This is an essay for the op-ed section of the Sunday Herald, the paper I helped found, on the UK government's proposed changes to the laws on retirement. Not a topic I usually grapple with - but it took me into fascinating areas: boomer culture, personal biography, questions about where the agents of change for a post-work society might actually come from. All thoughts and comments welcomed. (The unedited piece is below - here's the article on the SHerald site).
STILL IN THE GAME? AGEING, RETIREMENT AND PLAY
Pat Kane, Sunday Herald (unedited version), 20 July 2009
The crisis of retirement? As far as this 45-year old is concerned – last of the Boomers, first of the Gen X'ers - the biggest crisis is even having to think about it.
For someone whose cultural inbox is mostly stuffed with cool tech, Obamarama and the latest mind-body innovations, it's more than a bit bracing to have to consider Stannah stairlifts, Micheal Parkinson and the prevention of Alzheimers.
Governments on these islands are currently making their latest great policy heaves to deal with 'the demographic time-bomb' - the basic fact of our ever-increasing longevity. And it's easy to be stunned by all the horror scenarios: a future where nations of oldies are either worked till they drop, or endlessly crumble away in eldercare, whose cost will run into hundreds of billions.
But unless we directly address our underlying feelings and assumptions about retirement – and I will presume this "we" includes a generous radius on either side of my four-score-and-five - we won't even see these thorny facts clearly. And before I even do that myself, I have to contend with the contrary nature of the two retirement stories I know best: Mum and Dad Kane.
He couldn't have gotten out of his tedious, 40-year railway administration job quickly enough; and he couldn't have explored the possibilities of grey leisure, backed up with a combination of state and occupational pension, with more indolent enthusiasm. The 'Silver Fox' was the soubriquet my brothers gave him, and John was well named.
Mum's still here, but it's safe to say she had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the labour market. After forty-odd years of triumphant midwifery, she took on part-time jobs as a care-worker in a nursing home, doing heavy lifting and skilled attending until she was 70.
"I know what people need, and I love to care" is her slogan: she is the definition of the vocation-driven nurse. Yet even though she pushed her body too far in the last years, and now has restricted mobility, her mental and emotional life is teeming.
There are the soliciations (and occasionally demands) of her sons, her grand-daughters, her own aging relatives; and there is her permanent listening to Radio Four (and regular dates with Dimbleby on Question Time), which make her fearsomely well-informed. "I'd be working now if I had my legs", she's just told me.
One thing strikes me about these personal stories, as I've gone through much of the research on the "New Old Age". Our crisis of retirement - in attitudes, resources and structures – is not as unprecedented as we think.
Let's consider this Boomer generation - those who were part of the population bubble in the West between 1946 and 1964, the beginning of which is now entering the pensionable world. Much of the scholarly talk is about how the values of that generation (individualist, consumerist, liberal, education-oriented) will be driving a change in how we think of retirement. They will have different attitudes to work, to social rights, to popular culture, and so on.
But anyone with their own stories of their own parents might join me in saying: wait a minute, policy wonks. Born in the early thirties, my parents come squarely from the middle of the War generation – supposedly more conservative, more averse to diversity and change, than their successors.
Yet here are two War generation tales of retirement that – apart from a shared loathing of computers – anticipate much of what we regard as the possible futures of the New Old. One eager to retire from the fray and assiduously relax and consume, enabled by a good mix of public and private provision. Another equally eager to stay engaged with the world, fulfilling a life's vocation, but betrayed by a heedless attitude to physical limits.
Before we grapple with the looming icebergs of the politics of retirement, it might be worth noting the obvious. That to some degree, it's a subjective issue: you are only as young as you feel (or as old as you've been deadened). As the early Boomers' hero Bob Dylan sang, "he not busy bein' born is busy dyin'". To be "still game" is something that might come from a private realm, and from personal wiring, inaccessible to the reach of any policy-maker.
Yet as T.S. Eliot didn't quite write in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: We grow old, we grow old, we wear the bottom of our denims with turn-ups done in cool red stitching. When crinkling trendies think of retirement, our pre-dementia heads go into a psychedelic whirl: sixty five is twenty years away, and twenty-five is twenty years ago…ouch.
