Do you have a better or worse standard of living than your parents’ generation?
April 6, 2025
Are things better or worse financially in your country than they used to be?
38 comments
For the younger generations?
Worse, considerably worse.Most young people here either live with their parents and survive,or they have to move away.To the north of Italy or abroad.
Salaries are generally low, unemployment is high, prices in the shops are high and so are taxes.
Much better. My parents lived their 20s and 30s in the Communist 1980s and disastrous 1990s, and they didn’t get a chance to improve their fortunes much after 40.
I was already making more than my parents in my 2nd job, and that was more than 10 years ago.
At my age my parents had worked full time jobs for several years with either just primary school education or just 2 years in high school while Im still at Uni so I can actually get a job at all. Sure they had the 90’s economic crisis but also the fall of the USSR. I got a world order that is collapsing, trade war, even more unaffordable housing, even more unemployment, backsliding democracy.
Sure I have a phone and a computer my parents never had but that’s not really making up for the fact that unemployment is nearly 10% and Russia is back threatening Europe and the US promptly fucked the entire world over. Sure I got slightly better food but its back to being expensive as fuck and the future is very bleak.
Better if your family is from low class, worst if your family is from middle class. upper class always have it good due to generational debt so its indifferent.
Its much harder to buy property for a middle class person comparing with their parents if they were middle class. I come from low class so generation of my parents was still not getting all the benefits of the post dictatorship policies. I already got all those benefits like access to education so in that sense it is better.
Waaaay better. Being able to live and work abroad has its benefits…apart from owning a property.
With two jobs still a smaller house than my parents with one job, all of us university educated.
Generally absolutely: I was born shortly before the end of the GDR and the standard I am enjoying nowadays was simply impossible back then. My parents were also pretty lucky, given that they both found employment with rather big companies right after the end of the GDR and therefore weren’t actually impacted by the large wave of unemployment back then.
Definitely better. My grandparents grew up experiencing the dramatic history of communism with closed borders, political prisoners and barely any freedom of speech. Being in the European Union has opened many possibilities for our generation.
Way worse. My parents keep giving me out of date and out of touch advice, and it’s kind of ridiculous. “Go give the boss a firm handshake to get the job” kind of advice.
Better. My parenrs finished school/college and then had to find work when the UK had effectively defaulted on its debt and would go on to run a three day work week to save energy. It would take until the 90s housing slump for them to get a mortgage on a small house. That’s not even couting things like advance in medical and telecommunications technology
As an old millenial, I’d say I grew up with better SOL than my parents did. Now at 40, I’m roughly were they were at that age. I am pretty sure my SOL at 75 will be markedly worse than theirs are now.
Worse. One university degree leaves me with an extra life-long tax, the interest on which I will never even pay off. Salaries are significantly lower (once adjusted for inflation) and prices are significantly higher. Owning your own home is impossible for anyone under 35/40 without parental money, so I’ll spend my life paying someone else’s mortgage through rent. We’ve endured the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, Brexit, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a major war on the continent since the Second World War, and the entire global military, political, and trading order has been upended in just the last couple of months. Public services are decimated by old right-wingers so you don’t get a health service for all the money you pay in taxes. Town centres have nothing to do in them because of government policies decimating them. All we can do is work, sit at home, and pay other people’s bills.
Way better…
My father is born in a slum in the outskirts of Rome one room for him his 3 little sisters and his parents no water no heating system no toilet inside toilets were outside and shared with the people living in the slum…
My mother is French born in a farm she had it better food wise and comfort was batter has well but still no running water and no toilets in the house…
I’m born in a house made of stones with a fireplace running water toilets in the house food on the table had the chance to go to school and then university ( first of my family on both side ) got the chance to travel quite a lot… got the chance to play musical instruments and have books at home…
I’d say I had it way better than them !
Even if they are both saying they loved their childhood they say it was simpler times…
Way better. At my age all my parents could afford as students was a McDonald’s hamburger to share.
Different. In many ways better materially, but in many ways also worse, mainly immaterially.
Significantly better. My parents lived in a communist country and my dad on top of that struggled with extreme poverty.
Unimaginably better. My parents grew up in Communism, and even though we were the “happiest barrack”, it still took two months’ wage to buy a coat and it was a considerable expense to buy a can of mystery meat for dinner in the 80s. Also, they didn’t have the internet and 80s Hungary had the world’s second ever highest suicide rate, only beaten by 90s Lithuania.
