SUNDAY, 2 MARCH 2025

Many among my Baby Boomer generation dreamed of the day they retired, and especially early retirement at fifty or fifty-five. No more struggling to get up on cold Monday mornings to do a job that they found meaningless, no more self-important managers swanning around in meetings while treating them like underlings, no more working like a dog to make money for The Man. They could finally step off the treadmill and write that masterpiece or set up their own little company to do what they’d dreamed of doing all of their lives. Freedom at last.

But the reality is often very different. Assuming eight hours’ sleep (which is far from guaranteed as we get older, since our quantity and quality of sleep tends to rapidly deteriorate as we age), that still leaves sixteen hours in a day, or well over a hundred in a week. That’s a hell of a lot of hours to fill, even for the busiest of bees.

That’s assuming we’re still here to fill them, of course. My father, for example, having started work at the age of fourteen and then worked for just over fifty years, retired on a state pension at the age of sixty-five. At the time, he was slim and seemingly fit. Nine months later, he was dead.

Before I started writing this piece, I had assumed my father’s death shortly after retirement was a very common phenomenon, but a quick skim through the research on this suggests my thinking might have been swayed by a mix of availability and confirmation biases, and perhaps this death spike is a myth. Nevertheless my guess remains that it might have been more common fifty years ago for working-class men of my dad’s generation for two reasons: firstly, because they went from physical jobs that kept them very fit to a situation where they were largely inactive, and, secondly, because that generation of men saw themselves as providers for their family and lost that role on retirement, a massive psychological blow.

This brings us to the problems of retirement and there are many. The first and most crucial, of course, is health, which rapidly gets worse as we age. It’s true that this would happen regardless of retirement, but perhaps it is exacerbated by a sedentary lifestyle, often lived alone, and a consequent indulgence in too much comfort food and all-day booze. Adverts targeting the elderly always depict them as couples on park benches amid blossoming spring trees, the men in sensible cardigans and the women in fashions which even few retirees would wear these days because they look so Woman’s Weekly. In the media in general there is little sign of what I see almost every time I go down to the shops here in Gozo: old people with bent backs wheezing as they climb the hills, stopping to rest every twenty steps, and struggling simply to walk.

The people in the adverts always look comfortably middle-class. But for old people dependent on a state pension, lack of money is a huge problem: believe me, I know, I am one of them. In the worst cases, as in a recent phrase made popular in the media, it is a choice between eating and heating. But having money is not just about avoiding the stress of living on the financial edge; good levels of disposable income also offer a range of positive benefits. They mean vacations to warmer places in the winter, trips to the local pub or visits to National Trust buildings, not having to wear old clothes with holes in them, being able to afford a good haircut, a trip to a local restaurant: simple things that give people a sense of purpose and pride.

Another big problem for the elderly retired is social isolation, especially for those whose spouses have passed away after sharing a lifetime together. This makes me think of my mother and what she said to me once on one of my visits home from abroad: ‘Sometimes these walls feel like a prison’. She was talking about the little apartment that the local authority provided, a place she had always spoken of with gratitude and great fondness. During my visits, we’d walk together to the local Sainsbury’s and have a coffee and a piece of cake in the cafe there and she’d tell me how wonderful it felt to get out of doors. How sad is someone’s life when a trip to Sainsbury’s is a special treat?

Work may be a drag at times, and we may dislike some of our colleagues with a vengeance, but it also tends to supply many of our social contacts. So the elderly retired who live alone suddenly go from a life where they meet other people on a daily basis to one where they can go for days when the only people they see are the check-out at the local mini-mart and the faces on their TV screens. Snobby people like me sometimes sneer at TV and cite the famous put-downs such as ‘chewing gum for the eyes’ (Frank Lloyd Wright) or ‘the idiot box’ (original citation uncertain), but it often provides the only human company for the elderly and single.

Family helps here, of course. In those adverts I’ve already mentioned, the ageing couple, when they’re not in the park in springtime, are pictured in their living rooms surrounded by rosy-cheeked grandchildren. But in the modern, mobile world, it’s very common for old people and their adult offspring to live in different cities many miles apart, or even in different countries, so visits from grandchildren can be few and far between. And, believe it or not, not all families are harmonious, and, even if the weekly Sunday visit is possible, it can become a bothersome chore which neither party enjoys.

