Sunday 8 September 2024
When things just work
Vague and speculative this one, but the other day Mrs H and I were chatting with relatives about how younger generations seem to assume that things will generally work out okay.
Cars just work, online orders arrive on time, if the younger generation forgets to buy food there is always the phone and a takeaway, or the supermarket will have something, illness is a nuisance which can usually be sorted and so on. Daily life is clearly not perfect, but in recent decades, aspects of it have become slick enough for a degree of confidence to become habitual.
It's not that younger generations are unaware of risks and the possibility of things going wrong, but they seem to be less aware of it than older generations. Perceptions have changed as technology knits things together in previously impossible ways. Raised expectations are bound to follow and may spread beyond the next online delivery.
WWII is history, many serious and fairly common diseases are less threatening, houses are warmer and drier, cars more reliable, communication far easier, computers handle the paperwork, goods and services are easily located online - from a broad brush perspective, much of our world just works.
This is not to say that we have freed ourselves from problems, difficulties, failures, emergencies and so on. Neither have we freed ourselves from the problems of excess, growing old, ennui or mental problems. It is more of a raised expectation that many things ought to work, usually do work and although failure has not been banished, remedies are more accessible.
The recent low vote for Keir Starmer’s Labour party may be an example of a shift in general expectations. As we know, the party has a huge majority based on a lower total vote than Jeremy Corbyn achieved. This will be an outcome of various factors, but one of them may be a lower confidence that political promises are deliverable in any meaningful sense. The marked contrast between rhetoric and daily life has become impossible to miss.
There is nothing specific to be grasped here, more of a general awareness that political rhetoric is clearly not one of those many aspects of daily life which just work, which deliver what they are supposed to deliver. Keir Starmer’s political hill may be a much steeper climb than he imagines.
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8 comments:
The steeper the better. We can get the boiling oil!
Tammly - and not vegetable oil.
Interesting observation that leads in all sorts of directions. It might be that things worked well in one fairly narrow and rigid way. But now nothing works very well, but there are more ways to work around the problems. Food is a good way of looking at it. A traditional housewife understood shopping, storage, cleaning, and cooking. There wasn't a lot of range, but everyone was fed. Now, you can forget all of that and get food delivered to your door by uber or just eat. But it's lukewarm, poor quality, and probably made by some bloke who didn't wash his hands.
I guess the clever entrepreneurs are looking for ways to plug gaps in the systems. Fixing your phone, repairing your DIY efforts, assembling your flat-pack furniture, decluttering your house, planning your menu.
“Keir Starmer’s political hill may be a much steeper climb than he imagines.”
One hopes and prays.
I guess politicians use rhetoric to sell a dream. But we ordinary people now know that there is no single dream and no clear path to any of them. The politicians still have plenty of 'their' people around them egging them on and downplaying downsides.
Perhaps that is why the Conservatives turned out to be disappointing. They couldn't articulate the dream and didn't know how to achieve it. Labour have a sort of dream but everyone else thinks the dream is the result of eating cheese late at night, not principled purpose.
Sam - "probably made by some bloke who didn't wash his hands."
That reminds me of a recent news story about a local restaurant which has received a zero star hygiene rating for a number of failings, one of which was a member of the kitchen staff constantly scratching his backside.
James - and a few rock falls would be a bonus.
DJ - maybe political parties must become more adept as selling the dream, but to do that the dream has to be much more realistic and achievable. No magic money tree, no woke nonsense, much more pragmatic. No evasive shysters when it comes to interviews either.
The fact things have 'just worked' for a considerable period of time (long enough for several generations to have grown up knowing nothing else) is a considerable weakness in a society. I often wonder what would happen to the UK's urbanised masses were we to get a weather event on a par with the winter of 1963. In 1963 just about every house had a fireplace, and the country produced coal by the trainload, and had a rail network capable of getting it to within a few miles of just about every home in the country. And the inhabitants of those homes had the means and knowledge to use it to keep themselves warm and cook by it. Today if a winter freeze meant the electricity grid stopped working and there was no food in the local supermarket people would be freezing to death within a few days. No-one has a Plan B for events outside their own personal experience (or the knowledge of their parents or even grandparents). UK society now requires everything to work just so forever. How likely is that?
Sobers - I remember 1963 and yes, people today would struggle more than we did then. We have a gas fire and a wood burner and I'm not keen on having less than that available.
How will people with heat pumps manage if we have a severe winter with a prolonged blackout? What happens if freezing people see smoke coming from a chimney?
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