Also the healthcare system is unbelievably better than what I experienced living in the UK
I know, saying Germany is better to live in than the UK is hardly much praise, but I will probably stay here for as long as I can just because the quality of life is just so astoundingly better here than it is back home
Which has gone down in the last 10 years. There's absolutely no indication that anything in this regard will improve. All metrics show a downwards trend. Be it homeownership, financial security or even life expectancy. So it's basically just like saying "I inherited billions and I'm still not completely broke. My financial decisions must be awesome".
Gloom and doom seems to be the sentiment of the day (I feel it, too. I fear a relapse into authoritarian, racist isolationism and protectionism. It makes me depressed.) but with regards to quality of life all available numbers point in a different direction. Granted, the most up-to-date dataset [1] does not draw a simple graph, but it shows a pretty promising development across twelve areas. Combined it looks pretty good to me. Which metrics do you refer to?
Compared to other nations the situation gets even more confusing. The OECD Better Life index [2] places Germany consistently above average. The index is compiled from available data and surveys conducted in the corresponding country. So Germans feel everything is doomed but when asked they rank themselves in most metrics concerning quality of life above average. That does not make sense and I doubt the numbers are wrong. So why are Germans so gloomy? Is it the Mittelschicht-Problem? That's a serious question, because I don't know and it is important.
especially right wingers (fuelled by russian money, as confirmed more and more) need a doom&gloom environment + some targets to direct the anger/fear to. there is a lot of misinformation spread around, to an extend that group-thinking has already kicked in and confirmation biases are already at play.
the mental gymnastics are sometimes just outright insane: people with quite comfortable household income situations living in peaceful suburbs feeling close to take up arms to revolt against the evil government and those criminal foreigners everywhere (so against hated laws that don't exist in reality, people they never experienced themselves in their hood, general developments that don't affect them or also are not true/framed badly).
the reality is that life in general is good in germany, much better than in many places of the world considering the complete picture, its not getting more dangerous (criminal statistics overall are mostly flat/sinking over the last decades). there are problems, sure, but nothing spectacularly new, like aging population and pension stuff.
could it be better? always, yes. but it seems that any party that slightly tries to solve on of the actual problems gets a devastating amount of public fire (shoot-the-messenger-style) thats nearly to impossible to defend against, nowadays amplified by social media bots to a large extend, which many people are not able to identify.
With climate change worsening, I can't see this improving. Yeah okay right-leaning governments letting corporations getting away with too much shit and shoving more neoliberalism down our throats[1] is probably more to blame...
That's why I fear rightwing populism will keep rising.
We legalized, this was a great success.
Don't be so negative