Why I Can Stand On Your Toes If I Want To

A few years ago now, I was walking across a bridge in Amsterdam with my friend. A boat passed underneath, carrying what looked like celebrating medical students. I thought: "it isn't my world any more, it's theirs". 

It took me a while to understand that feeling properly, and some of it isn't pretty.

When I watched those medical students waving their drinks around, what I really felt was that the deserved self-centredness of older folk: you young people can look after the frigging planet now, we have enough on our hands just staying employed, right-weight and fed. You need to have been through the Wasteland Years from forty to sixty (I'm not quite out yet) to understand this: but when you have, you will know that you've paid all the dues you ever needed to.

Twenty years of showing up, standing your ground, fighting for your space and light, dealing with unemployment, finding jobs, gaining and losing relationships, all when the hormonal fires are going out is an endurance test enough. It breaks some people, either financially (divorce, bankruptcy, sustained unemployment), spiritually (too many compromises on the way up the slippery pole or for the sake of the marriage and kids) or physically (just look around you). Of course, for some people it's a wonderful time, but they live somewhere else I've never been.

So when I left the world to those students, I was also reserving the right to be as selfish, or self-interested, as I wanted or needed to be, to get through the remaining time. It's what a lot of older people do.

We get focused on our issues. We don't care about education, because our kids have grown up. We don't care about the planet, because we're not going to be around a lot longer. We do care about pensions and paying bills, because we're shortly to be out of work and faced with maybe twenty years of living. Those pensions and allowances cost younger generations money. Our lives contract as our energy levels decrease and our capacity for finding stuff exciting and rewarding diminishes (except for addicts and nerds, for whom The High from drugs, women, booze, music, movies, solving tough problems and putting one over on the enemy never goes away. This explains me).

My generation will cancel, or cause to be cancelled, the retirement age, because lots of us have worthless pensions wrecked by bouts of unemployment, and we will establish, or cause to be established, a de facto right-to-die based on the current idea of an advance decision. We are going to be short of money, and are threatened with a long and decaying old age of poverty. Not going to be popular with a generation who were used to being fit, present and able to spend.

Pete Townsend wanted to die before he got old because he didn't want to be helpless, compromised, poor, patronised by nurses and social workers, and a nuisance to his children. He's none of those things because the world has changed, and he's a millionaire. I'm none of those things either, and I'm not a millionaire. I still want to die before I get old, and can't find paying work.

And in the meantime, I've paid my dues and I don't owe anybody anything except good manners, settling my debts,  and a day's work for a day's pay, which are the courtesies of everyday life. It's just that now, you have to be more thoughtful to me than I do to you, because I'm the old guy with grey hair.

And if you're not, I'm going to stand on your toes.