The Age Thing

Trying not to spend too much time reflecting on the future

Spending time with my 94 year old mother in law in Australia has been a delight, and a sobering reminder to myself not to drone on about being old. She is very mentally alert, obviously a little physically frail but still totally independent.

She has helpers visiting, they take her shopping and hang up her laundry, but she cooks and cleans for herself and is still very active and aware of what’s going on in the world,

In a couple of weeks time I will drop in to see another Australian friend who is currently looking after her 100 year old father. I’ve not met him before, and again, he is very frail but still manages to get around with his walking frame, and is apparently, very mentally alert.

I was recently informed there are 700 men over 100 years old in Australia, and a couple of thousand women, but it’s still fairly unusual. My Aunt lived until she was 101, born just after the savage ‘Spanish Flu of 1918 and passing away a month before the 2020 Covid lockdown.

When I was much younger I often stated that I didn’t want to live that long, I would say with youthful confidence when such conversations took place that I would be happy to pop my clogs at 70 years old. (pop my clogs, English slang: to die)

I didn’t want to be a a grubby old git living in misery and loneliness. I mean to say, 70 is REALLY old, when you’re 25.

I would now like to politely modify that wish, I turn 70 in 2026 and if I’m capable of looking after myself and doing something half useful, I’m very happy to stick around for a bit.

During a conversation with my mother in law the other day, we worked out I would turn 94 in 2050, half way through the century. That is mad! I’m confident I won’t make it that far, I’m sure my misspent early years smoking thousands of cigarettes have put a bit of a crimp on my longevity. (I quit in 1990)

But, all that aside, I can’t help thinking about the changes happening in our society as a result of two factors, the baby boom of the 1940’s and 50’s, and the amazing array of drugs and medical advances that make reaching extreme age less and less rare.

Everywhere I go in Australia there are loads of grey haired people wandering about, they are generally fit and healthy, they seem happy, they go on cruises, they gamble in the casinos, they walk along the beaches with their dogs, they love their grandchildren, they own big cars and often multiple properties. They live a really, really long time.

Don’t get me wrong, I am painfully aware that I am one of them, my wife and I fit into the category of ‘lucky boomer’ very neatly no matter how hard we might try ‘to be different.’

I know I’ve written about this before on Substack, but I can’t help noticing how unbalanced the world has become. When I was a kid, there were no overweight children in my primary school but dentistry was barbaric. Of course there were old people then, but I know, statistically, way less than now.

My grandparent all passed away in their 60’s because they’d lived, by today’s standards, terribly unhealthy lives. They had shed loads of babies, most of them died before they were 3 years old. My parents generation who survived the war had babies in the late 1940’s and 1950’s and that birth spike is what we’re seeing the tail end of now.

This massive bulge in the population of people between 65 and 100 years old is very noticeable. If you are under 40 now, it’s perfectly fine to despise and belittle the wealthy boomers, but seriously, they are not the majority. There is a large section of old people now who are very poor, and I’m not just talking about Europe, Australasia and North America. This birth bulge was a phenomena around the world, but it’s a bulge that has ended, the global birth rate peaked a few years back and is now dropping, everywhere, in every country, okay, except Afghanistan.

General health care has improved, more babies survive, huge improvements in agricultural production mean less people starved to death. The boomer generation did achieve amazing things and, yes, many of those achievements had very negative consequences.

One big achievement was less war. Not no war, but a massive reduction in international conflict. Up to the end of 1945, the human race did war pretty much constantly, if you read Stephen Pinker’s ‘The Better Angers of Our Nature’ he lists the wars in what we now call Europe from the earliest recorded events to 1945. There wasn’t a day in that near 2,000 year period where someone wasn’t attacking someone else for some utterly daft reason.

I think my generation really appreciated that we didn’t have to live through a war, and of course there has been plenty of conflict in my lifetime. I was on a street in London in 1975 when an IRA bomb blew a posh furniture shop to bits, I went on anti Vietnam War demonstrations, I was the same age as the soldiers who went off to liberate some islands next to Argentina in the South Atlantic that only 2% of the UK population had ever heard of.

There was a cold war, I was repeatedly told all through my young life that Russia could invade any moment. I went to Russia just after the wall came down, they were utterly terrified that America and Europe were going to invade any moemnt. At the end of the Soviet empire, they couldn’t have invaded a bus stop.

But however you spin it, there has not been a conflict on the scale of the two world wars that defined the 20th century. My father fought in that war, my mother only survived because the bomb that fell into the basement of her childhood home in Cheltenham did not explode.

There is now a generation coming into power who’s great grandparents experienced horrendous global conflict, it’s very distant. I’m sure they’ve seen movies about it but the reasons behind those wars are becoming more and more obscure.

Essentially, our grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought against people who performed Nazi salutes, the like ones Steve Bannon and the Musk man have done.

I’m not as dumb as some might like to think, I know they are doing it ‘as a deliberate joke to mess with the libs’ or some other obfuscating excuse. It’s ‘funny’ to perform a Nazi salute because it upsets people so much. If you want to define immature, insecure, male adolescent behaviour, this is a pretty good example

D’you know why the fascists in 1930’s Germany dressed in military garb and did the self same salutes? For exactly the same reason, to mess with the libs, and then kill the libs, the Jews, the disabled, the gay, the gypsie. Anyone they didn’t feel comfortable around.

I’m very happy for anyone under 40 to sneer and begrudge my generation for their lazy, self satisfied pensions, property portfolios and massive SUVs. But please hear this. We know fascism when we see it and we’re seeing it right now.