8 ms·
Simulator of the life of a 30-year-old in the UK
- jamesalvarez 1y agoThis could actually be good but instead it just comes across as a coded xenophobic rant. Wasted opportunity!
- thierrydamiba 1y agoFeature or bug?
- dkiebd 1y agoAnd it’s actually good. Immigration does not do 30 year olds any favours. It only helps businesses and pensioners.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoIn the west there are not enough young people to support the elderly, and immigration of young people can help to address this problem to the benefit of everyone.
- dkiebd 1y agoNo, you mean to the benefit of pensioners. Plus there are enough people to care of old people. It’s just that immigrants cause such downward pressure on salaries that elder care is not a viable job sector for most.
- Husieandr 1y ago[flagged]
- Telemakhos 1y agoI see this argument fairly often, but rarely do I see the premises questioned. Why do the elderly need to be supported? Wealth is concentrated in their hands (especially in the UK), while younger generations are struggling to be able to afford housing let alone build wealth. Perhaps society should focus less on supporting the generations who have already accumulated wealth and instead focus on supporting the generations who are starting families.
- 9dev 1y agoThey need someone to literally care for them. In Germany for example, there are far too few people working in elderly care, and it’s a huge problem if we don’t want them to die of starvation, malnutrition or falling down the stairs with nobody to find them there. Even wealth can’t magically summon the humans necessary to do that kind of work, robots are no solution for the foreseeable future and I don’t think starting a family is easy if you have to take care of your parents and/or grandparents.
- dkiebd 1y agoThere are far too few people working in elderly care because it pays peanuts. It pays peanuts because immigration increases the supply of workers. With a limited supply of workers and increased demand as more people get older, those jobs would pay well and natives would want to do them. It’s basic economy. It works well in countries that are not a free for all regarding immigration.
- 9dev 1y agoThat is simply wrong. Social work has always been badly paid, exhausting, and ungrateful. You’re twisting the past to fit into your contrived narrative of immigrants somehow wage-dumping us, but that’s simply wrong, it’s not what has happened in the EU.
- dkiebd 1y agoI can go with your gut feeling or I can go with what I’ve seen in the market whilst looking for a woman to take care of elders in my family. Or with what I’ve heard from people in the hospitality and agriculture sectors. It’s not that natives don’t want to work, it’s that immigrants undercut everybody. Not to mention what they’ve done to the housing sector of course. It’s unlivable. We run a country, not a charity. Edit since I can’t respond anymore: You assume two things: that you can’t work for less than the minimum wage (you can, since most elder care work is paid under the table) and that you can have a good life with the minimum wage (you can’t, unless you are okay with truly bad living conditions). And a country has to prioritise the wellbeing of the natives first. You can’t destroy the lives of the poor and the young natives just to feel better about yourself.
- oulipo 1y agoIt helps everyone, migrants pay more taxes than they get out of the system in benefits. Plus they often do jobs that many people wouldn't otherwise
- Husieandr 1y ago[flagged]
- Telemakhos 1y agoDo migrants do jobs that native-born citizens would not under any circumstances do, or do they do jobs that native-born citizens would not do for the low wages that migrants are willing to accept?
- 9dev 1y agoWe’re talking about minimum wage jobs, so the low wages are capped at the bottom for everyone anyway. And yes, there’s absolutely "native born" workers that will and do work for minimum wage already.
- extraisland 1y agoRegarding the taxation argument. That may have been true in the past (it doesn't account that many of these people stay and then will need to supported when they become elderly) but under the "Boris Wave" immigration boom that is no longer the case. It doesn't address the other problems such as social cohesion.
- Gud 1y agoThis really depends on the quality of the migrants coming. The immigration policies of my home country Sweden has been detrimental for the Swedes. I live in Zürich and there are a lot of foreigners here. Here it’s not so clear cut if it’s for the better or for the worse.
- lurker44 1y ago>Plus they often do jobs that many people wouldn't otherwise because the wages are low, why are the wages low? because these jobs have access to an unlimited amount of strikebreakers/migrants willing to do them for those low wages, so the wage stays suppressed and low, instead of allowing market mechanics to bring those wages up
- rob_c 1y ago[flagged]
- komali2 1y agoI wish conservative humor was actually funny. I got a question that was about extinction rebellion blocking my bus. I chose "move them out of the way." The result: > You and another guy chuck them off the road. The bus drives through and you run after it and jump back on. The protestors are crying. Eugh. And everyone clapped. The other guy? Albert Einstein.