Difficult to say… My parents both had better jobs but never care about luxury. In all we all do pretty good. In general yes my generation does better.
In general the generation below me struggles a lot with housing costs to a point I have not seen before. I fear for them a lot.
Much, much, much worse. My parents live a very comfortable life. They’re always going out for food and occasionally just buy random gadgets worth a few thousand pounds.
My dad bought a detached house when he was 23, and built his own house at 25.
My parents went on to own 4 houses between them at one point. My parents have a joint income above the average salary as their pension.
I am in my late 20’s, my bills are over £2,000 a month. And I save just £800 a month and have just £15,000 to my name.
I will probably be mid to late 30’s by the time I buy a home.
I don’t ever see myself attaining their lifestyle unless I win the lottery or come into money some way.
The Uk is just a really bad country to be in if you don’t have family support and are just building your way up as a young person. It’s not a good country to immigrate to.
In terms of quality of life I have noticed that the manual traders are mostly doing better finically than those who went to university.
Worse. My parents were buying cheap houses in AUS in early 1990s and doing 10 X on them
Worse. Everyone is on their phone all the time, no one wants to do stuff anymore. Everyone is cynical and worried about the future. There are shootings 500m from where I live in broad daylight. The streets are no longer safe at night. Everything is expensive. My grandparents were able to build their own 4-bedroom detached house in the city on 2 teachers’ salaries, today you can buy a 2 bedroom apartment with that. My grandma retired at 50 years old from her job as a maths teacher and had enough money to travel the world with her friend. Schools suck, hospitals suck, petty crime is left unpunished, there are migrants and homeless people everywhere. The only thing I can think of that has improved since my parents’ youth is that there’s less pollution.
Much better. My parents were born during WW2 and lived through its aftermath. They both have memories of going to bed hungry. Things improved from the 50s onward, but they never enjoyed today’s standard of living during their working lives. And by that I don’t primarily mean income (though that is better too), but mostly things like better worker and consumer rights, more vacation, better support for parents with children, less crime and a much more open society.
My parents were born at the end of ww2, my standard of living, quality of life and general well being are immeasurably better in every single way
Ita different. I guess we are richter now but it comes at a price. My mom could work part time and raise 2 children and have a comfortable live with the salary of dads job. He had a good job but not extraordinary. Nowadays you need both to work full time. My parents generation had a hard time back in the days but all the home owners who but their houses back than are very wealthy now. Buying a house for my generation is much more difficult and the future is unpredictable.
I was born and raised in the USSR. So this question makes me smile. Over the last 50 years, the standard of living (in all aspects) in Eastern European countries has grown incredibly.
It’s not straightforward to answer this for Cyprus, because if we assume that you are addressing the 30-somethings right now, our parents are the generation who were children during the war in 1974. Something like 40% of them were directly affected, and since that’s the case of my family, my answer is relevant to them.
Their standards of living changed rapidly. For example, before the war, one side of my family was a comfortable middle class – the grandfather was a small business owner. He lost his business and his property after being displaced due to the war, and his family became suddenly proletarianised (something that he still has not recovered emotionally from). In the first few years after the war they lived in refugee camps and they received Red Cross food parcels. His children, my parent included, started working full time in their mid-teens and they never managed to break out of working class ever since, despite approaching retirement age soon.
Being thrown into the job market having barely received secondary education meant that their job prospects became more and more precarious as Cyprus rapidly transformed from a mostly agrarian economy before the 1980s to a mostly services-based economy afterwards.
Their earning potentials were capped because of their lack of specialisation. But in their “low” and “medium” skilled jobs they also benefited by strong collective agreements, so they had stable purchasing power due to cost-of-living adjustments and annual raises, and they had paid sick leave and company pension plans. They might have not risen to middle class working as waiters and cashiers, but back then those jobs could sustain a family (not on a single income, but could do so on 1.5 income).
But they did benefit from a booming economy in the 1990s and early 2000s. They mainly benefited from cheap credit, which meant they could take out mortgages and car loans quite easily.
Those who didn’t experience very unlucky streaks or who didn’t consider loans as free money, they also managed to repay their loans before the financial crisis hit in the 2010s, which made what followed less painful than for those who had their properties foreclosed on.
