Still reelin’ and rockin’ following billionaire snake oil salesman Rishi Sunak’s instruction to people with mental health conditions that they should, and here I paraphrase, “suck it up and get back to work – there’s fuck all wrong with you, plebs”, I read a column in the online edition of today’s Observer newspaper by columnist Martha Gill headed “Mental health is a measure of success, not a reason for politicians to sneer“. No, I don’t understand what that means, either, and the rest of article makes even less sense, at least to me, but the most important line is part of the very first line. “There’s more to life than money.”
There is, too, and more and more people, not just folk with mental health issues, are discovering just that. I made the decision to retire from the wacky world of full-time work when I still had nine years to wait for my state pension. Sure there were negative financial considerations but that line, there’s more to life than money resonated strongly. If I could still afford to do most of the things I really wanted to do, I concluded, then why wait until I was older and in deep decline, both physically and mentally?
We talk about “when we retire, we will be able to do this, that and the other“, meaning when we reach 66, 67 or whatever the government decrees is the age at which we receive our pensions and don’t always consider the possibility that actually we might not actually make it that far. Dreams of that big tour of Europe, for example, in our own time, stopping off at quaint little villages here and there, pootling along country lanes and quaffing carafes of the local wine – well, dreams don’t always come true.
I’m wondering how much the world changed after Covid. Millions died, many millions more suffer from the lingering effects of long Covid, people maybe thought: hang on a minute. This is life, not a trial run. What if someday, tomorrow, never comes? I’m hoping I don’t get some life-changing condition or disability, but I just don’t know.
I was lucky. David Cameron decided that investigating benefit fraud, the work I did for a living, was too expensive and time-consuming. Let’s get rid of fraud investigators, pension them off early and go after the easy hits instead. I benefited from that, the taxpayer less so. So I had an extra near decade of doing what I wanted to do rather than what someone else wanted me to do.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is worried about the effects of people leaving the workforce long before pension age. He wants over-50s to “get off the golf course and return to work“, so say to “help tackle the UK’s labour shortages” caused by, he doesn’t add, the Brexit his party accidentally brought about. I’ll just say this. If you can afford to stay on the golf course, to take your RV around Europe, to spend the winter somewhere sunny and warm, why the hell would you choose to work, often in low paid, insecure work instead? The Conservatives are repeatedly raised the retirement age because they want us to work until we drop. Why should they be surprised when many of us say sod that, I’m going to enjoy what’s left of my life instead?
If these here today, gone tomorrow politicians really want us to work longer, then they should make it a more attractive option. Less days, shorter hours, more flexibility, more annual leave. Oh, they will say. We can’t afford that. Well, it’s that or nothing, we should say. This is our lives we are talking about, not your profits.
There is more to life than money. Sure, it would always be nice to have more money, but how much is enough and what lengths would you go to to acquire it?
Joni Mitchell nailed it in her song Big Yellow Taxi when she said “Don’t it always seem to gothat you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?” Quite. And it’s up to us to decide what matters most. Who wants to be the richest person in the graveyard?
