Aggers' philosophical conundrum ....

[Kaz]

Indeed Ossie, and that's in the Midlands. My son earns around £25k or so but you can buy nothing in his area for under £200k He is saving, indeed I helped him with that a couple of years back, but he still can't afford it. His only hope is to meet a woman who is also earning well, and buy together

[Aggers]

I walked out of 6th form and straight into a job, at 17, on a full adult wage!

I walked out of elementary school at 14 and straight into a job in a Carpet Design office at a
wage of ten shillings (50p) a week. After stoppages I picked up 8s/6p and gave my mother 7s,
leaving me 1s/6d pocket money. That was in 1939. Those were happy days.

[cruiser2]

My first house, bought in 1960 on the outskirts of Luton cost £3000 and my salary was nearly £1000.00.
Bought this house in 1964 for £3200 in Lancashire. House next door sold five years ago for £165,000. It is a 3bed semi-detached.
We are not moving.

[Suff]

I must admit my own experiences were somewhat different. Also, from my own memory, going back to 71 would mean going back to a time when the Unions totally believed that they had both the power and the Right to disrupt the country and the economy whenever they felt like it, no valid reason required.

If I went back to 71 I'd need to go back to cold houses, poor central heating, no insulation and much, much colder winters on average. I would, however, have the summers of 76 and 77 to look forward to...

My own experience was that by 79 the job market had been virtually destroyed by a morally bankrupt Labour party and unions who had no other goal than getting "more" than anyone else purely by the reasoning that they were members of a Union and therefore "entitled".

When I left School there was nothing. When I went back to College and tried again there was, unsurprisingly, nothing. I wound up in the Army. Not a particularly good time but, again, a learning experience for life skills and an attitude which serves me well in contracting.

My own personal experience tells me that the early to mid 90's was a golden age for me. Most of what I see as "going bad" happened in the 2000's. For me the 90's were a time of unlimited opportunity, little in the way of serious limitations in terms of movement or government overbearing rules and regulations. We had technology, things were falling in price, house prices were rising and rising fast, but still affordable and liable to make quite a lot of money for you. Certainly it helped me up the property ladder.

OK Inflation was up around 5-6%, interest rates were still quite high compared to now, but, again, it was easy to travel, money went a hell of a lot further and the possibilities that the Internet gave were limitless. Many of the innovative happenings of that time can no longer happen today. Money is not there, rules and regulations forbid it.

On to the root of the conundrum.

As we age, we lose the keen edge of our thirst for something different. Life takes us in different directions, we look at our lives and start planning for a time when we will retire and have a family we may even still be looking out for. In short our outlook on life changes radically. No longer are we doing for the sake of just "doing" so much of our experimentation with our environment ends. We stop pushing back the boundaries and stop seeking for the next new thing round the corner. We want time to rest, time to reflect, time to enjoy the things we have earned in life.

So we are not quite suited to a world where everything is changing, sometimes on a daily basis, other times on a weekly or monthly basis. No longer is it completely unacceptable for an Author to bring out two or three books a year, in fact, if the Author is Not bringing out more than one book a year, they're forgotten in the rush to have something to fill the "empty" few microseconds between the frantic activities.

Society today moves at a frenetic pace not seen before. I recall waiting for TV series to begin again. OK it's not there, then we'll do something else instead. Play cards maybe? Today it's all about money and advertising and focus. The media outlets want us to be glued for every second we have spare from work. They want us to talk about it in every nanosecond between every second. Children, today, grow up in an environment where they are talking to everyone every second of the day, the more the merrier. If they don't have a person to text, Skype, FB, mail, or, god forbid, talk to, they go into withdrawal. If they aren't doing this, then they must be playing games on whatever piece of technology going, no matter how crap the experience is. I recall when computer games were things like characters furiously attacking each other on a black and white text screen. I know where this comes from.

Turn it over and we have the dark side, patterned in greys and blacks. People using that focus on technology to steal the rights of the masses, amassing huge sums of money then using it to create laws which produce even more money. Governments using the virtually unlimited capabilities of the technology to spy on everyone, everywhere. Instead of police forces to protect and "serve" we have cameras and fines and people watching our every move. Not to help, not to assist, but to control.

I live in the world of the young. I live in the provision of the services and the media and the things which bind them into their devices. I bring into my home the technology which allows music and video's all over the house, for everyone, wherever they may want it. I change my technology constantly and I am often more than 5 years and sometimes as much as a decade ahead of where the masses are today. I know what I see and what I use and what is available.

But what do I also see? Technology designed to bring people together becomes frivolous. The hedonistic time of the 90's is back again, everything now, to hell with tomorrow. People who can't even hold a mobile phone for 2 weeks before they are lusting after the "next best thing". People who spend thousands on games and game play, rather than stepping outside and looking at the real world.

I'd go back to the 90's. Then I would bind the governments in so many chains that they continued to protect our freedoms. I would kill facebook before it started and have a responsible chat service. I would do many things with the technology we abuse so badly today. But that is where I'm happiest. Cheap technology, warm houses, extremely available jobs, good wages......

It was a good time for me..