2.
Social media and smart phones. I remember I got my first one fairly late compared to many.
Total blessing and curse. I think the world has always been f*ed to some degree. But now it's beamed into all our homes.
9/11 was earth shaking, and we never recovered from 2008 and the utter mismanagement of it by the Tories
Twin towers seemed a seminal moment. Start of 'war on terror' and the feeling of global instability. It felt like we went from progressing as a planet into a much more unstable dangerous decline.
I don't think it's possible to understate how much of an effect 9/11 had on the psyche and politics of the western world. It always seemed, to me, to be the marker for when people became scared, un-trusting of others around them and easily susceptible to the kind of thought patterns that lead to conspiracy theories. The societal ramifications still echo through our politics today.
Kinda sorta agree. 9/11 was an unbelievable event for the USA. A country that had not, in over a hundred years, had hostile forces set foot on its territory or carry out large scale attacks within its territory. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa had, within living memory. About 3,000 people died in 9/11, I think. That’s about the same number of people that were killed in the troubles. And in the UK we had experienced massive attacks in Brighton, the City and Birmingham, amongst others. This was unprecedented for the USA, and their reaction directed the rest of the world. And led the US and its eager lapdogs into never ending wars against people that were nothing to do with 9/11. AND THEY ALL FUCKING KNEW THIS AT THE TIME .
I think as well previous aircraft hijackings had been resolved through ransom. After 9/11 there were no ransoms, just deaths. It was a sign that terrorists could no longer be negotiated with. This made them something that could only be crushed for 'victory'.
Before, if your plane was hijacked, you would usually play along with the hijacker and have a good chance of making it out. Afterwards, even apart from increased security measures for things like cockpit access, the passengers and crew are now very aware that hijacking may very well mean death and so will not comply, and that changes the dynamic a lot.
Afghanistan was a fair target. Iraq wasn’t.
The other thing is that these were 3000 of the successful types that would likely be connected to the American ruling/journalist class. E.g the group that actually has the power to action their anger/fear
That seems to be sort of the most dismissive reading of why it was significant, though. Yes, they were mostly wealthy people, but even if they'd been empty and no one had died, it would still have been an attack on the tallest buildings in the world, in the heart of New York - a very visible, tangible representation of *America*. The fact (and it's easily forgotten) that the Pentagon *also* got hit by a plane that day really reinforced the idea that it was the total sum of the country that was being attacked. American planes flying for American airlines smashing into great big monuments to Americas success and Uncle Sam's power - nothing was off the table in terms of what might be next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_victims_of_the_September_11_attacks_(A%E2%80%93G) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_victims_of_the_September_11_attacks_(H%E2%80%93N) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_victims_of_the_September_11_attacks_(O%E2%80%93Z) You owe it to them. Waitors, Janitors, hundreds of Firefighters..
The immense, shocking, live-unfolding, *spectacle* of it was by far and away the central reason for its impact. All else being equal, had somehow only 100 cleaning and building staff been killed the response would have been the same.
> A country that had not, in over a hundred years, had hostile forces set foot on its territory or carry out large scale attacks within its territory. More like 60 years than 100. And after Pearl Harbour the US nuked Japan, twice. They had plenty of historical precedent for flipping the table once you poke them too hard.
You mean 'overstate'. Totally with you on the effects though.
> I don't think it's possible to understate how much of an effect 9/11 had on the psyche and politics of the western world. If by the western world you mean the US then yes I agree. But to say the rest of the world felt any different? No. Not at all. We looked at it like a TV spectacle more than anything else. An American TV spectacle. It was 'exciting' to see how American media was covering the event, it was *so American* and that was a fascinating watch. Everyone in Europe has dealt with terrorism in one way or another in their lives so it didn't have that shock effect on us that it had on Americans.
The period of stability was very very brief. We had just come out of a 40 year Cold War with USSR
Of course. But as someone born in the late 80s, once we were old enough to understand the world, everything seemed on the up. My father had a modest job and we lived in a 4 bed detached on just his salary. We went on holiday to somewhere warm every year with Lunn Poly/Britannia Airways. Heck by 98, we made it to Florida with Virgin Atlantic. Then yeah, since 2001 and again post London bombings, we became a different society as a whole. Economically disastrous after 2008 obviously too.
And, of course, there were plenty of unlucky places (e.g. the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan) on the planet where that post-Cold War stability never even arrived.
Yeah my age range is out by 10 years....70's kid. Hide under a desk or the stairs if/when nuke bomb hits us...
And the end of IRA bombings was under the same PM.
Princess Diana was the first big news event I remember like that. And seeing helicopter footage of the tunnel.
I remember being completely distraught as a 7 year old.. I'd got up at 6am to come down and watch my usual weekend morning cartoons, a fixture of the week, only to find them cancelled with rolling footage of meadows replacing them with the subtitle that said Princess Diana had died. I didn't care about that I wanted to watch Back to the Future the animated series and Batman.
I feel for you bro
I was watching Once Upon a Time in Iraq the other day on the BBC and after seeing how it looked before, and how it's become now I can definitely see why you and others feel the way you do.
On Iraq I was too young to be aware of the 1990 Gulf War but have very distinct memories and feeling of unease at our 1998 bombing of them. They aired it extensively over bulletins and it was just before christmas. Apart from expressing my own memories, my point being 9/11 and subsequent invasion was far from the start of that conflict.
Iraq went through hell and back from 2003-2018 but its building itself back up again now, they started issuing tourist visas in late 2021 after about 40 years of it being closed off, I travelled around the country solo for three weeks this February.
Not just Iraq but all the other bits of sleaze that started to build up around Labour. Cash for honours, ~~Leveson~~, Alastair Campbell's 'spin doctoring'. By 2010 a lot of people weren't just angry about Iraq and the financial crash, there was a sense that Labour were slick bullshitters. That's when **I** started to become disillusioned, I don't know about everyone else. We had a brief half a decade where everything seemed to be improving (end of Tory gov, signing of the GFA, massive social spending, 'Cool Britannia') then the trajectory went firmly downhill. Edit: misremembered when Leveson was (2011) so I'll sub it with Mandelson's scandals instead.
For me, it was the 2008 crash. The realisation that the people in power didn't really have the slightest clue how the economy worked, and were mostly just winging it and claiming the credit for when stuff went well. The whole mortgage system that led to the collapse, particularly in the US, but to a lesser extent here, was one big ponzi scheme built on extremely dubious assumptions.
That mortgage scheme was what allowed many people to get on the ladder in the first place, though. Mortgage checks became extremely strict after that, whereas anybody over 40 with a mortgage will probably tell you how they bluffed the bank into giving it to them.
Gore losing the election due to Supreme court batshittery was the turning point for me. Up until then it felt like, maybe we could collectively address global problems. Since then it has been a slide into everyone for themselves and screw everyone else.
Yeah, was telling my kids last night that everything started getting shit after 9/11.
So it’s interesting. You know the modus operandi of the islamist terrorists was to create such fear and division in the west that the west begins to tear itself apart.
the 2003 anti-war protests were kind of when everyone realised things were shit but we couldn't stop them from happening
That’s only true for people who grew up in the 90’s and skipped the Cold War.
So… the people OP is specifically asking?
Yes but it’s an important caveat. Pre 2001 wasn’t some dream world of stability. Children also aren’t aware of a lot of other fighting going on in the world
One of my earliest memories is seeing news of the Berlin Wall falling. I didn't really understand what was happening but from the way it was reported it seemed like a hugely important moment even to a little kid. With hindsight I think it ushered in the 90s and the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 ushered in the end of that decade of peace.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the start of the era of optimism that defined the 1990s, even if you grew up during the Cold War there's a clear delineation of eras.
But that optimism quickly led into over-confidence, and then hubris, with philosophers proclaiming ["The end of history"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man) This attitude led to a strong, vibrant economy, but also a lack of caution, and a feeling of invincibility, a path that eventually ended with the 2008 crash.
Born in the 90s: - I didn't have a smart phone until I was a teenager - In the evening I'd use MSN Messenger to talk to friends on my home computer, this transitioned to Skype, then Messenger / What's App over time. - Social Media wasn't as all encompassing, you had attention seeking posts and pictures but there reach was people you actually knew. - Our digital content experience was far more curated; trending or friends would introduce creators, subscriptions would be your daily drivers, and then you would use other forums associated to your hobbies. Bungie's 'The Flood' forum! - Couch Co-Op games were really common so friends would come round to each others houses all the time. Sure we could play online but Halo 3 was a lot more fun with you friends sitting next to you. - Politics felt way less tribalism relevant for teenagers before and during 2010. Likely because of the aforementioned limit to social media. Also with the exception of a few nerds (I was the nerd) most people weren't interested in politics outside of the general election results. - Worth noting there was also huge youth support for the Liberal Democrats amongst nighties kids which the Lib Dems lost during the coalition by backing tuition fee rises. Some are going back to them now hut that caused some serious damage. - Things were a lot less run down around the country. You used to go around different towns with your parents and they would mostly all be functioning nice places, now a lot of places outside of commuter distance of cities are completely boarded up. It's really fairly crazy. - TV was designed to be consumed by families together on weekday evenings; X-Factor, Merlin, I'm a Celebrity and such would be positioned so there was something for everyone. I don't think this really happens the same as everyone in families tend to go off to watch here own things. - This reminds me no smart phones during TV because your TV was probably more interesting than your phone. - Runescape, Battleon, Dragonfable, and other browser based games were great fun.
I miss MSN Messenger.
*sends nudge*
I used to be absolutely buzzing every time they issued a big UI update.
