Forgive me a more personal note please. I am 63 today. I admit that does not seem possible. Nor does it seem reasonable. And congratulations are definitely not sought, although my twin (and yes, I do have one) might enjoy them.
Deep down I am at least a little aware that for a long time I thought that this was the moment when older age began. I think that that this was because both my father and the man who was my mentor as a teenager retired at the age of 63. My father lived until he was 92. Jack made 95. Maybe retiring at 63 was a good thing to do. Both enjoyed quite good health until their late eighties. But nonetheless these two very different men ended their formal careers to pursue leisure pursuits at the age that I now am.
In contrast I have no intention of retiring. Indeed, I have had discussions about a new (part-time) post recently and would want to make a seven year commitment to it. And even then that does not seem to be the limit to my working. My friend Colin Hines still works in the Green New Deal at 75 and has no intention of stopping as yet. I've long said that I think 83 might be a good retirement age, health permitting.
I suspect the difference in attitude that both Colin and I have towards work from that which my father and my mentor, Jack, might have had is that we are intensely fortunate to work pursuing things that we believe in. In contrast, my father spent the last twenty years of his working life in the same role. No doubt he was good at it. But after he was widowed when my mother died in her fifties and he was 57 he always said he would work until the balance of frustration and reward tipped in the wrong direction. It did in the end, and he went. Somebody else had to design the lines of pylons that march across the east of England. That was what he did, but I am not sure he believed in it.
My long held suspicion has been that many people would love their work to be more meaningful and that if only it was we could be so much more creative as a country. What always amazes me is how enormously able people who appear to be doing jobs that demand little of them in terms of management or creativity can be in their leisure activities. The range of talent brought to bear in hobbies, households and personal lives always seems to me to be so much greater than that which is utilised in a great many workplaces. None of that creativity is measured in our GDP, of course. Most does not give rise to measured economic exchange. But all those skills exist.
I am aware that I have been able to pursue work of pretty much my own choice and making since I was 26. I wonder how different this country would be if others had that opportunity. I did so without inheritance or financial support, although with the tremendous advantage of what was, in effect, a free university education. Now we are intent on burdening people with debt, plus rent or mortgage obligations that are so much bigger, proportionately, than those I had to fund forty years ago.
But what if we changed that? What if we worked to release the creativity in everyone? Is it possible that work might be less of a burden, which I know that for many it is, and that instead it might become a means to release the creativity everyone has within them but which work too rarely utilises at present?
This is the sentiment I have when I hear people say that our future will be so much harder if we are green. The suggestion is always that we will have less, and my honest response to that is that this may well be true. Consuming less ‘stuff' may well be what the future holds. But, on the other hand, there is almost no limit to the amount we can do for each other with almost no emissions cost.
Suppose we could do that? Suppose we could soften this harsh boundary between work and leisure? Suppose we could find the way to make this divide, so real in the case of retirement, so much less intimidating because work was something we could embrace as part of living well?
What would that world look like?
Would a four day week start the process?
Would better access to capital so that people can start businesses help?
Is this what a universal basic income is really meant to achieve?
Could leisure and work merge more often?
And what is it that might encourage people to take the risk of putting their creativity to work?
I suspect I don't feel 63, with the implication of retirement that has always had for me, precisely because I do not feel alienated from my work, or want to leave it. It would be a great outcome if more people could feel like that in the future. It seems to me that this is an essential part of the Green New Deal. I will keep working for it.
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Well, Happy Birthday Richard!
Thanks
A good walk to celebrate, I think
Very many happy returns Richard to you and your twin.
You are the one ray of light in a dim world. In all senses.
I look forward to your work marching across the country like your father’s. Enlightening people with positive energy for a better world.
Keep struggling to put forward your far superior ethics and fairness agenda to improve what could be a wonderful world.
Best wishes, Alec
Thanks
Many happy returns Richard.
Leisure and work have been merging more often for a long time. Amateur professionalism is the phrase you’re looking for coined in around 2004.
Happy Birthday.
Thank you
Richard — spot on. There are so many things we can and should be doing. Let’s focus on making desired outcomes explicit aims of the system. Happiness and wellbeing for the population, not extraordinary wealth for 1% at any environmental cost.
Chris
Happy Birthday! Both to you and your twin.
