6 April

I see this all the time at work and in the community. The avalanche of retirees, freshly released from the pressures of work and then suddenly feeling unplugged from relevance to our societies. This is part of the same kidult culture I often write about. There are no age-related roles now, you’re an adolescent ‘living your best life’, from age 13 to 103. All of this vast and growing mass of retirees are a bit stuck for what to do, to feel relevant. Many travel to distract themselves from that irrelevance, but many also start to interfere with things, they become permanent and demanding activists, for always new causes. They want to be relevant to social life. (To be honest many then become a permanent pain in the arse, for public administration.) I can retire in a couple of years, and have already thought long and hard about this. I never needed my working life to feel ‘relevant’, I’ve never tried to have a career. I pursue knowledge, and that will be the case even after I’ve retired. It will just give me more time to do that. Having never pursued or liked the groupthink of most social life, I certainly won’t miss it either.