Post 2010s, when we started entering the workforce, the main difference is that there’s no cheap credit, and that the services industry professions we have been trained for are in industries with next-to-zero unionisation rate which means we don’t benefit from sick leave, cost-of-living adjustments, annual raises, or strong company pension plans. The salaries aren’t much higher than for our parents even in “high” skilled jobs, unless you are employed in a firm with foreign pockets or in a still-unionised sector. If you work under an individual contract in a non-niche sector of the economy and you are no longer able to live rent-free, then it feels like all you do is tread water.
Depends on what level you examine then. The standards of living overall are much higher in 2025 compared to 1995 and 1975. In 1975 most of the GDP was redirected to rebuilding the country after the war – everyone took a massive pay cut. But the wealth gap was smaller in 1995 than it is now. Today, you can find people doing much better than the average person would 20 years ago, but also many who are doing much worse.
That’s kind of the problem with those questions. A developing country which becomes developed almost never falls back to the developing country level even after a financial crisis. So, it’s true for almost every European country that the current situation is overall better than it was any generation before. But then you need to zoom in to other factors, and there you can see that, for example, wealth inequality can go up and down quite more freely and to quite some extent independently from economic development.
Better in every way, it’s not even a debate (I’m referring to parents’ standard of living vs mine).
Undoubtedly. My parents struggled to put food on the table, despite my dad having a decent job. Any unexpected bill would hit like a hammer. Yes, they had a cheaper cost of housing, but the current generation of young people forgets that they spend a lot on ‘extras’ that didn’t even exist when I was a kid.
That said, I (mid 40s) live a lot better than most in their 20s and I do understand that the cost of living has ramped up significantly, particularly for housing.
Far far better. My parents were going to be bed hungry as children. They did buy their first home together in their early 20s, but all they could afford in their house for the first few months was fuel for an open fire and a duvet.
Much worse, imho. My parents used to go out on Saturday night, I spend my Saturday nights in front of the PC. The little town I live in used to be a lively place, now it’s a ghost town. Purchasing power is in the shitter while 40-50 years ago you could run a family with a salary without even a diploma. I want a time machine.
Lithuania.
Way WAYYY better. Life under russian occupation was kind of, you know, you can’t complain. Literally can’t, because you’ll disappear. That’s not a metaphor, people have disappeared for saying a shitty joke about Brezhnev.
Spoiled americans think that free housing was great. It wasn’t. Apartments were issued after waiting for many years and were usually trash, very tiny, and you couldn’t choose what you liked. You could be issued a car (a piece of shit Lada) if you were an exceptional employee, but that would be your one and only car ever, you’d never get a second one, so you better take care of it.
Then the nineties came and everything was shit but we recovered from decades of terrorist occupation in a surprisingly short time, applied for EU and NATO in 1993, sorted out most of the corruption, crime and inflation problems within a few years and joined in 2004.
In the nineties only the richest could drive new-ish (under 20 year old) western cars. Only the luckiest kids could buy genuine Jeans. Traveling abroad was an insane occasion, regular folks could only travel by bus.
Buses would stop a few times along the way to Germany, in a random parking lot, and people would eat sandwiches that they brought from home, because stopping at a restaurant for lunch was too expensive.
Now basically everyone has a modern car, a smartphone, access to knowledge, freedom and ability to travel anywhere they like. It’s perfectly normal for middle class people to fly to exotic places a couple times per year. This was completely unimaginable just 20-30 years ago.
Now almost everyone owns their own house or apartment, renting is basically just for students or for people who like to move every three years, so buying isn’t practical.
Now russia wants to drag us back down to their level, that’s why we’re doing all we can to support Ukraine while also arming ourselves in case orcs make a move.
First off I want to say I’m not Austrian so I’m going to compare the life of my wife and her parents. My wife is 40 and her parents are in their mid 60s.
So it‘s hard to say. I know my wife had a much better off childhood than her parents. Rural Austria in the 60‘s-70‘s was far from wealthy and her parents had to to live with a lot less, which was normal at the time.
As of now, comparing their life at 40 and ours at 40, they had it better. Things were just cheaper and the income to cost ratio of everything was better then. I look at her parents being able to buy land/build a house/go on vacations while having 3 kids and him working a the trades and her being a kindergarten teacher. My wife and I have almost the exact same careers with two kids and it‘s extremely tough, without having vacations and other luxuries they hadh
Much better. But I grew up kinda poor so it was not that hard
Every eastern european will say definitly its definitly better. My parents came from fucking peasant romania under communism with child labour, ticket systems for food items, pay check to pay check and taking care of chickens and pigs and growing veggies for extra food. Pigs were a luxury fattend up the whole year to be eaten at christmas by extended family plus.