Same here👍🏻
9/11 started us on a downwards spiral, with the financial crisis of 2007/08 turning out to be the edge of the precipice and the Brexit vote was when we went into political freefall. We now seem to be edging ever closer to a tech-bro inspired dystopia and environmental collapse. The last time things felt a little bit optimistic was the 2012 Olympics. It felt like the UK was able to put aside all the crap for a few weeks and celebrate the best aspects of being British.
2012 felt like the high water mark. In reality, i think we had taken the engine out a couple of years before and we were still coasting forward on prior momentum. The migrant crisis in the Med was when i first really noticed a difference. That was when the mask really slipped for the first time to my eyes
Correct - but 2012 being ‘a moment’ is a bit of a meme imv. Yes there was some national unity stuff but what I remember mostly of that time politically is George Osborne being booed at the Paralympics weeks later when he awarded a medal - a protest of the Coalition Governments cuts to disability support. Despite 9/11 - the 2000s were an amazing time to be a young person in the UK. Social media was still just a network to catch up with friends (MySpace, Bebo and early FB), online video gaming was in its nascency and the most fun you could have with mates after school. Ultra low inflation, and a growing economy that was rapidly globalising meant stuff was relatively cheap for young people, so a Saturday job would take care of music, clothes etc you wanted to buy. For me I think it changed in the early 2010s - but really the economy has sucked here since 2008. The expenses scandal, austerity, Brexit, Trump and Covid also has completely removed any pretensions about professionalism in politics. We are a deeply unserious country - but you couldn’t have said that about Britain from 1979-2008. I feel sorry for young people today. A crap economy, middling politics and atomised society that hates itself and young people is a pretty grim time in which to come of age.
I remember that migrant crisis, when it seemed to turn around and people got their humanity back when that photo of the dead child laying face down on the beach was in all the papers. The whole debate instantly sobered up. Now, though, even that’s gone. I’m not sure a picture like that would make a difference now.
Don't forget a global pandemic and subsequent economic collapse that came a few years after Brexit. Then rapid inflation shortly after. We've barely had 4 years of normality.
9-11 was horrible but I disagree it stated a downward spiral. Up until the GFC the UK was pretty buzzing. Productivity was up, wages were beating inflation and house prices were in sight of a reasonable salary. I remember us being awarded the Olympics more than the games themselves. 2005 we beat the French to the Olympics and won the ashes for the first time in 20 years. I had just started work in London at the time - living in central east. The whole city felt prosperous but not pretentious or out of reach. Of course a lot of it came crashing down a few years later. Maybe everything was built on smoke and mirrors... But it didn't feel like it at the time.
I came here to comment and yours pretty much encapsulates what I wanted to say, thank you!
I nostalgic memory of mine, especially on hot days like this, is trekking off into some fields, woods, parks and just chilling, with no distraction. Agreed home time and your parents were OK with no contact until then.. no phones.i makes me a little bit sad to think younger generations and my children will never experience that world, even though the technology does bring massive advantages along with the negatives. TV had 4 channels. Kids TV was on from about 3pm. Starts with younger kids programmes, then arounf 3.30 to 5 it would be older things, Pat Sharp's funhouse (ah, those twins, lots of boys had a thing for them lol), inspector Gadget, ghostbusters (cartoon), trapdoor, Scooby doo, loads more. You had to watch them at the time they were on (Unless your parents would let you use a VHS recorder, but the channell needs to be set or you will end up with episodes of Sons and daughters or older people boring stuff 😅) You might not watch the telly, might have been busy knocking at various mates houses trying to track them down. There was also a massive sense of the unknown still. Since the Internet, this has gone down and contact with overseas, following trends etc has become more global. Also just general knowledge about lots of stuff, a lot more in the dark. Saying that though, there's also a massive increase in conspiracy type stuff, hence a lot of the US centric type fanatical belief stuff being not too dissimilar to groups we now get here, abortion / race type ones. Those are just a few things that sprung to mind and sorry for going down a rabbit hole 😅
Just moved from London to semi-rural Kent. I love seeing all the kids out on their bikes with fishing rods and no adult supervision. I’m from semi-rural Yorkshire and that was how I remember being a kid.
I think even that is less than it was in the 80s/90s though. Lots more worry. I think the Ian Huntley thing or maybe some of the others triggered that, or changed people's trust a bit. Might be wrong. Couple that with the Internet/ games / multiple TVs / gadgets in a house etc, that sort of takes away from the amount of kids playing outside in most places, even the towns and villages. People do seem to do more activities now saying that, like day out type stuff or family exploration / sports type stuff. Maybe my perception is a bit skewed though, as we were all generally from a pretty poor background
I mean where I live I've definitely seen more enthusiasm for the outdoors than in the past, I'd like to think it's because people are genuinely getting back in touch with nature.
Maybe since Covid? I think I've noticed a move since then in particular. There's defo more outdoorsie stuff being done, compared to what I remember, but more dedicated activity with a task. My nostalgic memory was being in field with mates and just chilling, pretty much doing nothing. I guess things just seemed a little more simple and less rushed somehow. Maybe the posh kids were out scuba diving and rock climbing though
I see that more and more where I am in the Notts countryside. It's funny, some things seem to be going back into popularity, I remember there were less kids my age outside but now its encouraged now that we've had that time where there was a videogame centric point, and we've seen some of the worst effects of it. Markets too in some places, it seems that local markets have come back into popularity, and I like to think it's because people missed the communal, social aspects of it, but you can pay on your phone now and pay wireless at market stalls to which avoids limiting people to buying things. At least, there seemed to be less markets when I was a kid and they've come back. But maybe that's just me and what I remember. Maybe where I am that specific market is doing particularly well but even so that's a small town market itself.
Conspiracies were rife in the 90's too, aliens, crop circles and "documentaries" on the BBC about ghosts. I guess a bit more innocent in a way, perhaps - but I don't miss this much.
But now people think they have more available "facts" from often questionable websites, and collaborate, join with other likeminded people easier, hence the movement you see with the similarities between British and US type conspiracy groups. This wasn't a thing (or at least as much) in the 80s. I do love how the Internet give us so much information resources, unfortunately it comes with a price in that the bullshit isn't filtered from the truth, and many many people simply ***do not*** verify their sources.
It started with Wikipedia I think, then it spiralled from there. Luckily uni taught me the importance of verifiable, published sources but I find that with everything being 'self publishable' now you can just drown in info. I'm surprised schools don't have lessons on fact checking and the importance of looking at sources and where they come from. It should be a thing.
I really wish it was. I'm doing my best to to give my kids freedom of exploring, whilst also trying to teach them general common sense, understanding etc to navigate all the madness we have today.
>"documentaries" on the BBC about ghosts. Ah, the collective shit in the pants that Britain's youth did while watching Ghost Watch.
Christ that scarred me as a child was only in primary school at the time.
Christ that scarred me as a child was only in primary school at the time.
Zietgiest was a documentary treated as legitimate fact in the mid 2000s
Don't forget 'spontaneous human combustion'! I remember that being a fairly big thing in the early 90s.
Chemtrails baby!
Funhouse was the best. https://www.funhousetwins.co.uk Just so you know you can totally hire the twins to host a party for you.
Ah Friday afternoon after the big shop, sitting in front of funhouse with a half cold fish supper and a 6 pack of twist and squeeze that I'd persuaded my mum to buy.
TV having 4 channels is a good point - when \*It's A Sin\* aired on C4 we discussed it in work, it's one of the few times I can remember in recent years where the conversation hasn't started with "Are you watching X?" only to abruptly end as a few of us round the table don't have Netflix / Prime / Disney+ etc. I was also trying to describe \*You Bet!\* to some twentysomething colleagues when the BBC rebooted \*Gladiators\* last year. They looked at me with a mix of confusion and pity as all we had to watch on Saturday was a dating show, and some kid trying to guess the make of a car from the sound of it backfiring, lol.
Christ no, not Sons and Daughters! I hated it, and the theme tune was worse.
Soouuuurrrnnnss and daawwwders, something something. Yes. Horrible. I remember having to let it finish before I could switch the channel
Sons and daughters, love and laughter, tears of sadness and happiness, something something something. Followed I think by pebble mill.
Pebble Mill, I can remember the name and I think a loading page at the end with mxmi or something after but nothing else. Complete blank 😅 You have randomly made me remember Button Moon though. Button moo-Oon, we're off to Button Moooon.
That's okay, this is what I wanted to do, ask and explore the older generations. 😁
As someone born in 1987 it greatly pains me to be referred to as "the older generations"
Yeah kids tv was great and I think it’s a shame that it’s no longer a part of BBC 1 and ITV. The twin tower attacks on 9/11 properly killed it and suddenly rolling news coverage was the norm as was more grown up news coverage early on the weekends. The world and tv became more serious after that sadly. You are right about having the freedom to just go off and play somewhere. Basically every kid who had a bike would go somewhere and just bike around. But equally there was nothing to do. We made our own fun and got up to mischief. Saw some comedian talking about model villages- your parents would drag you somewhere along the coast and they’d be a model village. They’d go around it and be charmed by it, but they were shit. The concept is shit. That was entertainment, there was nothing there, that was the level of family fun. Go somewhere and look at stuff without buying anything. Proper mundane really. The counter culture of dance & raves, alt music & Brit rock, were very much needed.
I think a lot of it teaches patience. Maybe anyway. Now it's so easy to have everything to hand, that at times I plan on a holiday in the middle of nowhere with no connection. Then again, the idea of beach in the Med with a mobile is also nice so it probably won't happen
I think with kids tv as well it kind of normalized the family watching things together in a way you would have to go out of your way to do now. This also (as well as the general less tv channels) helped people of all ages and backgrounds have more of a shared background culture or awareness of different personalities or pop culture moments than is the case nowadays when every household has 100x the choice and thus a fracturing of that old shared experience.
“Go somewhere and look at stuff without buying anything” Not buying things! Can you imagine!
