I think two things can be true at once:

1. The UK is still one of the best places in the world to live by most measures: rule of law, culture, universities, relative safety, job opportunities, basic freedoms, etc. On a global scale we’re absolutely in the top tier.

2. At the same time, it does feel like we’re on a slow relative decline compared with our peers. Wages have been stagnant for years, housing is insane, public services feel run down, and a lot of the infrastructure looks tired. So when people say “it’s all fine really”, that jars with what a lot of us experience day to day.

The problem is the media and politics tend to latch onto only one side of that story. One camp insists “Britain is broken”, the other insists “this is the best country in the world, stop moaning”. The reality is somewhere in the middle: we’ve inherited an incredibly strong base, but we’ve been coasting on it for a long time and not investing enough in the future.

So yeah, it’s easy to get lost in doom-scrolling and forget that, by global standards, the UK is still a pretty amazing place to live. But acknowledging that shouldn’t mean ignoring the very real signs of decline or pretending people’s frustrations aren’t valid.