This week I planned on publishing a Substack piece on productivity techniques, tools, and aids, but then this popped up in my Twitter timeline:
…and part of me wants to go all out conspiratorial on this, about how UK media are not just a bit out of touch with much of the population, but that their entire raison d'être is to put people ‘in their place’ and keep them there, but… I won’t.
Well, not today, anyway.
Anyway, if we haven’t met yet: Hi, I am Jo, also known as Jojo, and I am old. Not Michael-Binyon-old or John-Simpson-old, but certainly average-London-office-workplace old and, in a physical sense, older than some other people my age.
Privileged
Don’t get me wrong, though, I consider myself privileged. Not private-education-to-ivy-league-pipeline privileged like, say, Michael Binyon or John Simpson, but privileged in a different sense: Issues at birth and early-childhood illness left me a tad damaged and behind on my peers, but a socialised healthcare system on the continent (no longer in existence today) got me unlimited remedial treatment and therapy as a child to the point that, as an adult, I can at least pass as able-bodied; I am just a bit slow and awkward in terms of my balance and motor skills.
None of the privileges I enjoyed from my childhood into early adulthood exist in the same sense anymore today. My state-funded education was more than half decent (I can string a few sentences together in multiple languages), my subsidised vocational training after that was practical and useful for life, and while my college degree was incomplete and a bit Mickey Mouse, my student debt wasn’t disastrous so I did not ruin my life there.
When in my late twenties/early thirties I became chronically ill, I was privileged in the sense that I found ways and means to work around this and earn an income; not quite as much as when I still wandered a conventional career path, but I felt privileged to be able to at least work and earn and escape the hellish bureaucracy and malfunctions of supposed social safety nets.
Finally, I never felt more privileged as the time when my GP referred me to the consultant who would perform the eventual surgery – in a private hospital, but paid for by the NHS – that proved to be life-changing: I have been asymptomatic for over seven years now, which, to me, feels as good as a cure.
It is this background that has made me feel immensely privileged to have been able to work both physical jobs and sedentary jobs and experiencing anything from minimum wage on 0-hour contracts in piss-poor working conditions (I shall not apologise for this choice of words) to luxury offices (or better, still: working from home) on above-average pay.
Lived experience
No amount of perfectly crafted and edited old or new media content beats that actual lived experience. (Emphasising this, because please pretty please with a cherry on top, remember this before boring me with either your old-media takes (“decades as a reporter and occasionally spent two weeks embedded or undercover”) or your chronically-online takes (a phenomenon so [bleep]ing common nowadays it warrants an entire post of its own that I may one day write and publish.)
But let’s not romanticise things either: It is the aforementioned background that has made me feel privileged in certain ways, but has also left me anything but unscathed. I am privileged, but I am also [bleep]ing damaged, both physically and mentally. I may write a no-holds-barred trauma-dumping piece about this at some point in the future, but for now, I’ll keep things fairly light.
‘Whatever it takes’ — belief vs. reality
Plenty of people may exclaim that they will “do any work they have to” but not everyone making the claim will ever need to live up to it. People who do live the reality of doing whatever it takes, may find themselves to worn out to shout about it or shouted down to “put up or shut up” or in other words to that effect.
Having always worked (and done any job I could do) has given me a wealth of experience but also absolutely nothing to show for myself, as well as damage to my health that can never be undone.
Because the wishful thinking I grew up with, that I could achieve anything through sheer hard work… well, it just didn’t work out as well as I had dreamed of. And I don’t feel pity for myself for that, nor do I expect anyone reading this to pity me, I just want to warn you, as a reader, that relentless determination and hard work give you a lot of good things in life, but not all good things you earn or otherwise gain will cover rent and bills.
Resentment
Do I harbour resentment? Heck, yes! Back to the tweet that inspired this piece: I do not resent people for choosing to keep working rather than retiring at a certain age, but I resent anyone effectively weaponising this against others, especially if those others don’t even have a choice.
Personally I want everyone to be able to have at least some semblance of choice to not retire at a given age, but some of us will have no choice in the matter. Personally, I doubt I will ever be afforded any kind of retirement, but already I have been confronted by the fact that my damaged body is no longer able to do certain jobs that I have done in the past. And that’s even before considering how workplaces are increasingly metrics-obsessed and target-driven, firing (or not even hiring) people like me, who they would consider too slow.
Using your well-paid position in a non-labour-intensive job to boast about working well into old age, right at a time when the UK government is announcing its plans to raise the state pension age for everyone, is at best tone deaf and at worst a weaponisation of personal privilege.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking anyone to feel guilty for benefiting from certain circumstances in life that others did not or do not have. I do not resent people having privilege either, but I do resent people either denying their privilege, or seeking to stop anyone else from having anything remotely resembling their privilege.
In an ideal world I would want everyone to enjoy certain standards in life, to a point that they are no longer considered privileges because they have become the default.
We will never be able to fully level every playing field, but we can work together to take out any unnecessary bumps that unfairly trip people over.
Then, perhaps, we can celebrate newspaper columnists and other opinion makers for writing unsanctimoniously about how they are not retiring, because they are too busy using their position of privilege in life to campaign for equity, so that retirement is an option available to everyone and no one is forced to work into old age.
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