Old Age: The Demeaning Of Experience

One reason why I don’t post as much as I once did is because, hovering on the verge of eighty years on this planet, one tends to feel ‘out of the loop’. By that I mean a distinct gnawing in the gut that society has passed me by. The doctor looks bored and churns out more pills. Were I twenty years younger he’d have me in the hospital undergoing myriad tests, but now the attitude is “why bother, he’s going to die soon anyway. Save the costs of those tests for the youngsters, the producers”

I don’t produce anymore. If I manage to sell a book, which is rare, I may earn a few coppers in royalties, but nothing to improve the economic state of the country. Instead, I simply drain the nation’s reserves by taking my pension every month. Politicians, along with most young people today, conveniently forget that I worked for in excess of forty years. I paid my taxes and National Insurance, the latter supposedly to be invested by the government to cover the costs of my pension when I eventually became old enough to receive it.

Of course, the politicians don’t own up to the fact that they robbed the pension funds to do other things leaving it to the next lot, who happened to stir up sufficient enthusiasm in the people to vote them into office, to replace the stolen loot. Did they do so? No, of course they didn’t.

Politicians constantly criticize the rest of the population for being unable to live on the meagre earnings they pocket every month. The ‘masses’ complain always of energy bills that are too high and prices in the shops off the scale.

They say we should be able to manage our housekeeping better and not find ourselves homeless because we can’t afford the rent on the rundown rat and mould-infested derelict the landlord refuses to maintain from his villa in the Canary Islands. Even if we manage to pay the rent we can’t cook because the gas is cut off, or have a bath because  there’s no electricity to heat the water…oh no,  that’s been cut off too, and they came this morning to reclaim the invalid carriage that’s the only way to get to the shops, if only there was money to buy something if one could even get there.

At best, it’s a pot calling the kettle situation. Politicians have exposed themselves as bad housekeepers since they stopped being kings or landowners lording it over the peasantry. Today, politicians are voted into office by those they still regard as “the peasantry“. There are numerous  instances of supposedly confidential remarks on the subject  being publicly broadcast, to a politician’s embarrassment, for that attitude to be confirmed.

Are we just useless at housekeeping? No, the bloody politicians are! When was the last time you heard the economy was in the black, that the government had a surplus to spend on making our lives a little better? I’ve lived eighty years but my memory’s still good, so let me think…Nope, not in my lifetime, Mister Starmer, and no-one offered me free luxury spectacles and fancy suits for just doing my job, either.

The problem is that the younger generations today have no memory of how things were a generation or two back. It wasn’t all good, of course. There were two world wars for a start, but how many in today’s Britain are aware that in the 1960s high earners, millionaires, were taxed at 95% of their income, and that included many pop stars of the day.  If the government of that day could do it, they can do it now. So why don’t they?

Unfortunately younger generations aren’t aware of what happened years ago. They are happy to accept what the lying politicians tell them. One excuse is that corporations will move their operations to countries that don’t tax as heavily. It’s rubbish! Oh a few may do so but the majority won’t, as was proved in the 1960s/70s. It costs an enormous amount to move the production of a large corporation overseas, and relatively even more for the smaller ones.

Although I don’t feel it, or regard myself as an old man, the above probably sounds like the rantings of an aging geezer who thinks the world was a lot better in his day. My father  would say similar about his life, and he lived through two world wars.

I began by writing that I felt ‘out of the loop’ because I didn’t seem to matter to the world anymore. I know I’m not alone in feeling that way. It’s a very common complaint of mature people who no longer work and live off their pensions.

The one asset we do have is experience. You can’t learn it from books or the internet. It’s a unique history of someone’s life bequeathed to everyone as they grow older. It’s also different for everyone, dependent on the lives they’ve lived that have shaped their view of the world and it’s human inhabitants.

Taken together, it’s a vast wealth of knowledge , a web of life’s experiences now totally ignored, even despised by those who have not yet lived sufficiently to have any but the most simplistic ideas of what living a life is about.

There was a time in history, within certain societies, when Elders were revered, even worshipped, for their knowledge and wisdom. They would be the ones consulted before any major social decision was taken.

But why bother with all that now? The internet provides all the answers. Artificial Intelligence will be the arbiter of all knowledge, the fountain of all wisdom. Little do they know in their arrogance today what is in store for these future guardians of the earth and it’s inhabitants, sold on the power of digitization as the future saviour of mankind.

Perhaps after all, this writer should be relieved, even happy to be a castaway from society, the old wolf no longer capable of leading the pack, cast out to the fringes, thrust out of the loop.