At the expense of banging in about these points
1. The percentage of GDP going to wages has dropped from about 65% in 1976 to just under 50% now, and the distribution of earnings has become increasingly unequal.
2. To say nothing of much less generous pension provision, and
3. Despite the fact that it would cost no more in real terms to build my house today than it did when it was put up in the mid 1960’s average House Prices expressed as a multiple of earnings have gone up by a factor of about three.
So we COULD enjoy a much better standard of living than we do at the moment or the same standard of living but work less.
On a personal level, my late father had to retire at 60, I think that had he been able to continue at work than it may have helped his health as he seemed to enjoy his work – he dealt with wills and probate, hence my weird sense of humour. While I am a bit younger than you (58) I might consider staying in part time (OK, more part time than I am) after 67 as I do get something from my work.
But there a major issue over the raising of the retirement age and the decline in occupational pension for Voluntary Organisations as many of their volunteers historically have been those who have benefitted from early retirement and have been able to use their skills in the Voluntary sector before age catches up with them.
That is a big issue.
Happy Birthday, Richard!
And welcome to the club.
I agree entirely with the sentiments you express in this excellent post.
It should give many of us the opportunity to think in depth on the subject of aging.
I cannot think of any time in the future when I will have nothing to occupy myself constructively on, be it getting to grips with political- economic ideas and matters, my musicological interests, or anything else that attracts my intellectual curiosity.
My concern is for that great number of people who do not look at the world with curious eyes, or beyond the work that has sustained their adult life, and for whom retirement is a struggle and challenge. I think that demographics highlight the need for a drastic change in society’s approach, so that nobody feels abandoned on the sidelines, with nothing to look forward to, and formal retirement means a new chapter in life, of continuing respect, personal value and regard.
As George Bernard Shaw observed, ‘You don’t stop laughing when you age, you age when you stop laughing.’
Many happy Birthday Returns and many more productive years of making constructive and positive difference wherever you go
Very many happy returns to both of you! Your passion keeps you younger, I’m sure, Richard – you can’t stop, can you, seeing and responding to the wrong things that happen every day.
Happy birthday to you and your brother.
Many thanks for your enthusiasm and insights!
Thanks
Agree entirely with the tilt and sentiment of your blog, Richard. And Happy Birthday to you, of course. ‘Go well.’ 🙂
Thanks Ivan
Happy birthday, and many happy returns. I trust you had your first jab some time ago?
I think that makes it three years until you reach state pension age. Your intention to carry on working is much more common than it used to be, for a variety of reasons, some good (better health and nutrition; less hard, physical work) and some not (poverty, for example). Some people have little choice, either to continue or to stop, but many can and do want to continue with some remunerated work when they reach retirement age, although not necessarily the job they did 5 or 10 or 20 years ago. So, do you think people should continue to pay NICs if they carry on working?
I would like to cut NIC on all those on low pay – but keep the credit
And I do not think those over retirement age should pay because they have likely got full credit records
I will be 74 this year so am about ten years older than you. I retired, or as I like to put it, was forced to stop working, through ill health some 20 years ago. However owing to the miracle of modern medicine and a number of surgical interventions I am now feeling better than ever and am a prospective candidate for the Green Party in the forthcoming local elections. My advice would be to do as much as you can for as long as you can. Even in my period of “enforced leisure” I took to opportunity to read, to learn new things, and, among other things to learn all 7000 of the official list of most common Chinese characters. If you carry on doing worthwhile things then you stop feeling a old as you otherwise might.
I wish you many happy returns! Or, as they say in China è¬å£½ç„¡ç–†ï¼Œç”Ÿæ—¥å¿«æ¨‚ï¼
Thanks
I learned from my father that retiring was not good
He gave up all committees at 83 and it was not good for him
Hi Richard,
Happy birthday again – already done so via Facebook, but happy to wish you a great day more than once, as also to join in on thanking you for your wonderful work and stimulating enthusiasm.
Your point about why people don’t retire earlier from unfulfilled jobs is (I believe – still not read it. One of many!) well handled in David Graeber’s book ‘Bullshit Jobs’.
And John Boxhall points out why not – we simply haven’t yet sought to create the ‘amateur professionalism’ society’ another of your commenters refers to, which would allow us to get off the intensified treadmill John Boxhall refers to, which is starving the voluntary sector of volunteers.
