I'm tired of modern life but there's one thing that keeps me up at night - Renee Hoenderkamp

It’s not a single law or grand announcement that does it; it’s the constant creep of control, the accumulation of small restrictions that eventually box you in. Everything is controlled, banned, or on a waiting list to be banned, even thoughts.

I’m tired of working harder, longer, more efficiently, and somehow ending up with less in my pocket. Each year the bar moves higher: targets rise, costs rise, taxes rise. Meanwhile, actual quality of life doesn’t. The price of food, energy, travel, everything, creeps upward, but wages limp behind, and the taxman’s hand is always outstretched.

I’m tired of paying more and more hidden and obvious taxes. Levies buried in your bills, green adjustments, little percentage points quietly added to keep the lights on in bureaucracies we never voted for. And what do we get in return? Fewer services, longer waits, more forms, less accountability.

The NHS is permanently in crisis. Local councils act like overlords rather than public servants. The police appear more readily for tweets and 'hurty words' than for burglaries. It’s a strange kind of progress where everything costs more but delivers less.

Then there’s parenting. I’m tired of being treated like an interfering bystander in my own child’s education. The Government decides when she should learn about sex, relationships, and identity, as if my input is somehow outdated or inappropriate.

Parental consent has been rebranded as optional consultation. And heaven forbid you ask questions; you’re immediately labelled difficult, reactionary, or a ‘phobe’ of some type. Social services start hovering if your seven-year-old girl wants to be a boy and you parent well and say: “That’s nice sweetie, now lets go to ballet."

What used to be shared territory between parent and teacher now feels like contested ground. The message is subtle but clear: ‘We know best.’ But do they? Education has become more about ideology than inquiry and embedding knowledge, and I’m tired of pretending that’s progress. Let's face it, standards are not rising, kids are not more intelligent, adept, robust, nor entrepreneurial.

I’m also tired, deeply, existentially tired, of being told that the pension I’ve spent decades earning might not actually be there when I need it. It’s the carrot on a stick of modern life: keep working, keep paying, and maybe, a big maybe, you’ll get something back before you die. Except the goalposts keep moving.

Retirement ages climb, contributions increase, and yet the promise feels less certain than ever. It’s like watching someone quietly drain your future while telling you it’s for your own good. It’s an abusive relationship with the state that spends our money and instructs us to be grateful.

Then there’s the small matter of enjoying the little things, like driving a car you love. Or rather, trying to. Because now every journey feels like an obstacle course of cameras, fines and contradictory rules.

Twenty-four miles an hour? Wrong turn? Wrong day? Flash and another fine with punitive points arrive courtesy of Royal Mail. Apparently, the act of driving itself is now suspect, a moral failing dressed up as urban planning.

They’ve managed to turn mobility, once the ultimate symbol of freedom, into a guilt-ridden administrative nightmare. And soon, we’re told, we won’t even have cars as we know them. Just apps, zones, shared pods, and digital permits to travel when approved. Progress, they call it. I call it dull and stifling. Who remembers that day your instructor told you that you had passed and your world opened up?

It doesn’t stop there. I’m tired of being told my boiler has to go, that flying is selfish, that eating meat is destructive, and that burning a log in my own fireplace is apparently an act of environmental terrorism. Every normal pleasure of life has been reframed as a moral hazard.

Of course, we all care about the planet, who doesn’t? But the constant messaging isn’t about empowerment, it’s about obedience. It’s the slow substitution of personal responsibility with state-approved virtue. ‘We’ll tell you how to live; sustainably, compliantly, correctly’. It’s exhausting and joyless in practice. The world gets ever smaller and more constrictive, not bigger and freer.

And while we’re at it, I’m tired of being told that facts I learnt at university are now wrong. That biology is a matter of belief. That words I’ve used all my life are suddenly offensive. That simply speaking plainly can now constitute a crime. The new social contract isn’t about coexistence, it’s about constant self-correction. You’re not trusted to think; you’re expected to perform. One wrong phrase and you’re an outcast.

Debate has been replaced by denunciation. We’ve gone from ‘I disagree with you’ to ‘I’ll cancel you’. It’s infantilising and authoritarian, all wrapped up in the language of kindness. And utterly draining.

The worst part, the part that keeps me awake, is my daughter’s future. She’ll grow up not even knowing the joys she’s lost. She won’t drive a car, robot cars will do that. She won’t have privacy because every transaction, every movement, every communication will be logged ‘for safety’ and scored for virtue and societal access. She may not even work in the way we understand it; how many jobs will be left for humans that AI can’t do?

And she won’t think any of it’s strange, because she’ll have no memory of what came before. That’s how freedom disappears, not in one dramatic confiscation, but in a slow, forgettable drift. You normalise each loss, and before long, you can’t even articulate what’s missing.

This global, overreaching, ever-more autocratic drift isn’t just political; it’s psychological. It’s sucking the spontaneity, humour, and messiness out of life. The very things that make being human worthwhile. Everything is monitored, nudged, optimised. Even joy feels conditional. You need permission for everything now; to heat your home, to travel, to joke, to question, to think. It’s like living in a padded room where you can’t get hurt, but you can’t really live either.

I’m tired, and from the look of my inbox I am not alone, of being treated like a problem to be managed rather than a citizen to be trusted. Of being lectured by those who fly private while telling the rest of us to cycle. Of being gaslit into thinking compliance is compassion and surveillance is safety.

But here’s the thing: exhaustion doesn’t mean surrender. Maybe it’s the first spark of awareness that things have gone too far. Maybe being tired is the natural response to living under constant scrutiny and the first step toward pushing back.

Because real freedom isn’t loud or dramatic; it’s subtle. It’s the ability to make small, human choices without permission; to drive somewhere just because, to say what you mean, to raise your child in your values, to laugh at something absurd without checking first if it’s allowed.

That’s what I’m tired of losing. And if we all start accepting that we’re tired in this way, properly tired, maybe that’s where the recovery begins.