Declining Living Standards

Declining living standards due to over-population

and making it trendy! 

Due to a rapidly increasing population that is assumed to be inevitable, we are suffering a decline in our living standards.  The intriguing thing is that some of this declining standard of living has been re-interpreted as trendy!  

1. Taking up less space

Heard of  'Tiny Homes?'   They look cute, and are pushed as The New Thing!  It is asserted that one can live perfectly comfortably in a 'tiny home.'  There are TV programmes that have idealistic young couples searching for their special 'tiny home.'  They are pushed as if they were a desirable thing, rather than the squeezing of a family into a far-too-small space. 

They are very like caravans, (or 'trailers' as the American would say,)  though not all are made to be moved around.  There are differences, they look prettier, often with steep roofs,  and they are often worse-designed space-wise.   

There was a TV programme I watched that was touting the virtues of 'tiny living.' It showed the interior of one of these houses.  There was a projecting corner that I could see was made for hitting your head on,  and there was a bed upstairs without sufficient safety railing.  Get up to go the toilet, still half asleep, and an accident would be all too possible.

Left - It looks beautiful and very cute.




The image on the right is little more than a bed on wheels.






I think there must be a deep instinct inside us that sees a cavity and imagines it as a home. 

The image (right)  is of the interior of a 'tiny home.' It looks attractive, but for long-term living?  I think a normal sized home is better.  And imagine the hazards for little children living there!

So 'tiny homes.' All they are is a loss of the living space that we have grown up with, and expect as a matter of routine.

And yet they are supposed to be all the rage?


 Cubicles instead of hotel rooms.

I saw a TV news reports that speaks of a trend in hotels to offer merely bed spaces instead of a hotel room.  There was a common area, where people could sit, and several bed spaces with doors, where one retired to sleep. The rationalisation was that one really only used a hotel room to sleep and could perfectly easily share other facilities with other guests.

Squeezing our houses into smaller areas.

We are firmly told that the house on a quarter-acre plot, with a picket fence and a big back yard is totally out of date. Now city houses are set so close, that one could leap from one roof to the next.  Those houses that manage a backyard at all, have a tiny one.

As a consequence, the way of life of families in the cities have changed. Now conscientious parents take their kids to the park every day so they can have some exercise and outside play.

There are new ways of being a child.  While my generation had space to roam in, today's children learn to line up to take their turn on the Flying Fox. 




There are positives. Children learn to get along with others at an early age.

But I pity them. We had so much more freedom than children do now.  Making our own little campfire and boiling up apples from the apple tree. Having a cubby house under the spreading boughs of an old pine tree. Dogs and cats and horses.

Even in a town, there were areas of free land where the kids would meet each day. Not structured playgrounds, but open areas where no-one cared if you built a bonfire or maybe 'jumps' for pushbikes.  Sliding down the slope on home-made billy carts or playing 'dams' at the edge of the creek.

Getting dirty, being free.  Kids these days are not very free.




We are told that people prefer city living and they prefer living in apartments.  I think it is more that they choose the best they can with the money they have, and that often means a small apartment.


Eating lesser quality food.

Veganism

Old-fashioned vegetarianism is apparently no longer enough. It's been around too long. Now the trendies are declaring themselves 'Vegans'  - not even permitted milk or eggs. It is stated to be 'healthy,' though I doubt it. Humans have evolved as omnivores, and we know that meat is a more efficient provider of energy than plant foods. Look at an animal meat eater, such as a leopard or a lion. It will hunt, eat, and then lie around for hours, even days.  

Herbivores, on the other hand, are forced to graze all day to take in enough energy to sustain themselves. And look at primitives in areas where there is insufficient game to have a good feed of meat now and then. They turn to cannibalism, often of enemies, occasionally of excess wives. Except in desperate circumstances, that is in the past, when people were limited to what they could source locally. These days, vegans have a wide source of foods, and most manage to have enough protein to sustain health.

