Attitude is a choice. I was choosing bread at the local Co-op when an old lady beside me said “I think the bread’s not very good nowadays.”
I made a polite noise and she went on to say “actually, nothing’s very good now is it?”
“Personally, I think life’s pretty good.”
“Well, I remember the good old days, I’m 91 you know, you wouldn’t remember,” and she stalked off to complete her shopping. I reflected that in the good old days before antibiotics, she’d probably have succumbed to pneumonia before she made 91.
Lots of
people complain about the NHS. Three years ago the arthritis in my knee developed to a point where I could not walk without pain, and my mobility was severely restricted. An international team of experts replaced the joint and within a week I was walking again. After a month or two of physiotherapy I was moving s well as I had 20 years before. And I didn’t have to pay a penny for it! Isn’t that amazing?
I remember getting a new phone a couple of years ago and complaining about it, because the buttons were a bit small, and the controls were counter- 
intuitive. Then I thought back to being a teenager and queuing outside the phone box with small change. My mother wrote to her mother every week - on paper, in an envelope! If you were prosperous enough to have a telephone in your home it was ugly and had a dial which had to be turned. It had no memory or answering facility, and you had to write telephone number in a book. Mobile phones are actually quite amazing!
Listen to people describe their travel experiences. How often do they describe them as “a nightmare” or “the worst day of my life”? They are usually describing a delay of at most a few hours. You don’t hear them say, “Well, after a bit of queuing and bag-checking we sat in a seat in the aircraft and were served food and drink while we travelled six miles above the ground at about 700 miles an hour. When we arrived we were thousands of miles away at the end of a journey totally unavailable to previous generations. Isn’t that amazing?”
Much of our everyday life would be unimaginable to previous generations. Much of our communication and computing technology would have been science fiction to me as a child. As I watch my 88-year-old mother get her shopping online, receiving emailed photos from relatives, I feel so pleased that she is able to have that level of independence. I am equally delighted that I am able to sit in my dressing gown on Boxing Day at 8 am and share my thoughts with the world.
We have our challenges – limited resources, especially energy, environmental concerns, mental health, and the inequality which leads to conflict. But if you live in the UK or a similar affluent land, life is actually pretty amazing. I read and hear the term “broken Britain”. I don’t see the reality. I see a lot of change, and some people handle it better than others. How you see life is a choice. What do you think?
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