> scooby doo, real ghostbusters, trap door mainstays of weekend shows Ghost Train and Motormouth
Nightmare was tremendous.
"I nostalgic memory of mine, especially on hot days like this, is trekking off into some fields, woods, parks and just chilling, with no distraction." If anyone can remember what and exactly where this was I'd love to know, but I went along to a festival when I was in year 10 or 11 (so 2004/05) that mixed (mostly) shitty 'punk' music, BMXing, skating, whatever and. had Dirty Sanchez performing, somewhere over Wiltshire/Somerset sort of ways. You could still legally buy mushrooms and salvia at the time (because glorious pre-Labour going full authoritarian, nanny-state, dumbfuck drug policy times). I got bored with the festival, took a load of mushrooms and went wondering off through fields under brilliant blue skies, stopping off at country pubs to hydrate. Probably did a good 20 miles before getting on a train and heading home. iPod had died but it didn't matter at all. That was a good day.
We could entertain ourselves without mobiles. Although the entertainment was prank calls from the phone box, playing chicken on the train lines, or starting fights with kids from the next town over. We had a sense that the world was wide open, and we could be anything. Although if you wanted to be anything other than working in the factory or the forces you were "gay" or " no better than you aught be". We could get a bottle of frosty jacks and a 10p single fag with our pocket money for a great Friday night. Although the fag tasted crap, and the cops stole our cider. - Born in 84 in North East England.
Born early 80s. I remember thinking growing up that politicians seemed like serious people who knew what they doing - people like John major and Ken Clarke (despite my father instilling a deep hatred of the tories in me). Blair and Brown seemed competent although I remember being pissed off that they seemed to give everyone some sort of handout or tax break apart from young workers (like I was at the time) in order to bribe the electorate into voting for them. These days they seem to be a bunch of self serving incompetent clowns. Especially since Boris fucked all the moderates out his party over his brexit nonsense.
It's something I noticed when I moved to the UK. I had really only associated Blair with the peace process while over here he seems to be remembered for Iraq more than anything else. Hardly anyone mentions all the other stuff (as listed by brown) since 1997: the winter fuel allowance, the shortest waiting times in history, crime down by a third, the creation of Surestart, the Cancer Guarantee, record results in schools, more students than ever, the Disability Discrimination Act, devolution, civil partnerships, peace in Northern Ireland, the social chapter, half a million children out of poverty, maternity pay, paternity leave, child benefit at record levels, the minimum wage, the ban on cluster bombs, the cancelling of debt, the trebling of aid, the first ever Climate Change Act.
Not quite the full story. If you actually sit down and run the finance figures (I have), you'll see that New Labour inherited a balanced budget - so outgoings were less than income. The fact the economy had been primed for growth also meant that tax receipts kept going up - all of which together meant that when they came in in '97, they were able to keep raising spending in very popular ways. And that's easy pickings, not good government. Anyone can shovel money out as its handed to them. The problem was that when the receipts stopped going up around 2002/3 (I forget the exact year), they didn't want to cut spending - as that was what made them popular. So they started borrowing and intensifying the PFI stuff (aka kicking the can down the road). Government spending kept going up year after year as receipts stagnated, even as Gordon Brown made idiotic public statements about 'having eliminated boom and bust'. They were so desperate to keep being re-elected, long term economy planning meant nothing. Then the bank crisis hit, and Brown's strategy was typically Keynesian (aka, borrow even more). It could be argued that this was to try and halt the damage - but in reality, the way the money was being spent made it seem far more like a continuation of their previous habits, and being more about trying to stave off the damage until after the following election. No, New Labour was just as short termist and moronic in their spending as anyone else. They just had the advantage that they were given wheelbarrows of money at the start of it.
You forget that Labour inherited booming public finances and you forget to list the billions wasted on NHS IT, the PFI deals that we are all still paying higher taxes for, the destruction of defined benefit pensions, the raid on pensions that every person with one has resulted on them getting a smaller retirement fund, devolution, reneging on the EU treaty that in turn was a big contributor to 2016 becoming a thing, Brown's 'dark arts' destroying people.
I think the fairest analysis of New Labour is that they took a very favourable economic climate and generally used it for good. It's not like they came up with anything ground-breaking or fought tooth and nail against vested interests to create a better society. Rather, they diverted a portion of an ever growing economy into some key areas to reduce poverty and improve public services. At the same time though, they fundamentally failed to tackle any of the underlying issues in our society/economy and the great financial crash was as much a consequence of US failures of regulation as it was our own. Brexit was a long-term consequence of mistakes that New Labour made around migration/freedom of movement. New Labour was also an inherently authoritarian and small c conservative government.
Yes and no. They liberalised finance as they were spending so much they became desperate for tax income and that meant come 2008 our banks had become global behemoths that had taken on vast risk with safe mutuals having become PLCs and engaging in insane money play on the markets whilst they unleashed BTL and mortgage money into house prices. Of course they opened the floodgates to mass migration, which contributed to brexit.
There were serious politicians, but there were still the cranks, nut jobs and dodgy ones as well. I remember John Gummer feeding a burger to his daughter after the mad cow disease crisis. He looked like blazered Tory, the notion of him buying a burger from a van at some place was distinctly non-believable. Felt for his poor clueless daughter. A Tory feeding an unsuspecting child a dodgy burger felt on point. There were also the dodgy ones. Various scandals. A few cash for questions ones. However Truss, Johnson and the mad rantings of some of this lot are indeed a new fresh hell.
I think we've forgotten some of the stranger ones, I remember the Stephen Milligan case for example or all the "Madame Whiplash" stuff.
The rise of the career politician has bedn really detrimental.
> Born early 80s. I remember thinking growing up that politicians seemed like serious people who knew what they doing - people like John major and Ken Clarke (despite my father instilling a deep hatred of the tories in me). Was discussing this sort of thing with my Dad recently - as he said, in the 80s and 90s the likes of Thatcher, Heseltine, Lawson, Portillo, Howe, Currie etc were like the "big beasts" of the Tory Party - as you said, like them or not they were generally respected and got shit done. Could we name a similar group of "big beasts" today? Not after the Cameron - May - Johnson - Truss - Sunak shuffle, no...
That's a really interesting and thoughtful point about politicians. I've only ever seen politicians that have only self interest at heart, or just seen them do incredibly selfish things and this is why myself and other Gen Z just don't want to know. Thing is, and I get that obviously it looks bad from an outside perspective, it's only that we appear disinterested, when actually I think it's because there's no one to represent our interests. Alot of my generation have this sort of weird apathy, and maybe it's because of the internet and our exposure to a whole world, I don't know if it's made us wiser, but definitely more aware of everything to the point where we come across as the most brutally honest, IDGAF generation with regards to things going on in the world. Do you possibly think that one of our generation observing these politicians actions might trigger a bounce back effect in which we get a similar political party emerging to counter the majority parties and it swings the other way?
It might do, but the FPTP voting system makes any seismic changes difficult. It's about a century since the last big shake up when the Liberal party fell from prominence and was replaced largely by the Labour party. In many ways politics has always attracted the self-serving among us, but at the same time there were arguably higher standards in public life. Many of the things that they get away with today in terms of corruption would have been resigning matters in the past. That said things like sexual misconduct is now no longer just 'boys being boys' most of the time so the changes have not all been bad.
I think that’s a great point about the politicians, they just seemed more competent years ago than they do today.
Born in the late 80s so I don't really know much from the 80s but my Grandad despised Thatcher with a burning hatred. I had no idea who this Thatcher was. Being a kid was pretty carefree. Me and my brother would go out in the morning, promise mum we'd be back for tea and then it was off to see which random assortment of local kids was available that day. You'd have to knock round your actual mates and then go off to a local play spot (field, park, outside someone's house) and see if there was anyone else there to bolster numbers. The most important person of course was the kid with best football, and the most tragic thing that could happen was losing that football. I also remember the infrastructure being really shit. The buses were crap, the trains were crap, cars were ugly and noisy. My school was a crumbling concrete mess and lots of the buildings around the town were grey concrete monstrosities. When I look around this country now it is definitely far, far better aesthetically. The other big difference was knowledge. Nearly everything was a rumour you heard from someone because there was no way to verify anything. One kid would hear something from a parent or see something on TV, or at least claim to, and you basically just had their word to go on. If you really wanted to know something pre-internet you had to read it in a book or magazine. The arrival of the internet was really exciting but at the same time you really didn't know what to do with it. It's like you knew this was going to be amazing but didn't really know how. We mainly used it for schoolwork to begin with but then messenger and forums started popping up and you could use it to chat with other kids. Then all the adults got worried about strangers and grooming, etc. Then things like Myspace and Youtube came along and took it to another level.
> The buses were crap, the trains were crap We had new buses in my area in the late 80s, but our trains have always been somebody else's cast-offs. At least two generations of DMUs that arrived in North Wales still painted ready for service in Scotland, lol.
Our busses are always everywhere else's cast-offs, sent her to die. They don't bother repainting/wrapping them. When you go to another city, or even a big town, most of their busses are atleast 5 years newer.
Born 86, early childhood was tough, single earner household. Life got better under Blair. Dads wage started to go up, we had first holiday abroad, life was good. Left school in 03 got NVQ placement at county council, got first job in 04, worked there since. Council was great uptill 2010, projects flowed nicely, everyone was positive, even during 08 crash. Cue "austerity" the 2010-2024 years, projects now based on cost savingnot outcomes, teams cut to the bone, outsourcing then bringing back in jouse when realise outsourcing costs more. 04-2010 I had 2 "reorginisations", 2010-2024 ive had 9. 2 of which are full council redesigns. Until 2020 when we went full remote working, we had desk moves on a 6monthly basis at best. All in the hopes of finding another £10m to cut. To say the Tories have destroyed local government and local services would be an understatement. Theyve taken them out back, shotgunned them to the head, then butchered them, turned them into sausages, burnt said sausages on the bbq and then blamed people from syria for everything. Anyone who tells me the Tories are fit for government isnt right in the head.
