If this year doesn’t have any effect on your current lifestyle and your priorities, then nothing will. 2016, I keep reading, can go and do one. I think it can go and do one, too, but there is a lesson for everyone here. Noel Gallagher sang “You and I, we’re gonna live forever” more in hope and maybe in jest, but do you know what? We aren’t. You can stake a wager that you will live forever by surviving your own death and stepping up to a heaven where our forefathers and mothers are just waiting for us to meet up with them, but don’t bank on it.
The news of the death of George Michael at 53 has come out of the blue. In recent times, we have heard little from or about him, which I suspect he rather would have liked. No lurid Sun and Mail stories, no intrusive paparazzi photographers plaguing his life. All the money in the world, poor George will become the richest man in the graveyard. Tragedy upon tragedy.
I finished full time work more than a decade before my state pension was due because I had long realised that my own personal wealth could not be measured in money alone (which was just as well since I had little of it). The nine to five drudgery, which now drags on until your late sixties and soon beyond, effectively takes away your best years, your middle years and ultimately gives you the remaining days when things start to go wrong.
Pushing back the retirement age has been very easy for the government. I don’t recall being asked about it, but the last Tory government, in which some Lib Dems had jobs (and never forget that when the next election comes along), nodded through far-reaching changes that will steal many thousands of pounds from everyone who isn’t already old. We are living longer, you see, so we must all work longer, right? It looks like it, but not all of us.
I have seen the world as it is and how it will be and what happens in old age isn’t always nice. What happens in relative old age can happen not many years after you finish work. Infirmity is almost a given. Because many people are living longer has meant an epidemic in dementia. There are numerous other illnesses and conditions that turn up along the way and having a big wedge of cash when you retire at 70 won’t stop you getting them.
George Michael dead at 53. How old are you? Do you have guarantees you will outlive him? Do you think the Thatcherite dream of accumulating wealth at the expense of everything else is really worth it?
There is no need to live day to day, living the dream just in case something crap happens, but a life beyond chasing that weekend’s overtime payment, when you could, should, be doing something else must be borne in mind.
People fly across the world for work, flying business class, staying in the nicest hotels, accumulating relative or actual wealth. Good for them, but I see every day and every night as a day and a night when you are not with the people you really love doing the things you really want to do.
I will never again do a job where I spend more days at work than not.The older I get, the more I wonder why anyone would.