Another problem of filling all those empty hours is boredom. Even retirees who are comfortably well-off are often unable to do the things they most love doing due to the natural decline of old age. Two of my closest friends are a married couple who are thinking of moving out of the house where they’ve lived happily for many years because they can no longer cope with its demands. This is especially hard for the husband, who has tended a beautiful garden all that time but now finds himself unable to maintain it to the standard he would wish. The retired are often advised to take up or spend more time on a hobby but lots of hobbies become impractical for the elderly, especially those which require bodily strength and flexibility.

Nor does the pace of change, especially technological change, help the elderly. It’s certainly not true these days that all pensioners are technophobic and I see many people in their dotage who can click on their screens with the dexterity of digital natives. But many cannot, and even relatively simple tasks like internet banking can become a source of anxiety. My sister, eight years older than me, was a perfect example. As far as I know, she never touched a computer keyboard in her life, and her ability with her smartphone was restricted to answering calls and being able to ring three or four listed numbers. Nor could she afford an expensive monthly package, so, in the days before WhatsApp, that ruled out calls abroad. This means many of the elderly do not have the option of modern technology as a source of entertainment or an aid against social isolation. The idiot box must suffice.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Many older people do take up new hobbies, have an active social life, and even take part in sports or go to the gym: the media loves to feature stories about grannies who first go parachuting when they are in their eighties. It’s all a matter of attitude, the self-help books declare in their towering wisdom (as long as one has health and money, of course). And I think society is adapting to this new world in which we tend to have more contact with people of our own vintage than we do across generations, with social groups of all types springing up, often based on personal interests. Some pleasures can be free or very cheap, and do much to counter the avalanche of loneliness in a modern world where so many people live alone.

I imagine many younger people reading this won’t feel all that sorry for me and my Baby Boomer compatriots because we were the pampered generation, especially those of us who weren’t born with a silver spoon in our mouths, in an age when governments cared about all of their citizens, not just the rich, and felt some sense of responsibility for helping them to prosper and thrive. And for the moment at least we are able to retire on a state pension, even if it offers only a rather grim day-to-day subsistence, and if we are sick we aren’t just left to die unless we are able to work (although as our governments cosy up to billionaires rather than take care of their people, I suspect this may not last: old people in their thousands gasping their last breath in cardboard boxes on the streets cannot be far away). Bad as this may become for us in the next few years, future generations will have it much worse. We have sold them down the river in a state pension system which is a kind of Ponzi scheme, the day of reckoning will have to arrive at some point in the future, and those left holding empty promises will be the ones who look at the IOUs in their hands and realise they are confetti.

Before I wrap up this rather depressing blog, I’d like to make a few comments about my personal situation, if only to make clear that I recognise how lucky I have been. I teach part-time online, but I only have to do this because I want to live abroad and I have to top up my state pension in order to pay the rent. If I had chosen to go back to the UK to retire, I would probably have received some help with rent and council tax, and just about been able to survive, although I suspect my mental health would have been much worse. Future generations, left to their own devices regardless of their health or disability, are going to have to work (if they can find it) until they croak it.

I’m also lucky because of the kind of person I am. I don’t really suffer from the social isolation because I’m introverted and frankly a little anti-social and I’m glad I no longer have to face being among groups of people and struggling to enjoy myself: something which I’ve always found exhausting. Nor have I needed to give up any of my hobbies. As an idler and a coward who is also something of a nerd, I promise you’ll never find me in a gym or see me dangling on the end of a parachute: I can still do most of the things that I love, such as writing, reading and walking. One day, I’m sure, these things will become impossible as my eyesight worsens and I’m no longer mobile, and I dread that day, but until then I don’t have to get out the Pringles and switch on the idiot box.

I realise that I’ve said nothing particularly original in this glum piece, but I don’t want to come across as totally negative about retirement. I’m sure the world is full of retirees who are very happy; however, getting old and no longer working is not always the golden age of freedom that the adverts like to portray. It can be good as long as you are lucky enough to be healthy, have enough money to get comfortably by, can still enjoy your hobbies, and maintain the level of social contacts that you prefer. The bad news is it’s not going to get any easier and the generations behind me are in a desperate position if they are poor. Having McJobs in a world where renting costs more than buying and unable either to get on the housing ladder or to save for the future, under governments which are more and more self-serving and corrupt and authoritarian, they will find themselves deep in the brown stuff when their bodies start to creak and their hair turns grey.