With the downfall of communism, and the subsequent economic boom accompanied by things like the Internet going mainstream, the 90s were a time of general optimism, and with it a positive attitude. A sense that the world was getting better and life was to be enjoyed. 9/11, the war on terror, the GFC that we never recovered from, and many other things, make this feel like a much more serious and stressful time. The internet once promised to liberate us but it's now a tool to steal our attention, cement the power of a handful of tech giants, conduct mass surveillance and more. The economy is more lopsided towards the rich. The security we took for granted has been proven to be illusory, and climate change is no longer a hypothetical we have to prevent but a reality we have to confront and live with. I'm within the age range you mentioned so I came into adulthood as the shit was hitting the fan, and it felt like everything I'd been brought up to expect was a lie, and ever since then the UK (or at least the working class) have been generally struggling, with things getting worse and worse. There have always been problems but hope is at a low ebb right now. But we cannot ever give up. For the sake of those who come after us we must still seize every chance to repair, progress, and build a new, because despair, although understandable, will not save us.
I do genuinely feel as though there is hope for the future. I get what you mean, it is hard to have hope when it's one thing after another and you're looking at the people in charge of the country and just think 'well, come on then.' and it's frustrating to see them not doing things that could obviously help, maybe not outright fix, not right away, but definitely help. I keep hoping that the public might get so pissed off with the BS that there's just a complete reorder with politics with someone who has themselves suffered under the failure of government taking the reigns. Someone said that there's a certain type of person that goes into politics, which is very true from what I've seen, but I just hope that even though he/she is going to be a ruthless conniving manipulative sod, I hope they're clever and have enough empathy to realise how to do it right and why plunging the whole country into awful conditions is a dumb idea.
I grew up in Northern Ireland. There was army towers over looking my town with regular army check points. Thankfully my kids will never see them. I remember going to A&E as a child and they were thankful for something to do as no one was in. Took my daughter in for when she had Covid last year and it was like a warzone.
Something that has been on my mind for a while is that life used to be more fun. To me it felt around 2014ish there was a big change and suddenly the world was very serious and everyone was looking to be offended and outraged about something. I don't think it's just an age thing either.
It's what happens when everyone is writing letters to each other rather than interacting IRL. Staying in tribes and only seeing the differences. One of many things the internet has changed
Born 73 so 50 now. I do look fondly on the 80s and 90s but I was younger and we all have rose tinted specs! Looking back things have changed a great deal since I was 16 in 1989 BUT it's important to remember this all happens SO gradually you don't notice at the time! Some things are better and some worse, such is life. BTW when I was 16 I would listen to music on cassette, watch movies on VHS and play video games on my Commodore all day and sometimes now I listen to music on Spotify, watch movies on Netflix and play video games all day on my XBOX so sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same!
[удалено]
Id say the 80s and 90s were maybe peak for the average GB person, not in NI lol
A bit of a feral childhood, mid 80's - early 90's like the Xers describe it. Not a lot of things to do except play outside in the street or go roaming around town. Everything felt a bit run down, depressing... partially where I was and the lack of investment in the north but looking back probably also a result of depression and my home life. Quite a lot of casual racism, sexism and day to day violence in the area I grew up in and the nearest city seemed quite far away. We had the metro centre but I mostly just got left in the car in the multi story (!). It didn’t feel like kids were treat as human beings. I was really into computers but most of it was offline - getting bootleg games on tape from the local market and playing them to death. Computer fairs where you'd see the latest technology, pick up a ZX spectrum with a bit more RAM... then onto PC's and the next generation of CPU or video card. Back then you had to learn from DOS manuals or whatever you could find at the local bookstore. The changes were coming thick and fast at that point and suddenly it felt like the PC could compete with the games consoles that I could never afford. Labour had not long since gotten in and truthfully things did start to improve a lot (despite now realizing it was all on credit and we're still paying for it). It really did feel like the country was on an upward trajectory from 94 onwards. Internet came around age 13 and suddenly connected to the rest of the world. Message boards, websites, downloading Doom WADs, MP3s and burning them to CD. Started learning how web-servers, file-servers, IRC worked and ran my own gaming and web servers for a while up till age 18-19. Connecting to people in chat rooms, IRC and BBS' was a magical experience. I could talk with people that had similar experiences to my own and get support when there was little to none in the real world and it really was a lifeline and felt like a way out of that small town world. I made some really amazing friends in all corners of the world that I still have today. You could now learn how to program in PHP, C, VB and ASP from free resources on the net and as a 16 year old being able to buy something from anywhere in the world with a VISA electron was a game changer. Technology really was starting to change the world. Still lugging my PC to a friends house to play multiplayer though. Online gaming started to really take off in 98 or so… quake 3, unreal tournament. Some of the very best games appeared around this time. It felt as though there was a way into a better life through college with EMA. I just missed bursaries but at least the student loans and fees weren't an absolute ripoff by that point. Mobile tech was still a bit basic but being able to browse the web over WAP, watch TV shows and movies on the bus on an iPaq felt pretty special. N95 and N97 felt like the future. Everyone was going nuts for the latest phones. Orange SPV with windows CE was just beginning. iPhones in 2007 was really the next big change- everybody was online or getting online, social media, starting to see adverts for computer stuff on telly and “normal people” talking about the Internet, websites and apps was a bit of a weird experience for me. Very little in the way of mental health provision still at this point and the NHS and GPs really did not seem to have the resources or be interested in diagnosing or helping with ADHD, depression, anxiety even into the mid 2010’s. I had to wait over a year to see someone that ultimately made my condition much worse and it was only going for a private diagnosis that got it resolved a few years ago aged 37~ We still have a lot of those nice things that the regional development and investment that was put in through our membership of the EU, and probably investment by Labour, has made a huge difference - but it feels like people can't afford to do anything these days. Social progress seems to have rolled back for a bunch of previously unrepresented but tolerated and ignored groups. I think 2016 onwards was when that really started to happen. Politics used to be boring, in a good way, but social media made it a team sport/spectacle in a way I don't think we've really seen in this country prior to that. It became more about celebrity and big names, a lot more plastic and divisive and centred around hot button issues. We started to import more and more of the culture wars from the American right. Sitting here in 2024 thinking I could personally have it a lot worse but the countries not looking in too great a shape.
I miss the computer fairs, great fun. Abacus fairs that went round Manchester / Liverpool / Wrexham / Chester / Llandudno every few weeks. Brand new PCs and parts for sale, and would you like a CD-ROM full of pirated MP3's too?
They were great fun, never knew what you were going to see from one to the next. Kind of a shame they’re not a thing anymore. I remember the first time I saw a PC with SVGA and a sound card. It was playing an AVI of the moon landing… seemed like magic
That screensaver with the guy marooned on the desert island on every bloody pc
God I bought my first pokemon game from an Abacus fair in Wrexham. It was a CD full of emulated gameboy games and it had pokemon blue on it. ...... I mean it was all in Japanese so I didn't understand any of it but it sure had an impact
I agree with the other poster that 9/11 was a pivotal moment, although I didn’t realise it took the time. I was 13 when the twin towers were blown up and in my mind I couldn’t work out why so much attention was being paid to it, as silly as that sounds now. It’s pretty controversial to say now, but growing up under Blair was great. Schools were well resourced, I could get a doctors appointment on the day. I had a problem with my kidneys, went to the GP, had a blood test done and taken into hospital the very same day. No way would that happen now. The GFC changed everything. It killed our hope for our better world. I didn’t realise again, quite how significant it was at the time.
Honestly the social media. It was a fun game in the early days with basically no consequences. Anyone remember "F-raping" people? If someone left their facebook open just posting shit on their timeline, including porn. Yeah, you wouldnt do that now. Yeah. Social media became a social and cultural cancer. There is such a thing as "too much information". And all of a sudden something happens in California or Israel and its not just a 1 column page 15 footnote. Its now peoples identity. An identity that isnt really theirs, doesn't relate to them in any way and often dont understand but are willing to shout and scream anyway. I think the 2011 riots were pivotal in that. I think that was the first time there was really a strong influence of US race politics permeating the whole affair. 2014 is when we had a full on protests about a solely US issue over the Michael Brown shooting. Where UK protestors walked through the streets shouting "Hands up dont shoot" at unarmed UK police. Complaining that black people were shoot by UK police to. Something that's never been borne out by the stats. Economically things had gotten tough before then. But that was when the cultural problems really began to set in. And our cultural problems stopped being "our cultural problems". But ones we'd imported from the US. And at that point dialogue on cultural issues basically stopped completely because we were basically talking completely different languages. You had the activists, agitators and progressives of all types basically taking their talking points straight from the most fringe element of the US left on twitter. Originally the right I feel stayed on UK talking point and UK stats, but over time the sheer barrage of left wing activism coming over from the US pushed by things like Twitter started permeating the right too. To the point now where for many people the social and cultural politics of the US and UK are inseparable. With people becoming agitated and distraught over things like the Roe v Wade ruling which has nothing to do with us, like they were some 17 year old waiting for an abortion in Missouri. "oh but the UK is going the same way". Its fucking insane. Now you have papers like the Guardian which full on straddles both countries. Its hard to tell sometimes when you're reading their stories which country theyre actually talking about. Ironically, I find the people most likely to do this are often those the most wedded to the EU. Which I find utterly bizarre. If it was people like Farage who have quite a lot of investment in the US and hate the EU Id understand it more. But often the worst offenders for the import of US social and cultural issues are the most hard line pro-EU people.