I on the other hand am the first in my line working in the higher standard industries and being happy to save 500 a month investing in stocks in my free time. I can buy clothes whenever I want, I can eat whatever I want and whenever I want, I dont even have to cook it my self. My parents had extrem luck with a generous loan on a house in austria, where the poorest make 1,5k a month while in romania to this day in some villages there are people living off of 300€ a month.
My life has been much easier than my parents. Better food and available food. They suffered from shortages and rationing. The rationing was a very fair system provided the raw produce was available. Their availability to rent a house or flat was much better than for my children now. So if this generation has a place to call ‘home’. they are better off, if they have no ‘home’ they are much worse off.
My father was born in a house that had no electricity and for a time was raised solely by my grandmother while my grandfather was a guest worker in Germany. But things definitely improved in the years following the revolution, and my uncle (his younger brother) had a more comfortable life though still very much working class.
My mother I don’t know exactly what class you could say she grew up in. She’s from Scotland and my grandfather was an electrician and my grandmother a nurse. So either working class or lower middle class.
I feel that as a child I grew up a lot more privileged than they did. As an adult though, I feel like I’m worse off even though I have higher level of education than both of them. It’s like we’re going in opposite directions.
In many ways better and in a lot of ways worse. Healthcare quality, access to information, and access to food are much better than they used to be.
But salaries haven’t kept with inflation, the welfare state is being ruined, access to healthcare is worse, and the housing market is terrible.
In short, life is more comfortable in everything except the basic needs. Am I salty? Yes. But objectively the old days weren’t that great either.
Actually a rather difficult question.
My parents grew up in the 70’s and 80’s which were something of a golden age for Finland. We had Nokia and made a shitload of money by selling western goods and our own to the USSR and buying cheap Soviet materials from them.
So while the standard of living has gone up dramatically, Finland is now less well off compared to other countries than it was back then, due to a stagnating economy mainly fueled by too many old people. Not to even mention all of the international bullshit that’s wrecking the whole world.
So i’d say better but had stuff continued in the same direction as it was until the depression in the 90:s, it would have been way better.
38 comments
For the younger generations?
Worse, considerably worse.Most young people here either live with their parents and survive,or they have to move away.To the north of Italy or abroad.
Salaries are generally low, unemployment is high, prices in the shops are high and so are taxes.
Much better. My parents lived their 20s and 30s in the Communist 1980s and disastrous 1990s, and they didn’t get a chance to improve their fortunes much after 40.
I was already making more than my parents in my 2nd job, and that was more than 10 years ago.
At my age my parents had worked full time jobs for several years with either just primary school education or just 2 years in high school while Im still at Uni so I can actually get a job at all. Sure they had the 90’s economic crisis but also the fall of the USSR. I got a world order that is collapsing, trade war, even more unaffordable housing, even more unemployment, backsliding democracy.
Sure I have a phone and a computer my parents never had but that’s not really making up for the fact that unemployment is nearly 10% and Russia is back threatening Europe and the US promptly fucked the entire world over. Sure I got slightly better food but its back to being expensive as fuck and the future is very bleak.
Better if your family is from low class, worst if your family is from middle class. upper class always have it good due to generational debt so its indifferent.
Its much harder to buy property for a middle class person comparing with their parents if they were middle class. I come from low class so generation of my parents was still not getting all the benefits of the post dictatorship policies. I already got all those benefits like access to education so in that sense it is better.
Waaaay better. Being able to live and work abroad has its benefits…apart from owning a property.
With two jobs still a smaller house than my parents with one job, all of us university educated.
Generally absolutely: I was born shortly before the end of the GDR and the standard I am enjoying nowadays was simply impossible back then. My parents were also pretty lucky, given that they both found employment with rather big companies right after the end of the GDR and therefore weren’t actually impacted by the large wave of unemployment back then.
Definitely better. My grandparents grew up experiencing the dramatic history of communism with closed borders, political prisoners and barely any freedom of speech. Being in the European Union has opened many possibilities for our generation.
Way worse. My parents keep giving me out of date and out of touch advice, and it’s kind of ridiculous. “Go give the boss a firm handshake to get the job” kind of advice.
