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So the pension age is set to rise? It’s hardly a shock & will be repeated across Europe over the coming years, it mostly makes sense as well, a lot of people are finding it hard to take that a birthday ends their employment. It may be a good way for businesses to do away with less productive staff & bear no guilt for it but it ought to be up to employees as well as employers so long as they can still do the job. This is where it gets tricky though, just as all of us have varying degrees of fitness at age 20 by the time a few decades have passed the degrees of fitness have warped somewhat. This makes sticking an absolute age limit a trifle dodgy, to the unfortunate man of 50 it’s a lifetime away yet to the spry 70 year old it’s a lifetime wasted, inflexibility will always bring casualties. How many of us know of people who’ve looked fit as fiddles at their retirement do yet are dead a short while after? There are those who live to be active & valued & for those folks an unending succession of empty days can be a nightmare that bingo cannot wake them from. Yes there are things for the retired to do but these things do seem to become an elaborate way of whiling away the days until the bloke with the grin shows up, coffee mornings may be good for the soul but beer nights are always better.

Besides, there are limitations placed upon those who’ve retired that are never applied to those still working, if you’re 65 with a job & live on your own then there’s no need to ask if you want to go out of an evening, move this person into an old folks home & all of a sudden they are adult no longer. Bearing all this in mind it seems strange to put an age limit on the working life, sure we should have an age marker where people can decide they are ready to retire without any trouble but it should be a choice where possible, for those healthy enough to want to continue then so long as they can then they should be allowed to. There will be industries where the length of time they can be worked in is shorter than others so the process should be tailored well so it can fit every trade, I don’t care if the lass down the Post Office is 87 but I doubt that the lads down the strip club would be so understanding. Given that we’re living longer these days, at least by the averages anyway some tinkering with the pension age was always inevitable, it used to be that retirement in most cases was some milestone to be reached whereon you got to put your feet up for a decade & then pegged it. Now if you retire at 65 you could still be bobbling about 30 years later & all of a sudden the perspective isn’t the same, the golden years are golden for those who embrace them but for many they’re a dreary sentence to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Retiring later may annoy a few people now & a lot of employers in the future but it does make sense for most of us, if you’re still fit enough to go on working & want to then only your competence at your job should count, I don’t see anyone forcing the Queen to retire or politicians after all. Experience is a big deal when we’re young & want a job & it should count just as much when we want to keep one, it can hardly become less valuable the more you have surely? There’s no need for jobs for life & no call to have senile gibbering wrecks in positions of authority, we can’t have everywhere like the House of Lords, we can though resist the urge to sling everyone onto the scrapheap according only to a calendar. A day off with nothing to do can be great, a week off bliss & a month off a decadent luxury, however three or four decades off with nothing to look forward to aside from a family gathering where they all finally say nice stuff about you just when you’re no longer capable of appreciating it is a bit much & should be avoided at all costs.

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