And looking at the field of issues, there are a few obvious places where the domed head of policy meets the I'm-not-listening smiley-face of boomeritis head on.
One place is money. The current gathering panic in the UK is precisely centred on the collapse of our post-Thatcherite patchwork of pension provisions. As part of their project to shrink the state, the New Right in the 80's made it easier for people to put more of their money into commerical schemes, whether company or personal. This went happily alongside the Blatcherite liberation of credit and debt, enabling our consumerist blow-outs. Both of these trends were propelled by the very recognisable boomer manifesto: "let me control my own money".
This didn't just allow the state pension to shrink to "disgracefully low levels" compared to continental Europe, in the words of pension guru Ros Altmann. It also subjected those private schemes to the vagaries of shareholder capitalism – which is no news to any of us at the moment. And it's shaking down through even the stabler parts of the system. See Friday's call for strike action at Barclays, which is closing its 'final-salary' pension scheme (based on wage levels and how long you've worked) to all members.
The next big area where Boomers hit reality is work. While unions are right to challenge employers to maintain their bargains with their workers, I have to confess that I'm part of a large group of late Boomers who look at that situation from the other side of the glass. I belong to that quarter of my kind, according to Demos's The New Old report, who are in "atypical" employment (self-employed or part-time).
And as the think-tank notes, this comes along with a whole range of boomer attitudes – ranking private life and free time as ultimately more important than working hours. "It seems that the key issue is going to be greater flexibility not in when retirement begins", says the report, "but in what it is allowed to mean, and the range of different activities that can be accommodated within it."
Of course, that means that nearly three-quarters of working boomers are in typical employment – though one presumes that "typical" also means the short-term and performance-related contracts that have dominated the jobs market in the last two decades. So we can surely say that the late boomers have grown up with a presumption that work isn't a stable institution.
And more pointedly, we also don't automatically accept the deal that 40 years of dutiful grind will provide 10-15 years of relative lotus-eating, and then – ffftt. Hippie counter-culture, punk defiance and post-punk creativity have given boomers a strong appreciation – how shall I put it? - that life before death is a Really Good Idea.
The policy thinkers are trying to put a whole new tray of senior labels before us, hoping we'll pin them to our Harrington jackets. Instead of "retirement", think "reordering". Allow yourself to be "elderpreneurs" of your own lives, composing new balances of employment and self-employement, leisure and education, care and self-care. Indeed, elder Boomers should be provided with the same kind of "flexible" life-and-work arrangements that young working families now enjoy.
Those boomers who have forged a play ethic at least as robust as their work ethic will, I hope, make a good stab at making retirement "mean" something different. The ideal response of the engaged and motivated elder of the future might well be: retire from what, exactly?
There's been a three-decades long debate about the creativity and flexibility that an information-driven economy brings to our lives and culture (into which I've chipped my bit). How can we create institutions of social support, or even just coherent lifestyles, which will help us to master this accelerated pace of living, bring up our families, include others in its many games?
I'm wondering whether it's the Boomers young and old, with their confident defense of the values of authenticity and self-control, who are in the vanguard of this debate. I wonder what new compacts of welfare – the citizen's wage? The shorter working week? – they will percieve to be necessary, and strike out for. It's in their years of "retirement" – better put, their continuing engagement – that the Boomers might show us exactly how to square the circle: how to live fruitfully, and not frazzledly, in the information age.
The third big theme might on the surface seem like the New Old dragged back into the Same Old: health. Obviously, it's deeply interlinked with the first two: our curve of affluence and social complexity seems to inexorably raise our expiry dates year on year. (And to be less parochial for a moment, this will be as much a problem for the growing economic powerhouses of the BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India, China – as it is now for us).
But our great fear is about when we become the Old Old - that our quality of life will be awful. A horror story of fragility, senility and loneliness, parked in a dusty care home, or connected up to a battery of exorbitant, life-maintaining treatments. We'll live longer lives, but thinner ones: our two feet being slowly lowered into the grave, calibration by calibration.
Well, again, hold on. What experts call the "compression of morbidity" – the possiblity that we don't just live longer, but experience more healthiness within that lifespan – isn't so easily ruled out. NHS studies have noted that while long-term chronic conditions are on the increase, we have fewer severe and acute health problems.