- jadamson 1y agohttps://metro.co.uk/2025/04/10/angry-driver-forces-protesters-off-busy-london-road-swarm-capital-22884551/ https://metro.co.uk/2025/04/10/angry-driver-forces-protester... It literally happened, though? Bus and everything? More than once, in fact: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/09/watch-motorists-drag-just-stop-oil-protesters-road/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/09/watch-motorists-... https://news.sky.com/story/furious-commuters-drag-extinction-rebellion-protester-from-top-of-tube-11837385 https://news.sky.com/story/furious-commuters-drag-extinction...
- spangry 1y agoI missed that bit. What did it say?
- komali2 1y agoOverblown dog whistles about "celebrate hijab day" or some such made-up nonsense I only hear about in conservative self victimisation fantasies.
- password321 1y agoI volunteered at a school. Rather than celebrating Christmas or Halloween, they had to celebrate Diwali because Christmas/Halloween might be too offensive or not inclusive enough. The country has gone mad.
- komali2 1y ago1. I don't believe your framing 2. What's wrong with celebrating Diwali? 3. Why should anyone care? Did anyone stop you from celebrating Christmas with your friends and family? P.s. according to your post history you have based anti capitalist positioning on the pointlessness of most white collar labor, what happened to make you participate on the wrong side in a meaningless culture war that's just a distraction from the reduction in material conditions of the working class?
- password321 1y agoWell of course you don’t believe me, it goes against your narrative. But I’m sure someone living in Taiwan knows better than someone British currently in the UK. Also that is quite an overreach on basic observations that are generally agreed upon and weren't anti-capitalist.
- olddustytrail 1y agoI don't believe you because I live in the UK and the idea that people don't celebrate Christmas is beyond moronic. The shops start doing Christmas stuff the day after Halloween. It's unending Christmas songs for two months. Tell me you seriously didn't notice this.
- 1dom 1y agoGreat way of putting it. This looks like ragebait. First 2 things I saw: - the idea that £100k deposit is needed to buy a house - some weird stuff about nationwide initiatives and hypothesised awkward conversations with people who might be Muslims. Maybe I got unlucky?
- ffsm8 1y agoSounds more like you live in a better area then he does. And by better I mean with less issues, not richer necessarily. While I admit that I don't live in the UK, I suspect it's similar to my experience from over the sea in Hamburg. I've recently moved there into a district with >50% migrants for roughly 3 yrs - not really expecting anything as I was still positive about everything. Finding apartment listings in the online portals explicitly saying they will only allow Muslims was surprising to me, but I ignored it thinking, whatever. Well, after moving into another apartment in the same area was an eye opener for me. Really, I'm frankly surprised there are people still in denial how bad it's gotten. Well, not really surprised. I mean I was one of them in 2021.
- whatsupdog 1y ago[flagged]
- Neil44 1y agoI knew it was going to be coded from the headline, wasn't sure in which direction. Cheers for saving the click.
- extraisland 1y agoI wasn't. It was more a satire on some of the ridiculous stuff in UK political culture and corporate culture. In it is literally has emails from Linda on total nonsense corporate cringe stuff that I am shielded from because I wfh.
- Husieandr 1y ago[flagged]
- bogdan 1y ago[flagged]
- hn_throw2025 1y agoSo the UK (pop 69M) has had net migration figures of 760K, 860K, and 430K over the last three years. UK finances have wafer-thin fiscal headroom. A significant chunk of monthly borrowing is spent on interest payments. There is no surplus for increased spending on public services. If demand keeps increasing and supply remains the same, people can feel their quality of life decreasing. A rapidly increasing population has a greater need for GP appointments, hospital treatment, school places, housing, food, policing, roads, electricity, water, sewage, etc. You can think of it as a meta issue that affects many of our existing capacity problems. So those who want to hand-wave away immigration as a right-wing dog whistle need to put a bit more thought into it.
- derelicta 1y ago[flagged]
- password321 1y agoMost of Africa which mostly hasn't been bombed by the West. Billions of charity investment.
- defrost 1y agoThe west and the east are still gutting African resources to this day via a bunch of carrots and sticks that rarely include direct bombing by a Western country or China. Plenty of western mercenary groups supporting traditional land takeover by corporations, funding radical groups to destabilize effective governments forming or growing in strength is still ongoing.
