Everything costs more than it used to, not a little more but a lot more. Inflation's just ridiculous, it's hit heights not seen for a generation, and even though it's started to come down it's not coming down anywhere near as fast as expected, let alone as fast as required. Food's the worst and that's supposed to be an essential but it costs vastly more than it did a couple of years ago and it won't be coming back down again, it's baked in.
Housing's in a bad state, in short supply and already beyond unaffordable. If you have a mortgage they've raised your payments far beyond what you were expecting and if you rent you're already paying over the odds for somewhere that's much smaller than you ought to have got. We should be building more, much more, but it's always the wrong kind of homes in the wrong kind of places because there's no overall plan, just a lot of profit for the wrong kind of people.
Any savings you've got are being eaten away, drained even, as banks refuse to raise savings rates anywhere near as fast as they lowered them. Even the idea of savings is a distant dream for many which is why food banks are on the increase, once a last resort and now increasingly the only way of staying afloat. We're entrenching poverty among the wider population, destroying futures and it never used to be this bad, hasn't been for decades.
The NHS isn't what it was having been starved of funds or expertise or positive leadership, maybe all three. Waiting lists are killing people, A&E is bursting and 999 is increasingly a lottery. Strike action meant to make the long term better is only making the short term worse. Your GP doesn't want to see you, they're overstretched enough as it is, and the provision of non-private dentistry has essentially collapsed. Happy 75th birthday NHS but how many more?
Energy bills have gone through the roof, nothing anyone could have predicted but extraordinary hikes leaving many to choose between heating and eating. We have no national resilience, nobody willing to make long term investment decisions, only the prospect of persistently paying over the odds for power that ought to be more renewable, and you might as well set fire to your money for all the good it's doing.
Local services keep getting worse and worse as things we used to take for granted are being slimmed, merged, sidelined and withdrawn. There isn't the money to keep everything going, central funding's been deliberately throttled back, and expertise once broken is incredibly difficult to reassemble. The promise may always be broader devolution but the reality is always tightened pursestrings because tax has become a dirty word.
Politics has become a cesspit, whether or not you voted for them they're just running down the clock on a zombie government that's run its course. The leader who got us through the pandemic turns out to have been a pathological liar, assuming you hadn't worked that out previously, and was followed by someone who proved to be far worse far more quickly, financially speaking, and look at the economic shipwreck we're all enduring as a result.
We argue about pointless things, obsessed by nomenclature rather than human rights and deliberately stirring up trouble with fake news. It's much easier to be dismissive than to debate, much easier to rant than to reason, much easier to start a culture war than to put out the flames. We thought the Handmaid's Tale was fiction but look at the Supreme Court in America busy winding back progress with unconcealed glee, and who's to say who's next?
London's polluted air is either killing you or emptying your bank balance. Knife crime continues to take both innocent and less innocent lives. A night out at restaurant is an increasingly rare treat, a round of drinks costs more than a flight to Spain, and forget about getting the train to Manchester because that'll break the bank assuming it's even running because of the strikes, and so our horizons shrink.
Our water companies are totally messed up, pumping sewage into streams and into the sea because there's no money to improve infrastructure because they've paid it all to their shareholders. We already knew this but somehow we've engineered a situation which can't be resolved, at least not without overcharging us all for remediation that should have been done properly in the first place, because oversight is toothless and tell that to the dead fish.
Climate change is only accelerating, the evidence is all around us - higher temperatures, rising sea levels, atmospheric disturbance - and that's just the start. We know how to slow it, all the mitigations and adaptations required, but so far are only paying global lip service rather than tackling the issues, delaying necessary actions until it's either too expensive or too late to solve the calamitous problems we've unleashed upon ourselves.
We got over-fixated on immigrants and voted to kick them out, but it turns out we needed them to do the jobs we don't want to do, can't do or had got too used to not doing. Now our borders have friction and imports cost extra and queues at passport control have got longer because it turns out the rules we wanted also acted against us, and suddenly going abroad isn't fun any more and what a miserable insular bunch we're becoming.
The war in Ukraine is disastrously unnecessary, an ego trip for a psychopath who assumed it'd be easy and instead wrecked a sovereign country, killed hundreds of thousands, wrecked the lives of millions and set off a chain of destabilising dominos that continues to make things worse all around the world. Meanwhile the Middle East is flaring up again and China isn't any friendlier, Afghanistan was a fumbled disaster, and the last thing we need is another flashpoint.
They say AI is the future but they don't know what kind of future or whether it's a force for good or bad. It could turbocharge technological progress and free us all from unnecessary toil but it could also take your job and simply make the rich richer, or it could even potentially wipe us all out, probably not the latter but 'probably' isn't the kind of odds you want on a cataclysmic outcome like that.
Freedom of speech is being curtailed, sometimes to prevent opponents talking out of turn and sometimes merely for fear of causing offence. Our major social networks are in the hands of megalomaniacs, one of whom is destructively picking his apart because he never understood what held it together. One day you'll log in and it won't be there at all, all that social capital wiped away, your voice unheard, not even a tiny textbox to wail into, it could happen today.
Obviously it's not all bad. Technology strides forwards and medicine breaks new ground, but under the surface too many of us are paying too much for too little with too few prospects. You might hope a new government could make a positive difference but, just like the last one left a message saying "sorry there isn't any money left", this time there aren't any decent services left either.
We're all only getting older, and whereas things used to get better with the passing of time these days they're just getting worse across the board with no immediate prospect of improvement. Harder, tougher, dearer, unhappier, grimmer. But however bad it feels at present, and it does, rest assured one day we'll look back on now as a golden age when things may have been bad but at least they hadn't yet got worse.
