Transcript of the above video:

I was talking to somebody the other day, it was a retiree here in Thailand. It was actually a group of folks and one old hand, if you will; been around a long time, it came up "Is retiring in Thailand like it used to be?" There was some back and forth, some humming and hawing and let's just say folks letting their consternation be known that it wasn't quite like it once was but as one person brought up who had been around a while, Thailand changes a lot. It is very weird when you live here because Thailand, I have often said myself, Thailand is the one place where the days go by like weeks and the weeks go by like days. It is a very odd kind of temporal position to find yourself in insofar the time here goes by it seems like at a different pace, it is a little bit warped or something. 

But as this person brought up, the Thailand of the 90s was very different than the Thailand of the first decade of the New Millennium which is very different from 2010 to 2020 which at that point I had had some experience in the first decade, was here all through the second decade then starting on the third decade, yeah it has changed a lot and it was a good perspective that "hey things change".  Now for the better or the worst, yeah COVID and all this stuff and frankly all the hysterics that have risen up around that, yeah that is its own set of problems, set of issues. Meanwhile, I would say certain things are kind of better at least from when I got here and obviously I am not a retiree. I do understand, I am not taking into account things like inflation, exchange rate; those have a massive impact and I do understand that and depending on your nationality that may have an impact on you more acutely than others, relative to other people, I get all of that. But yeah certain things have gotten better. I would argue there are a lot of products that one can buy in Thailand that used to not exist here or they used to not be available here I should say. Meanwhile, yeah I think especially in the very recent near past, bureaucracy associated with maintaining status, there was just a spike, it just went through the roof as far as that went. I am hoping longer term that is going to kind of fall by the wayside but I was just kind of thinking about it and yeah on the one hand, maybe it is not like it used to be in many different ways but there are pros, there are cons. 

I have to admit on a personal level having been here for 15 years, would I prefer the Thailand of when I first got here to now? Hard to say. I was a younger person then; I was a different person then and you have got to take that into consideration. Again I am not a retiree so if you have your own thoughts on that, maybe leave some comments below but long story short, the place evolves so to try to compare a past iteration of Thailand with the present, it isn't quite fair.