- derelicta 1y agoI know right. Folks don't understand that people who come to our countries are also workers whose countries have been destroyed by OUR elites. A bit of solidarity would be healthy, useful and anchored in reality.
- subsistence234 1y agoWhenever anyone on earth does something bad, it's basically Nick's fault. Nobody except Nick has agency or responsibility. They're all victims, except Nick.
- wosined 1y ago[flagged]
- admiralrohan 1y agoSorry don't understand anything. Just randomly clicking. Need more context on why you did this and how this works. And how much agency do I have.
- ajb257 1y agoI think that's the point. You don't have any agency. There's no way to win.
- admiralrohan 1y agoIs this about nihilism?
- scotty79 1y agoAbout as much agency as in real life. That's the point of the game.
- extraisland 1y agoPlayed a little. It is amusing. The ignoring emails from "Linda" about silly events in the office is a daily occurrence for me. I like that the site seems to use the gov.uk styling.
- wildrice 1y agoHow many liters of water does loading this webpage use?
- varispeed 1y agoJust delete your old emails to balance it off.
- rob_c 1y agoTried that but it's still not raining
- reynard_le_faux 1y agoDo you mean nick sim or HN?
- willprice89 1y ago> You get a rejection email: 'Write a rejection email. Make the message sound particularly caring and empathetic. Make no mistakes' That part actually made me LOL.
- oncallthrow 1y agoThe Nick meme is a great way of encapsulating how utterly sick of the UK young professionals are at this point. There is no way to win. I know many young people who are very comfortably in the top 5% of earners in the UK, paying tens of thousands of pounds of income tax per year, and are still locked into paying massive amounts of rent, because it's near-impossible to actually own a house here at this point. So quite honestly, what is the point any more? It's really no wonder UK productivity is dropping. It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here. Meanwhile pensioners sit comfortably in four-bed houses in London suburbs with triple lock pensions guaranteed by the government.
- gchadwick 1y ago> It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here. Eh, think that depends upon your social circles, sure it's not perfect but the vibes just fine from my perspective. There seems to be a massive swelling of online opinion that everything's terrible and everyone's deeply unmotivated which certainly doesn't match lived reality for me
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoIt's not a new thing. I'm genX and I lived in rental until my 40s. Was in a 1 bed flat with my wife and son until he was 4. Eventually managed to buy a small place, but even then I was lucky. I reject this generational war thing though. British state pensions are the worst in Europe. The triple lock doesn't make pensioners rich; it just keeps them from sliding into abject poverty.
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoI had to stop, it has some fairly nasty content in it (e.g. making jokes about LGBT people or not, taxes being spent on second generation immigrants).
- rob_c 1y ago[flagged]
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoI have indeed seen the rise of xenophobia and intolerance in the UK since Brexit kicked off. I do not find the average person holds these views. I certainly don't want to play a game that assumes I agree with them.
- rob_c 1y ago> I have seen it Also > I don't believe people think that way ... You're living in a bubble
- jakkos 1y ago27% of Brits think it's acceptable to make jokes about trans people if you aren't trans yourself: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/entertainment/trackers/do-brits-think-its-acceptable-to-make-jokes-about-trans-people https://yougov.co.uk/topics/entertainment/trackers/do-brits-...
- 1y ago
- crikeykangaroo 1y ago[flagged]
- rhubarbtree 1y agoPartially true, but being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution was also a major factor.
- rob_c 1y agoNo. Honestly when you have police arresting pensioners for peaceful protest and a govt which is breaking every election promise and triggering 2 calls to hear for a new election (within 12 months of coming into power). Not too mention the population changes that have happened over the last 20 or so years. Knife crime and acid attacks on the rise, social cohesion at an all time low and a standing populace who are struggling to support a national debt over 90% of GDP. Britain is not "safe" and still continue to be getting worse. But now I'll ask you if he's not the majority why are you attacking a minority? Do you have something against ethnically English, Scottish or Welsh people?
- crikeykangaroo 1y agoThe UK has been (and currently still is) creating havoc across the world. Sorry - I am a bit less sensitive for Nick's "troubles".
- pixxel 1y ago[dead]
- rvz 1y agoThe UK needs this...for its own embarrassment as the world laughs at them becoming irrelevant as a serious country that is in decline.
