Aspects of ageing

We all know the harsher facts of 21^st Century life. Perhaps save for in some distant, Third World, geographically-or-climate-change-challenged countries, continents and regions, the civilised human world faces an innumerable series of societal issues of which ongoing medical advances and healthy living (causing an ever-increasing number of people to live to a ripe old age) is one.

As this is my blog and I can do what I like with it, I need not trifle with doing more than rudimentary research to support my assertions and conclusions.

However, I believe it to be the case that – in Western society – our growing population (and indeed growing elderly population) is causing a few headaches among those whose responsibility it is to bean-count and plan for the future.

The more people that live longer and longer – bleat the actuaries – the bigger the gap will be between their total life-long (or career-long) contributions and what the current taxpaying public will actually have to shell out in order to pay for their retirements.

Yes, it’s that old chestnut that we current generations are living high on the hog at the expense of future ones, i.e. incurring debts that our descendants, and indeed other people’s, will have to pay off for us.

From time to time a Rust contributor makes reference to the purpose behind our website – broadly-speaking (and I’m generalising wildly here) to observe and comment upon the world from the viewpoint of those of us past the first flush of youth – and yet in a sense no definition can quite cover the whole. To an extent also each of us may have a different version, i.e. the one that applies or occurs to us – at least on each new day that we write and post a piece.

Another way of approaching the subject is by reference to what we’re not.

Sometimes I’m asked if we’re writing for the Saga generation, a question that never fails to irritate because in my view the answer is ‘certainly not!’

I mention that because someone had that business idea first a long time ago and then launched and built up an organisation called Saga – thereby almost making being past a certain age a positive, almost fetish, thing to be – and duly hit the proverbial jackpot. Well, good luck to them. I don’t know the true facts, but looking back it seems to me they originally started with insurance products aimed exclusively at oldies, then broadened out into sea cruises to the Norwegian fjords or the archaeological sites of the Aegean Sea … and thence to literally anything that seemed relevant to the senior generation.

The key business driver, it seemed to me, was never that suddenly Saga was appealing to a generation of people that for decades had been supposedly ignored because – largely not being in gainful employment but rather effectively being just an ‘expenses out’ section of the population – they were assumed not to have the degrees of disposable income that made them attractive to businesses in search of a fast buck.

Rather it was the belief that – if you could ‘capture’ any specific group of the population (even a disadvantaged or perhaps relatively poor one) – you could package and sell them to those businesses which from a marketing point of view needed to reach them. (Think producers of incontinence pads, zimmer frames, mechanical stair-lifts, funeral planning and so on).

That’s why Saga made its mark – it deliberately set out to ‘capture’ the older generations. The very process had its inherent drawbacks.

I can still vividly remember my shock, horror and intense revulsion when, shortly after my 50^th birthday, the Saga organisation began bombarding my letter box with marketing flyers and special offers for its products.

“How the ZXW^!”J@I*! had Saga found out that I’d just had my fiftieth birthday?” was my first and lasting thought (it smacked of serious Big Brother-style “I’m watching you” to me) … and similar has come to mind regularly in the decade and a half since every time that Saga has dropped in an offer that … er … now that my car insurance is coming up for renewal … would I not like to consider how Saga’s car insurance, specially-designed to suit an oldie, could work better (cheaper) for me than my current provider’s?

I still don’t understand how they know my age and/or that my car’s insurance cover is due for renewal.

Two ironies of belonging to the older generation came home to me in the past week from stories I have seen in the media.

Firstly, I saw a report of a spat between Andrew Silk, publisher of Mature Times, a magazine aimed at the older generation, and former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman – see here – DAILY MAIL

Secondly, and inevitably, I’ve been exposed to a number of pieces containing photographs of stars and/or celebrities who have been in the public eye for an appreciable length of time and – you know what? – it’s uncanny (and indeed unsettling) the degree to which ‘how they look now’ is shocking, i.e. compared to how they used to look in what I might glibly call their pomp.

Take Gene Wilder, the legendary comic actor, who died overnight at the age of 83 as an example. He was a particular favourite performer of mine.

We cannot help it, we think of him as having the eternal appearance of being how he was at his zenith, featuring in movies such as Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, The Producers and Stir Crazy.

However, the poor guy lived several decades past that time, i.e. until he was 83 years of age, and suffered from Alzheimer’s. So what? Stuff happens. It so happens that I’ve also lived that many decades since Wilder first became globally famous. I don’t suppose I look so damned hot as I once did either – not that such a dreadful thought ever occurs to me, of course, because (like everyone else) I’m only as old as I ever want to be as I sit in my living room, trawling around the internet on my computer. Those who live in the public eye wither before us almost stop frame animation-style before our very gaze.

Some of us are just fortunate in that we never had to.