Better. My parenrs finished school/college and then had to find work when the UK had effectively defaulted on its debt and would go on to run a three day work week to save energy. It would take until the 90s housing slump for them to get a mortgage on a small house. That’s not even couting things like advance in medical and telecommunications technology
As an old millenial, I’d say I grew up with better SOL than my parents did. Now at 40, I’m roughly were they were at that age. I am pretty sure my SOL at 75 will be markedly worse than theirs are now.
Worse. One university degree leaves me with an extra life-long tax, the interest on which I will never even pay off. Salaries are significantly lower (once adjusted for inflation) and prices are significantly higher. Owning your own home is impossible for anyone under 35/40 without parental money, so I’ll spend my life paying someone else’s mortgage through rent. We’ve endured the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, Brexit, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a major war on the continent since the Second World War, and the entire global military, political, and trading order has been upended in just the last couple of months. Public services are decimated by old right-wingers so you don’t get a health service for all the money you pay in taxes. Town centres have nothing to do in them because of government policies decimating them. All we can do is work, sit at home, and pay other people’s bills.
Way better…
My father is born in a slum in the outskirts of Rome one room for him his 3 little sisters and his parents no water no heating system no toilet inside toilets were outside and shared with the people living in the slum…
My mother is French born in a farm she had it better food wise and comfort was batter has well but still no running water and no toilets in the house…
I’m born in a house made of stones with a fireplace running water toilets in the house food on the table had the chance to go to school and then university ( first of my family on both side ) got the chance to travel quite a lot… got the chance to play musical instruments and have books at home…
I’d say I had it way better than them !
Even if they are both saying they loved their childhood they say it was simpler times…
Way better. At my age all my parents could afford as students was a McDonald’s hamburger to share.
Different. In many ways better materially, but in many ways also worse, mainly immaterially.
Significantly better. My parents lived in a communist country and my dad on top of that struggled with extreme poverty.
Unimaginably better. My parents grew up in Communism, and even though we were the “happiest barrack”, it still took two months’ wage to buy a coat and it was a considerable expense to buy a can of mystery meat for dinner in the 80s. Also, they didn’t have the internet and 80s Hungary had the world’s second ever highest suicide rate, only beaten by 90s Lithuania.
Difficult to say… My parents both had better jobs but never care about luxury. In all we all do pretty good. In general yes my generation does better.
In general the generation below me struggles a lot with housing costs to a point I have not seen before. I fear for them a lot.
Much, much, much worse. My parents live a very comfortable life. They’re always going out for food and occasionally just buy random gadgets worth a few thousand pounds.
My dad bought a detached house when he was 23, and built his own house at 25.
My parents went on to own 4 houses between them at one point. My parents have a joint income above the average salary as their pension.
I am in my late 20’s, my bills are over £2,000 a month. And I save just £800 a month and have just £15,000 to my name.
I will probably be mid to late 30’s by the time I buy a home.
I don’t ever see myself attaining their lifestyle unless I win the lottery or come into money some way.
The Uk is just a really bad country to be in if you don’t have family support and are just building your way up as a young person. It’s not a good country to immigrate to.
In terms of quality of life I have noticed that the manual traders are mostly doing better finically than those who went to university.
Worse. My parents were buying cheap houses in AUS in early 1990s and doing 10 X on them
Worse. Everyone is on their phone all the time, no one wants to do stuff anymore. Everyone is cynical and worried about the future. There are shootings 500m from where I live in broad daylight. The streets are no longer safe at night. Everything is expensive. My grandparents were able to build their own 4-bedroom detached house in the city on 2 teachers’ salaries, today you can buy a 2 bedroom apartment with that. My grandma retired at 50 years old from her job as a maths teacher and had enough money to travel the world with her friend. Schools suck, hospitals suck, petty crime is left unpunished, there are migrants and homeless people everywhere. The only thing I can think of that has improved since my parents’ youth is that there’s less pollution.
Much better. My parents were born during WW2 and lived through its aftermath. They both have memories of going to bed hungry. Things improved from the 50s onward, but they never enjoyed today’s standard of living during their working lives. And by that I don’t primarily mean income (though that is better too), but mostly things like better worker and consumer rights, more vacation, better support for parents with children, less crime and a much more open society.