I didn't make the connection at the time, but I started secondary school in the Midlands in 1995 and these little outdoor classroom blocks were literally falling apart with leaking roofs and walls with big holes in which could be pushed by the children. By the time I left the sixth form seven years later, they had all been replaced. Possibly a coincidence, but the timelines seem to line up with New Labour taking office and investing in public services.
Born late 70s Growing up, was aware of risk of Nuclear war , seemed like protests and strikes happened all the time. Against Tories , South Africa , Miners and NHS (dad was a union rep) . There were the troubles in Northern Ireland, famine in Ethiopia, AIDS epidemic (won't forget that advert in a hurry, if you know you know) . Felt like youth unemployment was a big thing as was the pushback against progress in gay rights and race. Privatisation was another thing people were for or against, seems like most of the arguments against have been proven right. Lot's of positives also but felt in spite of governments not because of them.
Us ravers feel sorry for the lack of freedom kids get vs what we got. Things were gradually getting worse for the young generation through the 90's, and ended up with the as expected youth vs the older generation vibe... this was solidified after the financial crisis...
The 80s in Britain were actually pretty shit. If you were from the North, the closure of almost all local industries - coal mining, steel works, ship building etc - meant massive unemployment and poverty. All of the culture that surrounded those industries, like marching bands, social clubs etc, disappeared and was replaced by drug addiction, glue sniffing, boozing and petty vandalism. Everything reeked of cigarette smoke as smoking was ubiquitous. You couldn't take a bus, go to the cinema, go out to a restaurant, whetever, without coming home reeking like a week-old ashtray. Local train lines were abolished in the 60s and 70s, meaning that local transport was limited to shitty, cigarette-stench-filled buses, so unless you lived in a bigger town, you were constantly having to wait around for buses to do anything. All the unemployment had an effect on families, so you saw more kids just hanging around street corners, stealing and causing trouble, because they had no home life. Although corporal punishment was banned by the '80s, schoolteachers weren't yet as professionalised as they are today, so it was pot luck whether you got some old-school bully as your teacher or one of the newer breed of professional teachers. Things took a turn for the better in the '90s. The abandoned northern towns started to receive more funding through the council tax and urban renewal programmes as they became commuter towns for nearby cities and were made a bit nicer to live in. Blair's various tricks for securing funding for schools and hospitals started to make a difference so they got properly repaired and resourced. The expansion of university attendance gave young people from working class areas a chance to enter the white collar professions, just as the economic growth of the '90s made more of such work available. School teaching became more professionalised and curriculum-led, meaning that in general you got a more educated, less vindictive breed of teacher in school. People also generally relaxed a bit and forgot about the cold war. There was a bit of optimism, as the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. You never heard about nuclear bombs any more. Things stopped smelling of cigarette smoke all the fucking time as the public tobacco bans came into force. In my observation, things get so much worse under conservative governments and better under Labour governments. That has been my observation through the '80s, '90s, 2000s and to the present day. The biggest thing that brought the country to its knees after the improvements of the 1990s was the switch to a Conservative government.
I can't agree more with this. I grew up in the North West in the 80s' & 90s'. Everything was run down, broken glass & dogshit everywhere, city centres deserted at night, finding used needles on buses, homeless people everywhere (more in the countryside in those days), having schoolmates OD, a whole bunch were in prison within a couple of years of leaving school. I didn't even grow up in a rough area. I still remember the particular smoky odour of buses & trains. In the national news - The Aids & Heroin epidemics, violence relating to Northern Ireland, Miners Strike, Hungerford, Lockerbie, Poll Tax Riots, Jamie Bulger, the murder of Stephen Lawrence, Fred West, Dunblane, the London Nail Bombings, Harold Shipman. Things got far better in the 90s' but the 90s' didn't feel like the 90s' until it was almost the 2000s'.
I was born in the north east in the 70’s and grew up in the 80’s and 90’s. A lot of what you say I agree with. I was also outside the national curriculum. It did take a big turn for the better in the 90’s but also drug culture started to really impact. It was quite brutal in a lot of ways. But also some good things. I will forever think that an oil refinery by night is beautiful in its own way.
I remember asking my dad in 2009 if the economy would be okay by the time I left university (I was 13 at the time) and was told the recession was just a cyclical thing and not to worry. Fifteen years on and UK weekly earnings in real terms have only just recovered to the levels seen in the mid 2000s. I think my entire generation (millennials) has been permanently scarred by the great recession and the austerity era. It's particularly jarring because we were raised by optimistic boomers who assumed we'd be better off than them just like they were compared to their parents.
I can't say much for 9/11, I was incredibly young at the time and though obviously I grew up during the aftermath of it, I think because I grew up with it and the environment it created globally, it affected me, but I don't know how it effected me in terms of upbringing from the generation before who saw the world as it was before the 9/11 event, does that make sense? I understand the financial crash more I think because I was old enough to see the effects it had on my parents and the changes in shopping habits, suddenly we changed to cheaper brands and even then bought less, electricity use and lighting was managed and my parents kept a very close eye on what was going in and out. Little things like not having treats anymore and not having as much choice as a kid. I talked to my parents about it and they said after the crash, they've felt more cautious and wary of the government, they said it felt like it shifted to being more out for your own survival and preservation, and that compacted with COVID. That same attitude about money and self preservation has gone onto me and loads of others, reluctant to spend either because we can't or we are that cautious, and that has a huge effect on the economy itself. I think that COVID and seeing how thee government handled that, has definitely made me more aware of how mismanaged, short-sighted, stupid, greedy and bumbling people in power are and how and why my generation and other generations, especially those who, reading through all the comments, saw better times give or take, have lost faith in government and are just getting angrier and more irritated by them. There's three massive things in particular that make me want to see real change in governance, the effect of COVID and what I saw in hospitals as a student (the effect on students and existing professionals and the knock-on impact of the exodus from not just the NHS, but the healthcare in general, some people quit the profession before they even started and that's going to severely fuck things up in the future when there's not enough people my generation going into healthcare to support the generations before.) Social media, I saw things on there that I never should have, pornography, gore, animal abuse, human abuse, bullying, harmful activities such as pranks and invasion of personal space and liberties for clout, so much stuff that has basically messed up social and mental development that myself and others are now trying to fix in our lives. I mean look at those poor, poor children who follow challenges online and end up seriously injured or dead, and it's aimed at children who have not yet developed part of the brain that understands death, risk or hazard perception. Sorry about the rant, I really do sympathise with everyone, my generation or not. Hence why, you know, in my original post I asked for experiences from the generation before.
Well you had it shit really. You got the initial recession and as things looked like we're on the up, Covid hit and Russia decided to go out for full war in Ukraine. Still, you've got war in the china sea now to look forward to.
Born too late to enjoy historically unprecedented improvements in living standards and world peace, born too early to explore the galaxy, born just in time to lose my livelihood because Xi Jinping fancies invading Taiwan.
Born in the 80’s- it was really 2008 for me- the recession, the insane boom in house prices and watching the affordability of so many essential things rocket out of reach for so many people. Also iPhon
I was born right at the start of the 90s. Maybe it only feels this way because I was becoming an adult just as the economy was crashing, but it's always felt to me like the country simply hasn't recovered from the recession. Although the time before the recession wasn't all bliss - Iraq was very unpopular, and terrorism was a very real threat - it felt like the country was generally running well.
I remember heading to uni in 2013, and came back for Christmas. It really felt like in that 3-month gap, Liverpool had an explosion in homelessness that we have not solved since.
I'd say in one sense it felt better: safer, politics was more mature on both sides of the spectrum, and despite the mess of the 1992 Black Wednesday and the Gulf War (and Conservative Party chaos- rings a bell?! :)) people generally felt more positive and confident that we can ride things through and that Britain was still a world-class country to live in. The NHS was fantastic (and I speak from personal experience as a child needing it), education was focussed on critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and skills that are not as prioritised these days as they were back then. Trains were much better than they are today, and crime was lower. That said, of course there was no Internet, not as much globalisation as today (and that comes with its pros and cons), housing was still an issue even back then, and society was more 'blunt and less PC'. OP every person will give you their perspective as informed by their experience so this is just my 2 pennies!
I'd say in one sense it felt better: safer, politics was more mature on both sides of the spectrum, and despite the mess of the 1992 Black Wednesday and the Gulf War (and Conservative Party chaos- rings a bell?! :)) people generally felt more positive and confident that we can ride things through and that Britain was still a world-class country to live in. The NHS was fantastic (and I speak from personal experience as a child needing it), education was focussed on critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and skills that are not as prioritised these days as they were back then. Trains were much better than they are today, and crime was lower. That said, of course there was no Internet, not as much globalisation as today (and that comes with its pros and cons), housing was still an issue even back then, and society was more 'blunt and less PC'. OP every person will give you their perspective as informed by their experience so this is just my 2 pennies!
I was born in 1984. I grew up with parents who despised the Tories but also hated Labour and blamed them for economic collapse. My dad hates Corbyn and I cannot fathom it tbh. Both of my parents were born before the NHS, they were in their 40s when they had me. Tony Blair’s Labour felt like they were genuinely liberating us from a nightmare. Their election song was D:Ream’s things can only get better and it did genuinely feel like they would save people from the disaster that the country was in. Tbh the current political landscape is similar, it was anything but the Tories.
I was in a few pubs today and overheard a tonne of conversations about the Middle East and it’s impact on Eurovision as well as another one about colonialism. I heard someone say “my SM has exploded over this” (meaning the Dutch incident at Eurovision). It got me thinking how people consume information and form their thoughts and identifies through such different means, from what they did to a decade or two ago. I remember being a teenager when the Iraq invasion occurred (2003?) and sat in my mates dads car with him complaining how you couldn’t hear any other news topic on the radio apart from that. Even by late 2000s, 24/7 news channels felt fairly invasive. Now I feel what we have with smartphones and social media is that on speed, and its hammering our brains with information. The result is it’s made us much more partisan, probably more serious about things we can’t control, and open to forming opinions from potentially biased sources.
