Superboomers - never had it so good!

Agree, russet. Because of the employment and jsa situation, workers have very few rights these days. My son works for the local authority and does flexitime. He ended up having to give them an extra weeks work last year because there was no way he could catch up without jeopardising his own work situation, and there is only so much time you can carry over from one year to the next.
My other son is a teacher so lots of us know how long the hours are that they work.

But in any population at anytime there are those that benefit and those that don't. look back hundreds of years and you will see a lot of old people living to extreme old age in comfort and leisure and many not making it to old age because of the effects of a life of abject poverty.

Now at least those at the bottom are guaranteed an income. Look forward 50 or 100 years and I really do not think we will see any difference. There will be some older people retiring into comfort and leisure and others that won't. Remember, until relatively recently occupational pensions were only for those in white collar jobs. In many companies manual and production workers either did not have the right to join company pension schemes or else had their own schemes that were substantially less generous so were completely dependent on the state pension.

Every generation has some things the previous generation did not have access to and will not get access to things the older generation did have.

Both my children are ostensibly less well off than we were at the same age, but both have a lifestyle we could not aspire to when we were that age. Neither of them is doing this on borrowed money and neither of them has expensive habits, but they take holidays, eat out, go away for weekends, go to the theatre and to shows and festivals and take for granted all sorts of other things for that we simply couldn't consider. On the plus size we had a better and more expensive house than they have - but mortgage interest rates never fell below 6 - 7% when we had one and were frequently much higher.

You cannot win them all.

What ever we have, we WORKED a long time for !!!!!!!!!!! ( I worked full time for 45 years ).

A lot of people can't even SPELL the word "work", let alone do some ! Let them get off their backsides and do what we had to do....provide for our older age, by not not expecting the world to give us a living and not wasting our money on "luxuries" every week like smoking, drinking, going out for meals, getting take aways/ready meals, etc. etc.

I think the majority of people of all ages work hard for their living today, as they ever did. Their have always been scroungers. I can remember my DPiL muttering about a certain neighbour who had been living the life of Reilly on the dole and a friend was outraged when she moved house and discovered her neighbour, the same age as her, hadn't worked for over thirty years after the local docks closed down.

There have also always been unemployables, people who for some reason have lives in such total chaos that they are incapable of going to work or holding down a job. Whether there are more of them now or we just hear about them more I do not know

durhamjen I don't blame you for feeling maudlin. I'd feel the same. I hope what ever comes my way good, bad comfortable or well off I i'v still got my husband to share it with.

FlicketyBWed 13-Aug-14 14:47:11

I agree with this post; it sums it all up. There will always be rich and poor, those comparitively well off and those struggling. Today's younger generation have higher expectations of what they need and want to enjoy a fulfilling life; it does not dawn on some of them (not all) that this will mean that they cannot afford a better house or indeed a mortgage to buy any house at all.