Did Anyone Think The Future Would Be Less Sucky?

There's a Reddit thread on r/GenX about Aside from getting old, did anyone think the future would be less sucky?.

I'm what Americans would call a Boomer, but this is the UK, and the UK population hump was about 1958 - 1972. The year I was born, rationing was withdrawn in the UK, so I'm some sort of Gen Post-War. Perhaps that should be Generation Candelight, because we did our homework with candle-light during the strikes of 1971/72 and were teenagers during the Three-Day Weeks.

I had no idea what my future would be. Or what the future of the country would be. Pass the exams, get a job, try to get promoted, find a place of my own, rented, then mortgaged. I can honestly say that marriage and children never featured. In autumn 1993 I went to my first AA meeting, which tells you how wonderful were all those years between being born and thirty-nine. At the time, I had been unemployed for a year or so. I had no professional qualifications, and no networks in any industry. I had no idea how to make and live an adult life, and I still don't.

Look at films and photographs of the UK even at the start of the 1970s. It looks like 1949. It was a different country. I date 'the future' to start with the Second Summer of Love (1988), and reach its peak in 2007, just before the banks frakked everything up. Personally, I think the world we have now is way better than the one of 1950, if you have a job that pays over national median wage, exercise, eat right, don't drink too much, stay away from drugs, don't buy shit you don't need with money you don't have to impress people you don't like, and if you are single, even if you have to flat-share.

So I don't think my future turned out to suck. Well, not until after 2008, and even so it's still better now than 1965. I can see how Gen X might think their future sucked. There's no doubt the Weak Men (and Women) are in charge, and that means the immediate future is going to get worse.

But since you ask...

In 2010 social media appeared on mobile phones, and the freaks, who are always with us, were granted a stage to flaunt their craziness to the world. 2016 told us that Western countries were run by people who held most of the population in contempt, and 2020 showed us that the political, media and administrative classes were so weak-minded that a simple flu virus could send them into hysterics. The posturing rich have forced DIE and ESG on companies which should be focussing on creating jobs and profits. Once-impartial institutions get taken over by activists pushing nonsensical causes, every year academic grades mean less, and money buys less. The news has turned into rehashed press releases, schoolyard gossip and glimpses of the freak-show. And people who don't speak our language, don't share our culture, have no useful skills, and whose first act here is to commit a crime by entering illegally, these people are championed and supported by politicians, journalists, lawyers, judges, and civil servants.

Those are all things I never thought I would see.