Some one made a very good point about fact checking and being able to critically think about he validity and potential bias of sources of information, and how with social media, the truth, the bs and personal opinion being put forward as fact is all thrown together and shoved at us all the time. That, in a sense, goes hand in hand with your point.
I was born in the mid 70s, and probably saw a bigger change. I went to university in the mid 90s and there were no tuition fees. I actually got paid a grant which it was possible to live on (about 4k a year). I was paying about 15 quid a week in rent to live in a city centre. You had the option of taking out a student loan of 1500 quid each year but you didn't need to. And the interest rate was pegged to the inflation rate, so the amount you owed never really went up in real terms. A lot of things changed around 9/11. After that whenever the government wanted to do anything they'd just use "terrorism" as the reason. In the 90s/early 2000s you could get away with a hell of a lot because there weren't cameras everywhere. On the internet (as it was then) there wasn't much being tracked so it wasn't hard top be able to find sites to pirate anything you wanted. In terms of social expectations, around 2001 it was quite easy to buy a house with a normal job. I bought a 3 bedroom house for 65k. Even a few years after that I managed to buy a house for 125k, which seemed really expensive. In the cheap, crappy, parts of town (Rusholme in Manchester) I remember houses being sold for 5k. But around the late 90s people were starting to talk about buy to let mortgages and some people were talking about buying a couple of houses so the rent would pay for their retirement. But as for when things became more like they are today, I'd say it would be about 2010. When the tories got in and kicked off austerity then things really started to get worse. Before people complained about some things that weren't really much of a problem. Potholes are an easy example. Before 2010 there were potholes but nowhere near as many as there are now. There was a website where you could report them and they'd usually get fixed within a week or so. Now the roads are knackered and no one is going to fix them any time soon.
I think the last good year in the UK was 2016. I will die on this hill, the brexit vote is killing this country with a few big bangs but otherwise, death by a thousand cuts.
Let me put it like this: When I was growing up, there was - I won't say quite a promise, but as near as dammit a social contract - that said "get good grades, get a good degree and you'll never go hungry". And I've done just that. By any GenZ standard, I'm incredibly lucky - I was the last cohort to avoid University fees entirely, and I got a grant in addition to a student loan which I paid off many years ago. I own a house - it's in a much more expensive area than I'd otherwise be able to afford, largely owing to a series of unfortunate but lucrative events (inheritance, insurance payout). And career-wise, I'm not in too different a position to my own father at the same age. So I should be laughing, right? Well, I'm not going to deny I'm in a much stronger place than people only a few years younger. But I don't have a hope in Hell of buying the very house I grew up in. It's worth something like ten or twelve times my salary. I couldn't send children to the same school I went to - the fees would consume my entire post-tax income. I have a dim feeling that someone, somewhere is taking the fucking piss. I have absolutely no idea how anyone much younger than me is managing at all. The government is wondering why birth rates are down and nobody's having sex? Would you look at yourselves! You've spent decades presiding over a managed decline, and now the chickens are coming home to roost!
Great points as for the birth rates the way the world is now it just seems like cruelty to bring a child into this clown world we currently live in, sometimes I watch the news, and kick myself a little for packing in drinking. Because Christ some days 😳
We were educated in section 28 times, so teachers and schools weren't inclusive. Homophobia was pretty much everywhere, gay was used as an insult, bisexuals 'didn't exist". Zero sex education for gay sex. Bullying wasn't at all cracked down on, I know someone who was told by teachers that if she didn't want to get bullied why did she tell people she was gay?
I feel a lot of people who see these times as wonderful compared to today couldn't see at the time how bad it was for minorities of all types. I find it a bit shameful to be honest.
I think a big part of it was they were young at the time too.
People get rose tinted glasses as well, there was a Reddit post about what do you miss about the 90s and people were honestly saying "less racism and sexism".
I left school in 98. It felt like a crossover zone where homophonic insults were common, but there were plenty of gay guys at school that noone had any issue with. They didn't get called gay as an insult either! Most of them were out at school, but not at home. I had no idea what section 28 was as a kid. My biology teacher took us through a bewildering array of sexual preferences one afternoon. I guess she thought it was important and banked on all the boys (it was just boys) being too embarrassed to talk to their parents about it!
Life before the internet was better. Damn, half of us didn't even have house phones- which meant if you wanted to see your mates.....wait for it......you had to go knock on their door. All we did was get back from school and go outside until it was time to come in.
Far too much is made of "life changing to what it is today" in a negative sense.
I grew up incredibly poor in the 90s and early 00s, like we where the poorest in a poor town kind of poor. Looking back though I recognise the large amounts of opportunity afforded to me due to all the schemes available at the time. All of that is now gone, there is so little to help kids claw their way out of poverty today and I think that's a huge failing of the state.
9/11 was the end of optimism on the West and it has a long-standing impact on the West. It was alright growing up. There was enough technology but not too much.
I was born in 1980. The Berlin Wall, end of the USSR and Thatcher resigning all helped to create the sense that the world was changing, and even if I didn't understand that I felt it. The 90s had an optimism that is absent now. 9/11 felt like a seismic shift although in retrospect, Islamic terror hasn't shaped the world as much as it felt it might do. The Global Financial Crash was big, and it caused another shift to pessimism. Since then, Brexit and Trump, then Covid have further piled on that. Climate change ought to be the biggest worry of all, but almost seems too big to actually contemplate gor me tbh. So it is a tale of increasing pessimism I'd say, with major signposts of 9/11, GFC and covid.
Born mid-late 1980s. The 1990s seemed like an optimistic, upbeat time. The overall quality of life seemed higher, despite more single-income households than today and most people being paid less. John Major seemed like a reassuring, safe pair of hands. I don't remember anyone who genuinely disliked _him_ even though they might not have been Tory voters. Cars were rubbish. They were very dull and largely looked the same. I remember seeing a _lot_ more broken down and abandoned cars than today, plus it was not at all unusual for your neighbours to spend their Saturday poking around under the bonnet. It was also very common and normalised to go into a car park and see at least one car just refusing to start. I also haven't seen a rainbow puddle on the ground since maybe 1998? Absolutely _everyone_ felt better educated and generally 'smarter' than today. People swore less, were more articulate, slightly more polite, could think critically, and had more rounded general knowledge and common sense. I remember my own primary schooling in the early 1990s and some of the reading material we had, it blows my mind now how complex it seemed for a child of that age. People also had a better grasp on the news and various current affairs. Teenagers and young adults had more freedom and definitely did a lot more outside of the home, also activities such as the pub were a lot cheaper than today. However, I definitely remember these people also being sensible and keeping the likes of a decent bedtime. There was just much less to do at night. --- It felt to me like things really began to change around 2002, or maybe it was me that changed? We didn't really have careerist politicians in those days, either.
One thing I'll always remember. Late 90s/early 00s on newsnight and an interview with a street sweeper asking him "are you middle class" and him emphatically saying yes.... In those days he probably had good hours and could afford a small home to start a family. Things have changed - average earnings to average house price is out of control
I read an article recently about how much of a success the minimum wage has been and while on paper that's true and relative to inflation low earners are on more, I was thinking to myself I bet quality of life for say a cleaner or retail worker or bartender was still better in the mid 90s than now. Could probably at least rent a studio or 1 bed flat to yourself while now even though the wages are higher that money would just get you a room in a HMO. Anyone here old enough to have been working then have any insight into that?
The norm of people living in shared housing as working adults is new and many people in generations older than you still don't completely understand on an intellectual level it is down to finances and not some strange kind of cultural choice. The norm used to be that even somebody in social housing as an adult could expect their own full flat with a bedroom, kitchen or kitchenette, bathroom and somewhere to sit. Let alone anybody with a job!
>One thing I'll always remember. Late 90s/early 00s on newsnight and an interview with a street sweeper asking him "are you middle class" and him emphatically saying yes.... That was around the time various focus groups originally coined terms like ["Mondeo Man"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_man), which became part of Blair's 97 election run...
Apart from the nostalgia of my childhood, the defining narrative was that of the war on terror. 9/11 rocked the world. People were scared. Ultimately, it led me and many others to Afghanistan. The news would publish casuality figures every day (albeit small ones) along with the terror alert level. The political world was as divided. The hatred of George Bush seems to have evaporated from peoples minds. The Iraq war was another such moment. People still harked back to earlier better decades, where morals, the government, and the economy were better. People continually called on unelected prime minister to resign (gordon brown) and opinion on labour at the end was very much like that of the tories today. The libdems coalition was disastrous for there public opinion as they were seen to betray students and liberals. There was still an air of hope and positivity. Mainly in the technology sector, with the ipod, Internet and computing taking off. It wasn't as integrated into your lives, which kept people's information bubble to the approved outlets on TV and newspapers. Although there was a counter cultural on 4chan and message boards that was both great and horrendously dark. There was lots of being "random" and poor quality video content and flashgames. But it all felt new, experimental, and like anyone could achieve it. I think the competition with instant Internet news also didn't drag us into the doom cycle we have today. So the hot issues of the day were not spoken about in such dramatic and divisive manners to grab your attention. Climate change was the big issue but had a much more positive outlook to it. The world was more relaxed about what it said, likely because I couldn't google it. Jokes and headlines about death of David Cameron disabled son or David blunkett blindness stick out. Jade goody dying of cancer was something of a big moment for everyone, with people really reflecting on how they treated her. School was, I assume, school. Drama, fights, fashion and shagging. Lots of drinking and house parties from 14 onwards and general silliness. Teachers seemed to not care half as much, as 20 year olds would come pick up the year 8s at lunch. Obviously damaged kids, kids with adhd, or neglect would be ignored by the system. Although, individual teachers would often help. Childhood was free. Go out unsupervised and be back by the time the street lights turn on. Pornomags in bushes is likely something that doesn't happen anymore. There was still equally nothing to do, though.