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoAt least they have Ibuprofen /s
- mike-cardwell 1y agoI live in the East Midlands in the UK. You can grab a reasonable first house here for less than £150k quite easily. So you'll need a 5% deposit, £7,500 for one of those. One person on an average salary for the area would be able to afford a mortgage for a house like this on their own. But Nick has a girlfriend, who can hopefully work, so should be able to afford it easily. But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem. I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most. And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.
- 1dom 1y agoStart pressing buttons and you'll see even more weird claims that most sane Brits won't recognise. This is a weird website that probably shouldn't be given much time.
- extraisland 1y agoI am from the UK and recognise most of the absolute nonsense highlighted. It is hyperbolic sure, but I kinda giggled at some of the gags in it.
- Tade0 1y agoThe usage of the GOV.UK Design System is a nice touch though.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoThis is true. You don’t need a £100K deposit unless you want to live in a £1M house, which is not necessary in the UK. If you want to buy a big apartment in central London or a four bed house near London, sure. But most people would consider that a luxury and not a necessity to raise a family.
- globular-toast 1y agoWhere is 100k for a house deposit coming from?! Don't most people start with a way smaller deposit? Like 5% is common these days. Yes you'll pay an enormous amount of interest. You pay rent to the owning class one way or another.
- rob_c 1y agoProbably to demonstrate that to ever actually be financially secure you should be paying off a significant part of your mortgage and not wage slave until retirement to only own 80% of the property due to inflation and rising costs. If you're buying into the 5% you're probably so fiscally irresponsible that nothing good will come off it. The new builds aren't all magically appreciating in value by 20% every year. And if they did the better house you'd want to move into has almost certainly gone up by 30% or more.
- subsistence234 1y ago> Don't most people start with a way smaller deposit? Like 5% is common these days. 5% down is insane. predatory lending IMHO.
- globular-toast 1y agoNot really. It's secured against the house so worst case is the lender repossesses. Either way, unless you have money you will be paying rent to the people who do, either via rent or interest payments. Yeah, I don't like it either, but that's the game. The OP makes it seem like renting and saving huge piles of cash is the only way. It's not. You can buy and save into your house instead. As long as interest plus maintenance etc is the same as what you would have paid in rent, you'll probably end up better off if house ownership is your goal.
- subsistence234 1y agoWith only 5% down there is no safety buffer. Lenders and insurers will take advantage of your precarious situation.
- deadbabe 1y agoEvery time I feel bad about living in the US, I just think it could be worse: I could be living in the UK. Hang in there UK.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoHow can Nick's rent be £4,500? You can rent a nice, 2 bedroom flat with two showers+toilets, 13 mins' walk from a London Underground station in zone 3, for less than £2,000. Even if they don't want to share with another couple, Nick and his girlfriend should each be paying less than £1,000, no?
- bogdan 1y agoI'm confident whoever created this has never stepped foot in London, or if they did, it was briefly.
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoPer quarter? It's not the monthly rent.
- wiether 1y agoWorse, in my first scenario, I started a £4,500 but then "girlfriend" ask to move together, so apparently Nick was living solo And once they moved together, the rent moved to £5,500
- alun 1y agoAm I the only one who noticed the gov.uk theme? Pretty brilliant!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Roark66 1y agoC'mon... 3 years have passed and only two job offers applied for? What is Nic's degree in? Babylonian history? When I was in this position I applied to 20 ads per month. In addition to applying I had alerts on my phone, if a job ad dropped that matched my cv well I'd call the recruiter within 5 minutes of posting. I scored two great jobs this way. But this was in IT... I hear every other industry is much, much harder
- PickledJesus 1y agoAs someone sympathetic to this, throwing in the culture war stuff (make jokes about LGBT etc) is a massive own goal and makes it so easy for people to discredit. This could have far more cross-party support but it's just going to amuse the people who already agreed with it and make everyone else think it's the alt-right letting the mask slip..
- pixxel 1y ago[dead]
- MattPalmer1086 1y agoIt's clearly an alt right thing trying to leverage a genuine social problem (housing) and blame it on "the other".