My parents were born at the end of ww2, my standard of living, quality of life and general well being are immeasurably better in every single way
Ita different. I guess we are richter now but it comes at a price. My mom could work part time and raise 2 children and have a comfortable live with the salary of dads job. He had a good job but not extraordinary. Nowadays you need both to work full time. My parents generation had a hard time back in the days but all the home owners who but their houses back than are very wealthy now. Buying a house for my generation is much more difficult and the future is unpredictable.
I was born and raised in the USSR. So this question makes me smile. Over the last 50 years, the standard of living (in all aspects) in Eastern European countries has grown incredibly.
It’s not straightforward to answer this for Cyprus, because if we assume that you are addressing the 30-somethings right now, our parents are the generation who were children during the war in 1974. Something like 40% of them were directly affected, and since that’s the case of my family, my answer is relevant to them.
Their standards of living changed rapidly. For example, before the war, one side of my family was a comfortable middle class – the grandfather was a small business owner. He lost his business and his property after being displaced due to the war, and his family became suddenly proletarianised (something that he still has not recovered emotionally from). In the first few years after the war they lived in refugee camps and they received Red Cross food parcels. His children, my parent included, started working full time in their mid-teens and they never managed to break out of working class ever since, despite approaching retirement age soon.
Being thrown into the job market having barely received secondary education meant that their job prospects became more and more precarious as Cyprus rapidly transformed from a mostly agrarian economy before the 1980s to a mostly services-based economy afterwards.
Their earning potentials were capped because of their lack of specialisation. But in their “low” and “medium” skilled jobs they also benefited by strong collective agreements, so they had stable purchasing power due to cost-of-living adjustments and annual raises, and they had paid sick leave and company pension plans. They might have not risen to middle class working as waiters and cashiers, but back then those jobs could sustain a family (not on a single income, but could do so on 1.5 income).
But they did benefit from a booming economy in the 1990s and early 2000s. They mainly benefited from cheap credit, which meant they could take out mortgages and car loans quite easily.
Those who didn’t experience very unlucky streaks or who didn’t consider loans as free money, they also managed to repay their loans before the financial crisis hit in the 2010s, which made what followed less painful than for those who had their properties foreclosed on.
Post 2010s, when we started entering the workforce, the main difference is that there’s no cheap credit, and that the services industry professions we have been trained for are in industries with next-to-zero unionisation rate which means we don’t benefit from sick leave, cost-of-living adjustments, annual raises, or strong company pension plans. The salaries aren’t much higher than for our parents even in “high” skilled jobs, unless you are employed in a firm with foreign pockets or in a still-unionised sector. If you work under an individual contract in a non-niche sector of the economy and you are no longer able to live rent-free, then it feels like all you do is tread water.
Depends on what level you examine then. The standards of living overall are much higher in 2025 compared to 1995 and 1975. In 1975 most of the GDP was redirected to rebuilding the country after the war – everyone took a massive pay cut. But the wealth gap was smaller in 1995 than it is now. Today, you can find people doing much better than the average person would 20 years ago, but also many who are doing much worse.
That’s kind of the problem with those questions. A developing country which becomes developed almost never falls back to the developing country level even after a financial crisis. So, it’s true for almost every European country that the current situation is overall better than it was any generation before. But then you need to zoom in to other factors, and there you can see that, for example, wealth inequality can go up and down quite more freely and to quite some extent independently from economic development.
Better in every way, it’s not even a debate (I’m referring to parents’ standard of living vs mine).
Undoubtedly. My parents struggled to put food on the table, despite my dad having a decent job. Any unexpected bill would hit like a hammer. Yes, they had a cheaper cost of housing, but the current generation of young people forgets that they spend a lot on ‘extras’ that didn’t even exist when I was a kid.
That said, I (mid 40s) live a lot better than most in their 20s and I do understand that the cost of living has ramped up significantly, particularly for housing.
Far far better. My parents were going to be bed hungry as children. They did buy their first home together in their early 20s, but all they could afford in their house for the first few months was fuel for an open fire and a duvet.
Much worse, imho. My parents used to go out on Saturday night, I spend my Saturday nights in front of the PC. The little town I live in used to be a lively place, now it’s a ghost town. Purchasing power is in the shitter while 40-50 years ago you could run a family with a salary without even a diploma. I want a time machine.
Lithuania.
Way WAYYY better. Life under russian occupation was kind of, you know, you can’t complain. Literally can’t, because you’ll disappear. That’s not a metaphor, people have disappeared for saying a shitty joke about Brezhnev.