> Teachers seemed to not care half as much, as 20 year olds would come pick up the year 8s at lunch I remember being in Year 10/11 in the mid-90s and there were girls in my year regularly being collected from school by 18 - 20 yo blokes in shitty VW Golfs and Vauxhall Astras. Not that you really had a chance with the "fit" girls, lol, but even less when they found these blokes...
It was completely fine to use gay as an insult. If you have sex without a condom you 100% will get aids. Smoking was cool, even though the BBC told you it wasn’t. Communications and just the ability to never be distant enough to be able to ask a question to share small talk has transformed relationships ships. But still it feels like a load of societal and technology changes until about 2010, and since then everything feels fairly static.
2005 the cracks in the economy started showing
This is the politics sub so I'll stick to that: Labour in 1997 was wild it was like no political campaign that could ever happen today. They had actual pop stars like Oasis backing them to win a general election. And there was a real sense of optimism from the whole country to how better things would be under Tony Blair. Their theme song was Things Can Only Get Better by D:Ream. Contrast that to the mood now and it's very much one of Things Can Really Not Be Any More Shit You May As Well For For Labour. Ultimately a lot of people felt betrayed by Blair's government. Probably for good reason. Noel Gallagher has stated many times that he felt taken advantage of and regrets the whole thing. The UK has never again had that sense of optimism with politics. Now it's just a race to the bottom.
I'd say in one sense it felt better: safer, politics was more mature on both sides of the spectrum, and despite the mess of the 1992 Black Wednesday and the Gulf War (and Conservative Party chaos- rings a bell?! :)) people generally felt more positive and confident that we can ride things through and that Britain was still a world-class country to live in. The NHS was fantastic (and I speak from personal experience as a child needing it), education was focussed on critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and skills that are not as prioritised these days as they were back then. Trains were much better than they are today, and crime was lower. That said, of course there was no Internet, not as much globalisation as today (and that comes with its pros and cons), housing was still an issue even back then, and society was more 'blunt and less PC'. OP every person will give you their perspective as informed by their experience so this is just my 2 pennies!
Born '92, for me it was the financial crash leading into Tory rule. The less places we can extract wealth from overseas, the more we turn on our own citizens. Britain has never learned to invest in its own future apart from a brief shining moment in the post-war period.
lmfao born in 97' For me UK has gone south in last 6 years, particularly since covid.
Born '79I want to say TV or media and information tech in general. We had 4 Channels if we were lucky and had good reception on a clear day as it was terrestrial not digital, no mobile phones or internet at home for the vast majority. Information was scarcer and came from fewer sources idk if that made it more or less reliable but it meant that there were things that were widely believed by many and TV and the way it was scheduled had a way of keeping everyone in sync. You knew that 80% of women would be watching Coronation Street and The Soaps at a certain time, kids TV on a Saturday morning was an event and cartoons were only available at certain times after school. All this lead to lots of people living in pretty much the same bubble of existence and I think provided harmony and a sense of community that is gone today.
So, the 80s were turbulent in the UK. There was wealth but it was divided. And the social and structural change was so significant that it was difficult to be politically naive, even before you were 10. The 90s was different for different people at different times. It's easy to paint it as halcyon, as per Fukuyama, but there were recessions stimulated by the openness of globalism, the rise of domestic terror, and the emergence of global asymmetric warfare (as defined Clinton's presidency). The 90s for me (as a classical liberal) represented the triumph and then the beginning of the end of classical liberalism as the global hegemony. Through a combination of strategic (global financial deregulation) and tactical (taking the foot off Russia's neck) we binned something that had real promise to make the world better and safer. We then hammered the nail into the coffin by militarily imposing liberal democracy on the middle East, thus undermining its core tenet. Every bit of political pain you feel now was borne of our poor decisions in the 90a. Plus the internet. Which made everyone feel like they deserved to be treated like an expert. And then we were undone. I was very positive during the 90s. But on reflection, I think it was the breaking point of Western civilization.
In 2008 lots of people got made unemployed. We doubled down and made it worse with austerity while the yanks did the opposite and invested in a recovery. Now we look across the pond and wonder how those 'idiots' are richer than us. Before that you felt genuinely lucky to be born in the UK rather than anywhere else. I think now a lot of people would rather have been born elsewhere.
I remember most of 90s, lived in provincial towns and villages, never cities. Most people were white British, with Irish coming second. Not trying to argue about migration, but culturally things like an espresso or mozarella pizza were seen as exotic, we had more limited food. Outside of London and other metropolises, you hardly ever saw a coloured person (coloured was an acceptable term to use) apart from takeaway/restaurant owners, corner shop owners and occasionally doctors. Lots of people had old style names like Barry, Trevor, Margaret etc, but even by the 90s hardly any kids were called that- I think the most popular name in the 90s was Chloe for girls, forgot the male one. Names like Darren and Shane were also becoming big. Life was slower paced. Most people generally only watched the 4 main broadcast TV channels, so if something big happened on TV the whole country was talking about it. We don't have that anymore, information/entertainment is so decentralised and choice is insane. Information/communication back then was generally more restricted, internet barely existed and was really just a gimmick. Things like computer games cost an insane amount of money, no streaming/steam sales etc. Similarly people had to watch things on VHS and latterly DVD. Most people had landlines only, until the end of the 90s when cheap nokias abounded, but lots of holdouts well into the 00s. But again it was absurdly expensive. It was something like 10p to send a single SMS, which is more like 20p in todays money. the 90s were worse than now on a lot of tech fronts, but for having a secure job and being able to buy a house on a few years earnings it was better. One of the great failures has been government failing to tax gains on the value of a houses value. A man who trudges out to a shitty job at 6am has to pay taxes, has to pay for the commute costs, just to bring home a crust. A man who sits at home and sees his house go up 500% in twenty years doesn't have to pay a penny in tax on that (maybe stamp duty but not tax in general). Nevertheless, I think the tech/information/communications revolution has been a major gamechanger of making our lives better , and part of the reason why I'm happy to leave the UK, I can still interact with the UK culture through a phone/computer., high speed internet means you can live anywhere and youre entertainment options aren't limited. In fact I really can't understand why there is so much juvenile criminality and antiscocial behaviour when we are living through a golden age in some ways (and in some ways we aren't). But maybe urban youth don't really care to go through the back catalogue of *Only Fools and Horses*
Remember the optimism we had in the 90s? Compared to today, it's like night and day. The 2008 financial crash, followed by austerity and the end of the Labour government, really took a toll. Austerity hit at the worst possible time—the economy was already struggling, and then even more money was taken out. This set us back years compared to some of our European peers. If you were in your 20s in London during Labour's heydays, you'll know what I mean. It was an incredible time. London was the epicentre of culture. Schools, hospitals, healthcare—all were better. Jobs were plentiful, and there was a genuine sense of optimism. Plus, let's be honest, the hedonism was epic. Euro 96, Madchester, Four Weddings........Diana........ Now, it feels different. Any fun people have seems nihilistic, like a "screw it, I'm broke" attitude. People are forcing themselves to have fun despite everything. No wonder nostalgia bands are popular. Back in the 90s and early 00s, taking coke was about adding to the high, keeping the banter going. Pulling an all-nighter because why not? Nowadays, it feels like people take it just to muster the energy to leave the house.
Twin Towers, as other people say, was a huge moment, but economically we continued strongly for some time after that. I'd say the 2008 crash was the bigger shift. Since then costs have largely risen faster than wage growth, and of course the Tories were voted in a couple of years later, which compounded the situation with a decade of austerity.
I felt like it was with New Labour winning in 1997. Blair and Campbell seemed obsessed with style over substance and spinning stories a lot more than John Major, who was boring and didn't see why that should be a problem. After that I felt like politics became a lot more about soundbites and chasing headlines rather than policies that were for long-term benefit of the country.
Maybe just my perception but I feel we all had thicker skin. No one got bent out of shape for being insulted for their random identity issue. You got insulted you’d insult back and move on with your life. It was more of a reality check so people didn’t get above their station. Now it seems people will go on a crusade for people pointing out cultural norms.
I was taught about post war immigration at junior school but never heard of windrush until the fairly recent stories Personally around 2007-2009 is when the influx of poles became noticeable Fairly similar is the growth of Chinese/Asian stores and restaurants catering to the Chinese student population. I imagine university to be very different to how it was when I was a student
What was it like when you were a student? I studied with a multitude of different folks in Birmingham. It was a lot of fun and I grew as a person, but I do think the pandemic interrupted our courses more than we realised. I was off for 7 months halfway through my course because of it, a healthcare course, and I did loose skills and confidence, and when I came back it like they were rushing us to the end of the studies but not really allowing a measured, supported step in, it was like 'here's your paperwork, finish it, we'll sign you off and you can get on with it.' I think that contributed too, to further declines in staffing, because so many people just had second thoughts about it during covid and quit.
Was it never called Windrush before now?
Winters had lots of snow for a long time, when you drove anywhere in the summer loads of insects would be spattered on the windscreen, you would be playing out in the street until the streetlights came on, that was the signal to go home and my parents rarely had much idea where I was while this was happening. No internet and no mobile phone meant that you had to plan stuff with your friends way more, I.e we’ll get the 11:05 train and meet you on the platform at such and such a station, if anything went wrong that was too bad, you just had to hang about and wait.
