This book provides a balance sheet of the changes that have transformed our ways of being, from welfarism to the pill, women's and gay liberation, from globalization, consumerism and individualization to new forms of intimacy, from friends as family to same sex marriage. Some respond to these challenges with a deep cultural pessimism or moral conservatism. It rejects such views and argues that this is a world we are increasingly making for ourselves, part of the long process of democratization of everyday life. Unless we grasp this we cannot understand, not only the problems and anxieties, but the opportunities and hopes in this world we have won.