“Get early retirees off the golf course and back to work,” says Guardian hack Phillip Inman. “Why early retirement isn’t good for UK plc.” It’s the sort of headline I’d expect to read in one of the more right-wing newspapers, leading a story about how early retirement is somehow a bad thing. Inman goes on:
“Early retirement is a wealthy indulgence that needs to be discouraged. As a minimum, ministers should strip away any inducement offered by the tax system for people who want to retire in their 50s.
“Every western country needs their more mature workers to keep going, if not full time, then part time. And if not paid work, then unpaid voluntary work that acknowledges the luck that flows from being a 21st-century baby boomer in good health.”
The article is about the economic effects of people who, like me, retired very early from full-time work, 11 years in my case. Among my many considerations was most definitely not the economic effects to the country. I saw work purely as a means to an end, that end being an active life that didn’t involve being flogged, working long into old age for a salary many thousands below the average wage. Put very simply, once I had a glimpse of my own mortality, as relatives and friends began to die off, some long before they were able to retire, there was a simple choice: work at someone else’s behest or enjoy my twilight years doing things I really wanted to do.
Actually, I did “keep going” in part-time work, not because I particularly wanted to, but because it was, for a few years, a financial necessity and by and large I did not enjoy it. Working for piss poor managers at the British Red Cross and the dysfunctional brain injury charity Headway were not experiences I would care to repeat and certainly wouldn’t recommend. Had I enjoyed the financial resources, I’d have bailed out of all forms of work, except the voluntary work I have been engaged in for the last three years.
Doubtless Inman’s cosy, well-paid job at The Guardian insulates him from the miserable reality of so many people. Many people do not look forward to the joys of working into old age. And who wants to see police officers, paramedics and firefighters tearing around in their late sixties? Work, I suggest, is a younger person’s game. Meanwhile, Inman has a spiteful dig at various groups of workers, like university lecturers and council staff, the former “obsess about their pensions every day” and the latter who “spend precious hours scrolling through WhatsApp groups discussing the most mundane changes to their retirement plans with a degree of attentiveness that, to give them credit, is in line with the generosity of their benefits.” Do they really? Is that what bin men, school dinner staff and lollipop ladies (and men) fret about all day? I think not.
In fairness, there is clearly a serious economic angle to the issue of retirement. Of course, we need a substantial working population to pay for the benefits, such as they are, which are enjoyed by old codgers like me. I look at life through the prism of how long I have left and what do I want to do with that time. I decided many years ago, long before I did retire from full-time work in fact, that I would seek to end full-time work as soon as humanly possible. No one could have convinced me that I should carry on working for the sake of the country and not the latter stages of my own life.
Later on in his article, Inman seems to get it:
“Maybe its (sic) the lure of sailing on the Adriatic or cruising the Caribbean that captivates so many, or less positively, the frustration and anxiety from working near, with or for incompetent or venal managers in a succession of modestly paid jobs.”
But then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like:
“Still, whatever the reason, too many people want to cash out of the economy, trading their pension and property gains for a long period of rest, with only the stress of remembering what day it is to bump their heart rate.”
Clearly a man who has never endured “the frustration and anxiety from working near, with or for incompetent or venal managers in a succession of modestly paid jobs.” The message appears to be work until you drop, for horrible bosses in exchange for pathetic wages. Don’t call me, Phil. I’ll call you, in all likelihood on the twelfth of never.
To my mind, work is overrated and if you can afford to stop, then stop. Unless you believe in reincarnation or a heaven or hell, this is our one shot at life. We defied almost impossible odds to be born in the first place so we are the lucky ones. I have known far too many people who never even got near to retirement age and others who, once they got their, found they were no longer physically capable of doing the things they dreamed of doing when they finally did retire. I am far from the physical specimen I once was and I know that things are only going to get worse as the years race by (and they do race by when they start to run out).
Early retirement for many of us was not a wealthy indulgence. It was a choice that came about, at least in my case, by a combination of accident and design. I grew up in poverty and I have learned to be grateful for everything I have and everything I worked for. Early retirement, to my mind, is something to aspire to, unless your desire on earth is to live to work. Get on that golf course, go on that SAGA cruise; live that life. If you have worked hard and sacrificed a lot of income in order to have a comfortable retirement, then go out there and grab it. And if the likes of Phillip Inman, and more importantly governments, want you to work longer, then let themk make it worthwhile because at the moment it’s all sticks and no carrots.
As I staggered into middle age, I began to feel that another day at work was another day nearer death, one when I wasn’t doing what I really wanted to do. Life is what you make it. From my point of view, life is better when you don’t dance to someone else’s tune or, if you are self-employed, your own.
