The Retirement Rabble

France is locked down. Trains are stopped. Air traffic is grounded. Roads are clogged worse than my shower drain. France is standing still. It has been for near a month now. Over the Yule holidays no less.

It’s weird… it feels like I wrote the same thing just barely a year ago…

No, this isn’t a part of the Gilets Jaune’s temper tantrum in regards to necessary fuel reforms. This time, somewhere between (depending on if you believe the government or the organizers) hundreds of thousands to 1.5 million union workers across over 30 different unions have mobilized to shut down the once proud nation in an effort to protest sitting president Macron’s pension reforms.

Union workers in France, you see, want to carry on like they’ve always done. With their 42 disparate pension systems and their low-low pension age of 60. In some cases even lower than that.

You spoilt prats. You spoilt, untethered to reality, fucking prats. You spoilt, post-colonial, imperialistic, lazy, fucking prats. You’re the kind of people that make a great case for dictatorship.

Here’s a government administration that keeps up a tradition of reforming a byzantine pension system, a project that was started in fucking 1993. And you go out and shut the whole thing down because you can’t be arsed to adapt to the current demographical realities of living in a western welfare nation. If only the French worked as hard as they protest.

Okay, sure, you feel betrayed. Lied to. You’ve worked… some days in your life, and you were told that you’d be taken care of to some extent because of it. Now, the government is in Vader-like fashion altering the terms of the deal. Fucking fuckers, right? It feels unfair. It feels like a stab in the back. And even though most the rest of the western world already has a pension age much higher than yours, I can see how it feels galling when they move the goal post.

But the pension system was always a sham. It has never been a truthful, honest, and inviolable promise. The money you put away according to pension schemes was never yours to extract once you came into your autumn days. The money that you’ve paid to your pension plan was never stockpiling. It was being used. To pay for those that had already retired. And the only hope you have is that there will be people likewise inclined to pay part of their salary to a pyramid scheme so that you too can enjoy the benefits of growing old with as much graze as arthritis and dementia allows.

Now, imagine that more and more people are getting old. A smaller and smaller percentage of the population is of working age, and can insert their hard earned spoils into your black hole of entitlement. Just how do you expect such circumstances to be sustainable? A greater and growing need, with fewer and fewer suppliers, with no stockpiles to speak of.

It’s simple arithmetic. The system doesn’t work. It isn’t sustainable. And even though the government is a bastard for selling you on the idea that it could work, somehow, despite all the natural laws to the contrary, you’re still a fucking idiot. A fucking idiot for believing them. A fucking idiot for betting your whole life on a smoke and mirrors notion. And most of all, you’re a fucking idiot for going down fighting to preserve something that was never ever going to work. Despite what all the fables might tell you, the cold-hearted laws of supply and demand won’t just warp to suit your stubborn delusions.

So, if you’re out protesting that the government is trying to turn your crazy complicated system of 42 pension systems into one unified strata, if you’re out protesting because the nation will expect another two years of work from you, if you’re out protesting because you’re just now realising that you’ve been lied to; then you’re an idiot. A lazy, entitled, idiot.

Truth likely is, my generation x and beyond are never going to be able to retire. Not without some, however likely though unpredictable in its fathom, great cataclysm. The population will keep getting older. Fewer and fewer will work traditional jobs. The pension system has only sort of functioned because people believed the lie. And people are coming awake.

And for once, I feel absolute sympathy with a government who’s thankless job it is to do the waking.

/Sebastian Lindberg 31/12-2019