It is very trendy to be Vegan, and more and more people are taking up that choice, and feeling morally superior because they do.  

How much is it pushed and how much is it chosen? Hard to say, but certainly it is easier to feed an enormous population if they don't want a decent feed of meat most days of the week. 

Eating Insects.

Every now and then, someone will declare that 'with the increasing population,'  we will have to start eating insects, as it is 'no longer sustainable' to be meat-eaters.  There was even an episode of  the cooking reality show, 'Masterchef,'  that featured crickets as part of the menu, and many of the contestants demonstrated eating the things, and nearly all (maybe all?) featured them in their 'dish,' even though it was not stated as a compulsory part of the brief.

I would have loved to see the pep talk they had, off camera, to say just why they had to serve - (oh dear) - crickets! 

Eating all of the animal and all of the vegetable ‘because we can no longer afford to waste.’

On TV,  25^th March, 2018, there was a programme about a chef who liked to cook up odd things to show how he abhors food waste.  Chicken rectum anyone?  Offal, not just liver, kidney and brains, but uterus?  Really?  The bitter parts of vegetables because one should not only eat the edible part. Cabbage leaves, not just the cabbage.  (The reality is that in selecting just those small parts of the animal, he probably wasted far more than the average cook at home in the kitchen.) 

And the commentator obediently said that whatever he sampled was delicious, and was probably making a horrible face off camera!  

There is a lot of talk about 'food waste.'  They invariably blame all of us, but nearly all householders waste very little edible food. 

We do eat only the parts of the food item that are generally regarded as edible.  Banana skins get thrown out, and so do apple cores and orange peel.  Bones, gristle, and often the excess fat of a cut of meat gets thrown out. The only way they can come up with the figures they accuse us of 'wasting' is if they count this as waste, rather than normal food preparation.   



Supermarkets and restaurants, of course, waste far more. 

No waste is good, (actual waste, I mean)  but fretting about it as if we were in the midst of the 1930s Depression?  That only comes about because people are fearful that there will be inadequate food to go around.  

Growing pretend meat in test tubes. 

With the burgeoning population (they always say this, as if there was no choice,)  we may no longer be able to have the area of grazing lands where sheep and cattle graze.  

At the moment, growing 'flesh' in the laboratory is horrendously expensive. It is quite impractical to produce commercial quantities.  The presenter of the TV programme I happened to see,  said that, nevertheless, it would become more efficient and it was 'inevitable' if we wanted to eat meat in the future.  Because why?  Because of our 'burgeoning population,' of course.  

There are plenty of articles about lab-grown 'meat.' Below are just two links to articles. 

https://www.wired.com/story/lab-grown-meat/

https://www.wired.com/story/lab-grown-meat/

So we see declining standards of living because of a burgeoning population.

Mass immigration

But here's an idea. How about we control our population, and then we won't have to tolerate an erosion of our living standards? 

The birth rates in Western countries is already only at, or even below, replacement.  In third world countries, it is very high, and the living standard low.  And so enormous numbers of people emigrate, looking for a better life.  And this is why our population is soaring.

But taking in immigrants does not ease the pressure of population in their home countries. There are always more babies in those countries, especially as in most of the worst areas, contraception is either unavailable or against the religion. 

So now, too much pressure is put onto Western nations, who have to try to cope with the never-ending floods of immigrants, some of whom find it difficult to integrate, and more who choose not to try. 

Instead of accepting millions of new immigrants until we end up as poor and overcrowded as the worst nations are now, we should aim for a stable population for ourselves by a strict limit on immigration, and provide as much education and family planning clinics as possible in their countries of origin. Not many mothers really want a dozen children.  In many countries, they have no choice.

There is nothing wrong in looking after ourselves. I do not want to lose our land to more and more development, I like to see grazing stock, and I want my children and grandchildren to have the option of country living if they choose it.  

Don't be fooled by the pretense that things are merely fashionable when they are disguises for declining standards of living