- scrlk 1y agoThis is inspired by the "Nicolas (30 ans)"/"The Social Contract" meme: https://xcancel.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1863959668357296496 https://xcancel.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1863959668357296496
- jacobp100 1y agoThe festival part is wrong - you can earn £1,000 from self employment without paying tax on it
- Mk2000 1y ago[flagged]
- mzhaase 1y agoThis game is an ad for progress . At the end it has this link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OvkH4VxsIuG8uVN7qFbi7m_LMp_w6ZPhP6PnWIjCPYs/viewform?edit_requested=true https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OvkH4VxsIuG8uVN7qFbi7m_LMp_...
- BurdensomeCount 1y ago> New Town Blocked > A 50,000 home new town in Kent is blocked because they found nests full of agitated Chupacabras following the government's 'reintroduction' of the cryptid to British arable land. Your deposit requirement increases by £5000. This is too real...
- phatfish 1y agoIt's "viral" marketing for progress-party.uk, if you play to the end there is a link to a Google doc to register your interest. The veiled racism and bigotry in the "sim" is cheap. The current housing situation may be made worse by migration, but the majority of it is legal so hardly the migrants fault if we are inviting them. So blame the government (predominantly Conservative over the last 20 years) and all the NIMBYs and hypocrites that stop anything changing in this glorious country.
- subsistence234 1y ago> hardly the migrants fault Of course not, but it's the fault of whoever lobbied for and passed those laws. > we are inviting them. Who is this "we"? It's not the British people.
- archagon 1y ago> It's not the British people. Maybe not you, but plenty of British people support immigration. Believe it or not.
- lurker44 1y ago> but plenty of British people support immigration. Believe it or not not many i bet has any government ever went to an election with the promise that they are going to increase immigration rates if they are elected, and won? no because its electoral suicide to do so
- subsistence234 1y agonot the majority. not even close.
- defrost 1y agoThe British people, of course, includes those British Nationals with English as a first language, who served in the British armed forces in World War Two. The UK government, needing workers to help fill post-war labour shortages and rebuild the economy, invited many British people to come to the metropole. Like all those dark skinned folk of the Windrush generation, and a good number of people who came across to the UK from India and Pakistan. In more recent, pre-Brexit, years that invitation to fill a labour vacuum went out to fellow EU member states.
- rojeee 1y agoNick should leave London and go live in the countryside - that’s the only place where traditional British values are alive and well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- p3rls 1y agoFeel free to add my experience > Escape from system (fire protection trades) > Build popular web platform for Korean pop music > Google redirects all korean queries to indian seo scammers for three years (eg, google "BTS" or "BLACKPINK" and count the indian URLs)
- AlecSchueler 1y agoI feel like it's more particular than 30 year old. Seems to be a white, straight male with an Anglo Saxon heritage living in England. A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK." This isn't a criticism just an interesting case of unconscious bias at play and how we tend to universalise our experiences.
- _dain_ 1y ago>Seems to be a white, straight male with an Anglo Saxon heritage living in England. This is in fact an extremely large, dare I say representative, demographic. Je suis Nicolas (30 ans) aussi. And his counterpart Nicola (30 ans) has similar problems herself. >A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK." By the 2021 census population pyramid, about 12,000 / 1.9M = 0.63% of the population are 30 year old women in Northern Ireland, and about 0.58% of the Northern Ireland population is black. Maybe 5% of women are lesbian? Derry's population is 85,000. So 85k * 0.63% * 0.58% * 5% = 0.15 of a person. >This isn't a criticism You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias" (and various -isms by insinuation).
- AlecSchueler 1y ago> This is in fact an extremely large, dare I say representative, demographic. It might well be. I didn't suggest otherwise. > You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias" No, I'm not, that's why I took the time to explicitly say so. I made no "accusation," you've just taken it that way. We all have unconscious biases and we all act them out in various ways. I made absolutely no value judgement and I think I'm a healthy society we should be able to talk about these things without everything having to be taken as an accusation. > population pyramid I intentionally used an atypical demographic reality to demonstrate my point: that person is just as much "a 30 year old in the UK" as Nicolas. There are obviously many millions of other people who are not like Nicolas and it's reasonable that a conversation includes an eye to the diversity of experience around us for a host of different reasons.
- thrance 1y ago> "It's Celebrate Hijab Week". Oh. Just more conservative self-victimization about made up issues. Truly pathetic.
- nialv7 1y agoIt's created by Progress, which IIUC is a movement under the Labour party? I mean, you are literally in power, you can just change it. What's the point of this?