Many reports on the future of the health services, like the Wanless report of a few years ago, have to build in wide variations of possible scenarios, because how unpredictable this morbidity factor will be. And this particular boomer keeps a close eye on the biogenetics sector: we shouldn't discount a range of discoveries that might transform our societies as deeply as the microchip, or in its time penicillin. When they figure out how to safely disable the chromosonal triggers for human cell decay - already achieved for some rats - most longevity bets are off.
Scotland, as we know, is the home of the wildly varying health factor – but along entirely the wrong axes. We can have as many abstract discussions about shifting the definitions of retirement into our eighth decade as we like. But it will have less-than-zero meaning to the grizzled Calton resident who pegs it at the median age of 54. Whereas it'll be fragrantly relevant to the silver-haired granny in nearby Lenzie, mistily departing at 82.
Recent works like Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better make it abundantly clear. Pensions and retirement must be seen within a much bigger context of the redistribution of wealth and life-chances, and the tragic physiological consequences of a lack of wellbeing throughout the lifespan. For your living conditions to kill you 10 years before you get the chance to even think about being an "elderpreneur" is truly obscene.
Yet although politicians will exhort us towards "preventative" health - nutrition and exercise now as the foundation for sparkly seniority in the future – the mental furniture has to be properly arranged also.
In our collective heads, I'd say we've got it tough in Scotland. Our generally appalling health and age states, by far our greatest shame as a developed country, must be connected to that dark whirlpool of industrialism and Calvinism - both their crushing impacts, and their devastating departures. The unsettled nature of our national identity adds another poisoned tributary.
And how does those dark waters dispose we Scots towards the rethinking of retirement, indeed towards work and life itself? You'd need a Max Weber at the height of his powers to write that thesis adequately. And you'd need a repatriated Douglas Coupland to write the story of Scotland's boomers: gym membership in the one hand, sausage roll in the other.
But surely too many of us sons and daughters have our own sad tales about the dangers of retirement after work, rather than the pleasures. Battering through their hard-working, overtime-dominated forty years – sustained by too much drink, too much stodge - with the glimmer of a pensionable rest from wage-labour pulling them through the murk and mediocrity… and then, expiring a few years after retirement. There's an obscure implosion in their tired bodies and minds: betrayed by their selves, just at the moment they return to full self-possession.
You see, some of us sons and daughters aren't just commenting that we live in a post-industrial Scotland. Some of us passionately aspire for that to be a truly realised state of affairs. Some kinds of work, in other words, are consistently too dangerous to retire from.
What can we learn from the furrowed, often self-destructive labours of our parents? How can it teach us wisdom about our coming senescence? Could we make a virtue of serenity and calmness in the face of our coming austerities, both financial and ecological? Are we able to remove the compensation of consumerism from our Boomer souls?
An amazing opportunity for social leadership presents itself to the boomers around the retirement issue - the early ones as they contemplate their seventh decade, the later ones as they imagine what their prime years will lead to. Collectively, boomers hold 80% of the nation's wealth: they possess a rich density of occupational and educational achievement. What they have done with all this power, whether they have left us a ruin or a new beginning, can be a discussion for another time.
But I think this sense of historical moment explains our fascination – ok, my fascination - with Barack Obama. Apart from everything else, he seems to integrate the contradictory extremes of boomerism: a man who clearly has style, confidence and a good dose of hedonism, but who also seems deeply committed to a liberal, enabling, productive society. One hopes that he proves to be the action-script for the next twenty years of boomer influence, from adults to elders to ancients. A serious player, indeed.
From this angle, the more I think about it, the luckier my personal inheritance feels. I suppose I had a playful father, and an ethical mother. I got a lot of the former, and still hope to get more of the latter. He was a true hedonist, even an aristocrat, with his leisure; she has recomposed her vocation, maintaining her agency amid her infirmity. She still embraces the game of growing old; and to a degree both defied the influences of their epochs and trends.
I wish their idiosyncracy on others, and myself. In the face of what often seems like implacable social and economic tendencies, we need to esteem our ability to take our realities lightly, to cast old and seeming certainties in a brand new context for ourselves.
Back to my tech, my Obama and my positive psychology. There's creative life to be lived, right here, right now.
PAT KANE is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com), and one half of Hue And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk).
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