Things are better than they used to be

It’s important to remember the many ways our quality of life has improved over the last 30 years; we may be poorer but that doesn’t mean life isn’t better. 

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has just released a study saying that people born in the 60s and 70s (ie me) are going to be poorer than their parents in retirement, and it is all over the radio, TV and papers today.

But when they’re working out comparative wealth between generations the part that gets missed out on are the things that would not have been available, or would only have been available at extreme cost, that make our quality of life today way beyond what would be imaginable 30 years ago.

So here are some things to keep in mind whenever someone’s talking doom and gloom about the value (with a huge UK bias).

· Dog Poop: People used to let their dogs crap everywhere, it was all over the streets, all over the parks. When stories first came out that in New York people picked up after their dogs we thought that was insane. The past is another country, and one covered in dog excrement.

· Smoking: Everyone smoked, and everyone smoked everywhere. You’d sit in the cinema and watch the light from the projector in the smoke as it rose above the right hand side of the auditorium. People smoked at work, not huddled outside, or in smoking rooms, but at their desks, in meetings, everywhere. When you came home after an evening out your clothes stank. And that was before you got to the cancer.

· Telephones (1): The question people used to ask was “Are you on the phone?” because getting a phone was expensive and there was a waiting list. The calls were ruinously expensive, unless it was off peak and local. Phoning someone in a town 30 miles away was a carefully rationed treat. International? No, not really.

· Telephones (2): No mobile phones. Emergencies could get really scary, things could go wrong and there was nothing you could do about it.

· Television: 3 or 4 channels against 500? And don’t give me the “500 channels and nothing on” line. The options at any moment, even before you get into on demand tv, are miraculous.

· Football on Television: No one would actually want to watch every live game they possibly could, but there was a time when top division games were played without cameras there even to record highlights.

· Coffee shops: There are lots of complaints about Starbucks/Costa etc, about the homogeneity of the high street, about how they force independent coffee shops out of business, which ignores that in the UK these independent coffee shops really didn’t exist until Starbucks arrived. There are nicer places to sit, chat to people, read, have a coffee, which only seems a big thing when compared to how desolate the equivalent places used to be.

· Facebook: When I was 16 I moved towns. As a result, apart from one or two close friends, I lost touch with everyone I knew. At the age of 18 it felt like my entire school life before 16 had disappeared, no one I was around remembered any of it. Now I’d be Facebook friends with my entire year, and would be able to remain connected. You can ask if we need to be that connected, but it’s good to remember what it was like before that was an option.

· Cars: Modern cars are safer, more comfortable and more reliable. You can’t even buy a new car as limited as the most up to date mid-80s models any more.

· Dentistry: The trump card of progress. Constantly improving in ways that make it unimaginable to do things the way we used to do them.

· Maternity/Paternity Leave: Close to my heart at present, the way the concept of having time with your newborn child has becoming embedded in our culture has brought such a lift at the most amazing of times.

· Anti-discrimination laws: Not claiming that we live in an equality utopia but these days when you mess with someone on the basis of gender, race, sexuality etc you at least have to be subtle about it. It used to be front and centre and no one could touch you for it.

· Getting past the gatekeepers: In the old days if you made music you had to convince a record company, if you wrote you had to convince a publisher, and then you had to rely on them being able to do their job properly. Now you can do what you do and put it out there. What we get is chaos, a crazy mass of stuff to try and make sense of, but that’s better than only getting what has already been vetted and defined, maybe.

And of course…

The internet: Whether it was looking up Mycroft Holmes on Wikipedia last night, or deciding that I need to see Martin Luther King’s final speech, the amount of stuff that’s just there is a constant miracle it’s easy to take for granted, and it used to all be so hard.

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