Spoiled americans think that free housing was great. It wasn’t. Apartments were issued after waiting for many years and were usually trash, very tiny, and you couldn’t choose what you liked. You could be issued a car (a piece of shit Lada) if you were an exceptional employee, but that would be your one and only car ever, you’d never get a second one, so you better take care of it.
Then the nineties came and everything was shit but we recovered from decades of terrorist occupation in a surprisingly short time, applied for EU and NATO in 1993, sorted out most of the corruption, crime and inflation problems within a few years and joined in 2004.
In the nineties only the richest could drive new-ish (under 20 year old) western cars. Only the luckiest kids could buy genuine Jeans. Traveling abroad was an insane occasion, regular folks could only travel by bus.
Buses would stop a few times along the way to Germany, in a random parking lot, and people would eat sandwiches that they brought from home, because stopping at a restaurant for lunch was too expensive.
Now basically everyone has a modern car, a smartphone, access to knowledge, freedom and ability to travel anywhere they like. It’s perfectly normal for middle class people to fly to exotic places a couple times per year. This was completely unimaginable just 20-30 years ago.
Now almost everyone owns their own house or apartment, renting is basically just for students or for people who like to move every three years, so buying isn’t practical.
Now russia wants to drag us back down to their level, that’s why we’re doing all we can to support Ukraine while also arming ourselves in case orcs make a move.
First off I want to say I’m not Austrian so I’m going to compare the life of my wife and her parents. My wife is 40 and her parents are in their mid 60s.
So it‘s hard to say. I know my wife had a much better off childhood than her parents. Rural Austria in the 60‘s-70‘s was far from wealthy and her parents had to to live with a lot less, which was normal at the time.
As of now, comparing their life at 40 and ours at 40, they had it better. Things were just cheaper and the income to cost ratio of everything was better then. I look at her parents being able to buy land/build a house/go on vacations while having 3 kids and him working a the trades and her being a kindergarten teacher. My wife and I have almost the exact same careers with two kids and it‘s extremely tough, without having vacations and other luxuries they hadh
Much better. But I grew up kinda poor so it was not that hard
Every eastern european will say definitly its definitly better. My parents came from fucking peasant romania under communism with child labour, ticket systems for food items, pay check to pay check and taking care of chickens and pigs and growing veggies for extra food. Pigs were a luxury fattend up the whole year to be eaten at christmas by extended family plus.
I on the other hand am the first in my line working in the higher standard industries and being happy to save 500 a month investing in stocks in my free time. I can buy clothes whenever I want, I can eat whatever I want and whenever I want, I dont even have to cook it my self. My parents had extrem luck with a generous loan on a house in austria, where the poorest make 1,5k a month while in romania to this day in some villages there are people living off of 300€ a month.
My life has been much easier than my parents. Better food and available food. They suffered from shortages and rationing. The rationing was a very fair system provided the raw produce was available. Their availability to rent a house or flat was much better than for my children now. So if this generation has a place to call ‘home’. they are better off, if they have no ‘home’ they are much worse off.
My father was born in a house that had no electricity and for a time was raised solely by my grandmother while my grandfather was a guest worker in Germany. But things definitely improved in the years following the revolution, and my uncle (his younger brother) had a more comfortable life though still very much working class.
My mother I don’t know exactly what class you could say she grew up in. She’s from Scotland and my grandfather was an electrician and my grandmother a nurse. So either working class or lower middle class.
I feel that as a child I grew up a lot more privileged than they did. As an adult though, I feel like I’m worse off even though I have higher level of education than both of them. It’s like we’re going in opposite directions.
In many ways better and in a lot of ways worse. Healthcare quality, access to information, and access to food are much better than they used to be.
But salaries haven’t kept with inflation, the welfare state is being ruined, access to healthcare is worse, and the housing market is terrible.
In short, life is more comfortable in everything except the basic needs. Am I salty? Yes. But objectively the old days weren’t that great either.
Actually a rather difficult question.
My parents grew up in the 70’s and 80’s which were something of a golden age for Finland. We had Nokia and made a shitload of money by selling western goods and our own to the USSR and buying cheap Soviet materials from them.
So while the standard of living has gone up dramatically, Finland is now less well off compared to other countries than it was back then, due to a stagnating economy mainly fueled by too many old people. Not to even mention all of the international bullshit that’s wrecking the whole world.
So i’d say better but had stuff continued in the same direction as it was until the depression in the 90:s, it would have been way better.