They bought gas, water, and electricity—three essentials that tied ordinary life to a steady rhythm. Winter was met with a disciplined acceptance of its chill, while summer invited a practical warmth that felt earned. Wednesdays arrived with the anticipation of Christmas and Easter, as if time itself were scheduled on a calendar of family milestones. Jobs seemed secure, promises of stability counted for three years as if carved in stone, and the future included motherhood or fatherhood, a mortgage, and the dream of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home. Perhaps a suburban house with a garden, a dog, and a pond where colorful fish darted under the sun. Grandparents hovered on the horizon, a symbol of continuity. Yet there was a paradox: they did not always know where the energy or water would originate, just as they did not always know where Wednesdays and Sundays came from. The day might arrive when Monday refused to show up or when privatization rendered essential services unaffordable, and the simple comforts of modern life—electricity, air conditioning, heating—began to seem precarious, almost alien to the roof under which a family lived.
They absorbed syntax, grammar, and the alphabet as if these were lifelines. Public health, free education, and well-paved streets were treated as natural rights, alongside personal income tax, value-added tax, property taxes, and the omnipresent reach of the internet. A future that had once seemed distant now pressed forward, built on a foundation of assumptions that allowed for gatherings in philosophical circles, literary salons, and art-film discussions. There were roundtables debating the links between economics and mental health, and the imagination could drift to cities like London and New York as easily as to Rome, Paris, or California. The era’s wonders—cinema, theatre, the circulation of blood, the roundness of the Earth, seasonal fruit, trips abroad—felt almost universal, a shared language of modern life.
People believed the world was finally taking shape when, in fact, it began to fracture. The first jeans from faraway factories appeared, digital watches emerged, and temporary job agencies based in distant economies proliferated. Outsourcing and subcontracting became the accepted norm for basic services. Traditional strengths—Catalan textiles, Albacete cutlery, Valencia oranges, savings plans, and fixed-term tax arrangements—were treated as permanent fixtures to be relied upon. Inflation, a beast that seemed to stalk distant shores, asserted itself in everyday life through shorter contracts and unpredictable wages. And on once-quiet beaches, there were no jellyfish to be found—merely the signs that a global market and its shifting tides were rewriting local realities in ways that were both familiar and unsettling.