Retire at 70+!

The logic is faultless. A burgeoning aged population and a shrinking working force generating income. Something has to give to square the equation, delaying the age when pensions are first paid is an obvious solution, no one can argue with its sweet reasonableness. Except it doesn't join up the dots to complete the shape of life's realities.

With age you lose the thrust and energy of youth, become burnt-out in coping with crisis or novelty and struggle to absorb the relentless expansion of knowledge and the body no longer copes with heavy burdens. The extra benefits of maturity and experience do not expand in direct proportion to the daily task's growth in demands. By all judgements an older man cannot keep up with a younger self and this discrepancy increases faster the further past the meridian of life the older man is.

Yet a man's position in any society is judged, by those he encounters and by his own self-worth, by his working roll. So how are we going to manage the scenario when the line manager is deemed to no longer be able to cut it, not sharp enough, not sufficiently uptodate, network contacts no longer relevant to the current market? Who is going to relegate him to the post room with a two third pay cut and how is that going to work with staff morale? Or who decides that craftsman can longer produce a satisfactory quantity of output and is growing dangerous with his lack of flexibility in a hazardous industrial workplace? So what happens to him and all his kind? There can only be a finite number of aged supermarket shelf-fillers and is this role a dignified end for a working career of a previously admired manager or craftsman?

The reality is that for most, they cannot continue indefinitely at their chosen work and at huge loss of self-esteem and self-respect will be forced to take some other menial work, just to survive until pension time is finally called by some remote actuary. This is not a multi-career choice that is lightly banded about, this is an ignominious shuffle off into a backwater job nobody else with any respect or modicum of skills would contemplate. That is life's reality to extending the retirement age to 70, or 75 or even eighty. What sort of fresh employment do you really think is plausible for a person at that age? Can you begin to imagine the personal humiliation of being forced to accept such low-grade work after a previous successful career?

This does not sound like a caring compassionate society to me. There just has to be another way to pay our way through this age bottleneck.