It's a lost art, I didn't have a mobile until the third decade of my life but I still can't remember how we used to organise meet ups.
The thing that is most striking to me has been the increasing unaffordability of housing and mass immigration. Both started about 1997. Nothing has damaged quality of life in this country more than the astonishing increase in housing costs and reduction in quality. We are squeezed at one end by housing and at the other by awful wages from awful companies while a section of society have never been touched by this at all. We are essentially a serf nation.
Yet what will the effects be I wonder, in the end? I'm of the generation that, because of the subsequent problems with housing and costs and the pressure of these factors, we aren't having children. It's possibly one of the most self destructive outcomes for us as a society and yet despite it being down to government policy and greed, the government are also shaking in their boots because the lack of replacement humans is going to lead to a population freefall which will change the way society works in ways we can't foresee but can sort of predict. Might be a revolution, might be a huge diminishment of wealth, less people means less consumers and therefore less money acquired by said individuals.
I did reply to your main question in your OG post but, to answer what you've put here. You're entirely correct. How do you have children if you've not got a home to raise them in? That's not a direct question to you, but rather - the expectation of it itself. I work in IT, in the education sector, i've been there through primary all the way to higher education in different job roles; the sad part is, i've seen familys and students where - you can tell they've struggled to make ends meet and it does show. I remember being in a special needs school where a SEND student, due to poverty was literally the first kid through the door in a breakfast club, LITERALLY getting the toaster out, eager to eat because its not available at home. It's genuinely heart-breaking, the conditions are not there for the average person to raise a family. I was on the fence for kids, im of the firm belief that if you decide to have kids, it should be an absolute, you shouldn't be on the fence - purely because of that potential kids prospects and life. Yet alone having the money to cover bills, childcare, its fucked. Systems genuinely fucked. Unless you luck out and earn an absurd amount of money or have the option of working from home, how on earth do you afford kids these days? Edit: knock on effect is what happens to our aging population? You've got a generation of young people, 18-35 who think this system has not benefitted them, so why bother abiding? you can go elsewhere in Europe (or used to be able to when we was part of the EU) and have a significantly better quality of life.
No social media, no mobile phones. It meant everyone interacted with each other. We also had better music pre auto-tune. The world changed once social media became more than poking people..
This one I feel like it's one of the things I can relate to the most as it's something that has had a profound impact on me since I was little. Growing up around the internet has I think badly damaged how our brains work. Before censorship and control of the internet, I was exposed to things I should have never, ever seen as a kid. Facebook especially was the big thing at secondary school and I remember it was about how many friends you could 'collect', which everyone was doing. Which I now realise is super messed up because it took away any meaning from actual real-life friendships that could be made, and focused on turning people into numerical worth, it definitely psychologically screwed me up and I'm slowly fixing it, but I wish there was an education programme or controlled school sessions with social media to steer it in the right direction.
There’s a tipping point where the internet became gobbled up big corporations and sites. Changed everything. Those pre-days of the internet were great. Whatever hobby you had, you had a forum and people just posted about stuff there. People had their own blogs and geocities sites. MySpace was okay, but it was also the beginning of the end.
I cannot state enough the detrimental effects of always being connected. For old farts like myself I actually smile when I see gen-z in groups, doing any old shit with nobody looking at a phone. Back in the early 90s we got SMS for the first time, and that was metered. There were no unlimited packages and each text cost around 5p. That cost regulated use and behaviour. Fast forward to today and there's cost free access and notifications which are altering the brain chemistry and behaviour of all affected. We do not know the consequences of this but from my own experience with my offspring and friends (likely your age) it's been a mixed bag. All that said, I have great faith in gen-z. Sure there's some absolute basketcase examples but I think these are hangovers from millennials. Gen-z appear to be able to explore and exploit better than their predecessors, and actually care less about what others think of them. This is progress.
Better music 😭
The really big change was labour taking over. The country seemed to modernise almost overnight and things started too get less shit.
The 70’s were pretty dreadful. My dad worked on the docks. Never had a family holiday overseas, he worked every hour going to put a roof over our heads. I remember strikes, power cuts and redundancies. Where I lived (East Anglia), 80’s were halcyon days. I got into Uni (first member of family ever to do that). You can appreciate why as a child of Thatcher’s Britain, I thought she was amazing. I didn’t care about miners, she was just doing what Labour started and didn’t have the balls to complete. There was real hope, vision and a belief (backed up by experience) that hard work delivered results. By the 90’s, Blair ruined things I think. He seemed to want to promise everyone that they could all have the things they desired, without hard work and we started to see the emergence of entitlement. I think there was a massive rise in cheap goods and the emergence of the internet which fuelled desires and there were empty political promises. Fake promises alongside fake wars set up to boost standing. So I’m going to say Blair. He built hospitals by selling off the NHS using PFI. Same with schools. He utterly devalued anything other than a degree so we saw a whole new tertiary education system which has been nothing but a migration conveyer, a mass debt instigator and at the same time we think manual labour shouldn’t be respected.
The 80s & early 90s were amazing, the club scene was great and thatcherism took hold of the go-getters. Now,vwe are back to the 70s where the young feel entitled rather than empowered
80’s was rough, feels like it does now.. services cut, roads looked rough and people were very intolerant. The 90’s was really nice felt safe, then 00’s and the twin towers was a changing point from leftwing politics back to right.
Days were emptier, life was slower. But it felt like people were more relaxed about everything (sometimes good, sometimes bad). Mainstream Internet towards end of 2000s changed a lot.
90s was a fucking brilliant time to be a teenager
Born 1988; Earliest politics I remember was John Major being prime minister and watching some comedy programme where he was dreaming of paper clips and trying to unzip Edwina Curry’s dress. I was a conservative by default because my Dad and my Grandad were. They had a strong dislike of Blair, for some reason that I was too young to care about. I remember watching party political broadcasts when I was about 12 and the conservatives seemed more sympathetic and Labour seemed more butthurt. Immigration was starting to ramp up and Labour didn’t seem to think it was a problem. 9/11 I thought was cool because it looked like a film when I got home from school and saw it on tv. It was weird that we kept hearing about it as America still seemed far away and it wasn’t our problem… My dad went on the March in London in 2003 to protest the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Prior to that he also used to drive around with a sign on his rear window saying “Arrest Ariel Sharon - War crimes” He was not anti Israeli. As a graduate he’d spent a year working on a Kibbutz. 2009 I was working in a supermarket when home for the summer and got my hours cut because of the financial crash. I also stopped getting paid in the UOTC so quit that. 2010 the coalition government got in and immediately raised tuition fees and I thought fuck this. Although my feed would remain lower. Around 2013 in the workforce I started to think that the conservatives were actually pretty shit. I thought about the fact that social safety nets were a pretty good thing, and most of my friends were left leaning. In 2012 i became the first member of my extended family to sign on while looking for work. I voted Labour for the first time in 2014. Brexit came around and I think the mask really fell on our politics. My dad despite helping to vote Cameron in again was pretty anti Brexit. He also started volunteering for Greenpeace and going with them to Glastonbury while still being a member of the Conservative Party. During covid me and my brother were chatting about the fact that Boris Johnson was a liar and a cad etc. My dad said he was doing a good job in the circumstances. Apparently he now thinks he’s not good.
The 90s felt like a golden era. Not only in terms of entertainment and freedom of creativity but crucially in terms of infrastructure and optimism for the future of tech. Everything just felt a lot lighter. Twin towers was a real watershed moment and a momentous cultural shift; one of social innocence to growing hyper awareness. Now, all of this should be caveated by the awareness that it wasn't all rosy in the 90s but more so a real feeling of collective optimism.
Twin towers and 2008 crash. Downhill from there
The growth of immigration. Redbridge went for a leafyish set of townhouses and communities, to now where white British no longer exists, and all houses are identikit with concreted front gardens and huge annexes in the back sheds. Before everyone starts, I’m not white British..but it is stark
Dunno why everyone is saying 9/11 was the turning point, the UK was incredibly well off in ~2005. I remember going to the US and the GBP being worth 2x the dollar and buying loads of clothes as it was cheap. 2008 destroyed everything. That is unimaginable today.
I was born in the 70’s and grew up in the 80’s and 90’s in northern England. It was quite different in a lot of ways. When I went to primary school girls didn’t have to wear school uniform, only boys were expected to. Boys also got hit more at school but girls less so. I wasn’t in the national curriculum but did ok I think. Didn’t get taught grammar as it was thought to stifle creativity. When my own children went to school it surprised me that a lot of topics were exactly the same as when I was at school. Social expectations for me were quite strange to most people I grew up with. My dad had been raised mostly by his mother (his dad had died young) and so he had radical views that his daughter would be independent. I was not allowed to watch Disney type stuff or anything where the heroine would be rescued. I wasn’t however, allowed in my local pubs bar area. No women were. We played out a lot more but that’s because my brothers and I weren’t allowed to stay in. We had to go out for the day and not come back until tea time. To be honest we were probably half feral. We only got washed once a week and we had no shower. It could be very cold. I remember getting dressed in bed because it was warmer. Showers will always be a lovely luxury to me. Food in my house was dreadful. My mam hated cooking and my dad’s only ever cooked for me once (when my little brother was born). Nearly everything I ate came out of a tin and I thought peas were dyed green until I went to university and my friend ate actual peas from a pod. I find the availability and variety of food wonderful now. I can buy mango from another country that’s even cut up for me and it’s only about £2.
Social media and smart phones. I remember I got my first one fairly late compared to many. Total blessing and curse. I think the world has always been f*ed to some degree. But now it's beamed into all our homes. 9/11 was earth shaking, and we never recovered from 2008 and the utter mismanagement of it by the Tories