How much better to have REAL State Pensions (not the UK’s Scrooge pensions), and a 4-day week (with even that with some part-time work, maybe), allowing people more ‘blue-sky/looking out of the window’ time, and time to pursue interests and and passions.
We CAN build, and can afford to fund, such a society, to everyone’s benefit, providing to prise the dead hand of oligarchy from the operations of society.
They would happily have us all working to 75, on subsistence pensions thereafter – the neo-feudal society I’ve long feared, where the 1% new Barons have ALL the rights, and NONE of the obligations (including the obligation to pay tax, and having new fee farms in the form of access to State Revenues, as in the PPE scandal and the crony capitalism), and the 99%, the new serfs, have ALL the obligations, and NONE of the rights, having to pay for everything that used to be free at the point of use.
Thanks Andrew
And much to agree with
Happy Birthday Richard. A very young man from where I’m looking.
Along with you , I have never wanted to be ‘Retired’ with a capital R and am still sort of working.
Is David Attenborough retired? Rupert Murdoch? Bernard Haitink only just retired, Nicholas Parsons was working well into his nineties.
Keep up your work – amazed at the stream of activity on this blog, I just wish we could find a way of plugging the ideas stream into Labour, and other parties, and of course the media, the BBC now being very much part of the one party state.
Thanks
And on the message being hear, I have to live in hope
Happy Birthday. Hope you’ve had a really good day.
So, in Lockdown birthdays, you are 2:-)
Craig
But at least on this one I do not have Covid
Last year I was in bed feeling not at all well
So I call that progress…
Happy Birthday Richard and I hope that you have the energy and enthusiasm to keep up your work for many years to come.
From a 66 year old still enjoying work as a hospital techie 🙂
Thanks 🙂
Equinox babies!
Explains the well balanced life
58 this year, back from early part retirement to top up beer and travel tokens. And do voluntary hard committee work for Social club I joined that needs tlc, using my dusted off skills and experience and relearning excel and basic financial control.
I Learnt to dive when stopped working completely by chance. I am not a swimmer!
Trekked the Himalayas briefly.
Activities I want to do more of before age forbids.
That is my only helpful suggestion for your full life, remember to fit in these physical adventures and hobbies – even at cost to expectations.
Many happy returns.
Hobbies feature
Two good walks this weekend with bird watching
And building model railways may be almost as geeky as being interested in tax, accounting and economics, but I don’t care. So relaxation is done.
What I never get enough time for is reading
I too like walking. It was he thing I missed most after having to stop work as, for a number of years, I could only do so with crutches and with great difficulty. The only real advantage of the situation was that people would give up their seats for me on trains and buses. Still, I’m making up for it now!
Good luck with that
Happy birthday both of you!
Thanks
Happy belated birthday.
Work for most people is a humdrum necessity to pay the bills and eat. I’d like to see people have much more time for themselves and their families. Universal basic income is never going to become a thing, capitalism is far too rampant and successful for the few.
This article is interesting on that subject however.
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-employment-rose-free-money.html
With the Covid pandemic, the whole system is brought into question. There needs to be a total re-evaluation of how society is organised and functions.
Are humans intelligent enough? Society will have to change to be more equal, and after the pandemic, people will not go back to incessant buying for buyings sake, so there will be no choice but to stop making so much stuff.
It’s crazy that recycling goods and products isn’t the norm. Runaway plastic production is the most damaging industry to the planet, the oil industry is thriving because of it, especially now. It can’t be sustained.
Change, or chaos, that’s the choice for humans.
Well that one cheered me up on this beautiful East Anglian morning, Petroc Trelawney’s Bach Before 7 in the background! (Not all of your posts do cheer me up…) I thought I’d say, I quite enjoy work and after retiring early at 57 I have gone back to it, part time, which suits me well and leaves time for playing music, my hobby (passion, actually). In June I’ll finish again aged 62, and maybe that will be the time for some voluntary work. Any suggestions, anyone? (I’m an actuary with senior management experience, politically somewhere in the same area as Richard but not as much fire in the belly as he has, for good or ill.)
Oh, and Happy Birthday; but what are birthdays, here today, gone tomorrow…
There are man y charities needing trustees with your skills
That’s one thought
Happy Birthday Richard. I’ll be 63 in April. I love what I do too and feel it’s a privilege to be able to “work” in that sweet spot where what matters to me meets a need in the world.
Thanks
And happy birthday in anticipation
Happy Birthday! Great article.
