A chance encounter yesterday with an old friend for the first time in years reminded me what I escaped what was increasingly becoming the prison of full time work until you drop. She is younger than me, still in her late forties, and bumping into her by the deli counter you would never have known there was anything wrong, but there was. Her husband, also in his late forties whom I don’t know quite so well, but like very much, has been diagnosed with a serious, life-changing and life-shortening condition. Life is beginning to go wrong for them.
Unlike me, they had not really thought a great deal about retirement, other than when they got there they would be financially sound, having scrimped and saved to ensure they had a good pension pot. There would be time to do all the things they couldn’t do now because work gets in the way.
I am not going to lie and pretend I wouldn’t like a few more bob in the bank to finance a somewhat more lavish lifestyle, but it is far from a priority. Money can certainly buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy time.
I didn’t suddenly have a Road to Damascus moment but as I got older, I began to value my time away from the office more and more. Sunday nights were usually bearable, but in my last five years at work, they had become unbearable. The fact that I was ill with severe clinical depression didn’t help, especially as I worked through it, even at the worst times (looking back,I don’t know how), but it was more than that. I had things I wanted to do and the things I wanted to do became the things I needed to do. I needed to write, regardless of how badly, and I could not do that following someone else’s instructions five days a week.
And in the latter stages of life – and I know I am slowly, relentlessly but surely entering into them – it could be too late to do all these things. Already, George Osborne has stolen a year’s pension from me and younger people will end up being robbed of even more.
There is a lot to be said for loving one’s job. Until I quit the civil service and started working part time for a well known charity, I never experienced that, but I do now and I’d do it even if my lottery numbers came up because in my small way I am picking up the pieces of the wreckage that Thatcher’s Britain has inflicted upon us and a pernicious mindset that still poisons society more than I ever knew.
So many of us really do work until we drop, many for someone else to get rich, some to make success by virtue of their own hard work. I admire all of them, I admire, encourage and celebrate success, but increasingly I realised that this does not last forever.
I have seen enough broken dreams to last a lifetime, from young people suddenly and dramatically taken away, at our even before the best years of their lives, of lives becoming overwhelmed by good times unexpectedly taken away before they even arrived.
There are no promises, we do not know what is around the corner, things do not happen for a reason. Tomorrow is another day, if we get there.
It has been nearly two years since I escaped the drudgery of the civil service and my life has been immeasurably improved since then. Most importantly, increasing awareness and understanding of my own mortality has made many days so much better, understanding the things that matter, really matter.
For those who find sufficient life rewards in working hard and accruing material wealth, then that’s fine too. You might be lucky and live to ripe old age to enjoy the fruits of your labours. But there are no promises, no certainties and I am glad I didn’t take the chance.
I have seen too many good people taken away and too many survivors ruing, with ‘what ifs’ abounding and staying with their loved ones forever.
We are only here through the accident of our birth and it can all end just as accidentally too.