In answer to your questions:
The world would look different in terms of where people live and where they work; travel; and community facilities. It would feel very different.
A four day would certainly be a boost; working at home, hybrid working, flexible working are already pushing society in this direction.
Capital is less important than cash.
UBI would certainly be a big boost: again, enabling people to take charge of their work (do what they want) and provide a steady basic income not tied to paid work.
Leisure and work are merging already; Fine for some; stressful for others. It can merge too much: Sheryl Sandberg, ex COO, Facework likes ‘whole self working’ which is a total merger of home and work. They need to be separate and the barrier needs to be maintained by the worker as well as by the organisation.
One question is who does work that is dirty or unpleasant. AIs? Or humans who will need to be paid much more if UBI/cash is available?
A Happy Belated Birthday Richard! And many happy returns 🙂
I could say lots on your well thought out sentiments, but I’m running late, as usual (luckily for you. Haha). On age – folk need to stop thinking of 60 as ‘old’ – and I’m the same as you (though a decade younger) in thinking that it’s quite unfair that I should be getting older! On society – if only a better balance was sought to reward skills – and yes let’s do away with this race to endemic consumerism. Etc.
My mum is definitely still disgruntled with being forced to retire at the age of 70 – I’m trying to find a more skilled (she did bookkeeping – surely there must be something out there) volunteer position, but stymied by pandemic responses at the moment, and my lack of effort. (Sometimes people need a shove in the right direction – I certainly do!)
I am sure there are people begging for help
We have a great website where I am for the community called DSptted in Ely
Is there anything like that near you?
I had been thinking about looking at the Scotland-wide website that shows volunteer openings throughout – but now you mention local community groups, that sounds like a better option, I’ll have a wee search to see what’s in her area (she’s in a different part of Glasgow from me, but there will be various things where she is too) (we are both as bad as each other for not getting around to things!). She only started in paid employment when she was about 59 so didn’t discover the boost to your self esteem you can get from being appreciated in a job until late in life. I think she deserves more of that – and lockdowns have resulted in tedious routines too. Thanks 🙂
Happy birthday! Thank you for being a constant inspiration 🙂
Have a nice birthday Richard.
Nice thoughts and cheering. Mine are currently a bit dark.
I am curious; do you speak to your twin? Is he or she, even a little cloneish, philosophically speaking?
My brother does not speak to me – and I am not bothered about that!
Norman
My twin and I speak often
And we are polar opposites (which in the case of poloti8cs means he is just not interested) – which is a great reason for knowing and liking him
Been reading your enlightening blog for a while now and educating myself along the way !! i have always had this nag that there is something not quite right with our Society and this post resonated with me articulately . i admire you for carrying on Richard , as it would feel to me if i was in your shoes , that i was swimming against the tide . Your train of thought in this post is surely a beautiful picture of the future , that a small but powerful amount of people would not want . that is what saddens me and makes me angry on a daily basis , resistance seems in futile in so many people’s life.
Anyway Happy Birthday Richard , it is my 60th Birthday in a couple of weeks !!!
Enjoy it!
Happy birthday Richard. Keep on keeping on. And well done on “coming out” as a railway modeller.
If I had not been a railway modeller as a teenager I would not have got interested in accounting, mergers and acquisitions, the company as an agent for social as well as economic change and so had the career that I have followed
(Slightly belated) Happy Birthday, Richard! Long may you continue to work on tax and economics.
Thanks
Happy Birthday! We don’t know one another but your writings have become an important part of my thinking and have opened my eyes to so much. Thankyou from Tywyn!
I love Tywyn!
It may be that train…..
Happy Birthday – to you both!
Though we are not all lucky with our health, age should be no constraint on doing and learning new stuff. All that knowledge and experience to build on, provided it has not atrophied into prejudice. I celebrated my 60th with a Masters – my kids enjoyed coming to the ceremony!
Just keep doing what you are doing – we all get great benefit from it thanks
Thanks
Congratulations Mr. Murphy and meets many years more.
Superb allegory about age, work and love for doing that you like without limit of years.
I am 64 years old and last week I defended my Doctoral Thesis at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) on “Tax Havens and their future”, in which your teachings and books are very present.
Thank you very much for your teachings.
Brilliant!
Well done
A very well deserved Happy Birthday Richard.
It was surprisingly good