Don’t Retire Early! says government

An attack on those who leave the workforce:

[Early retirement can] have a major impact on people’s mental health, leading to “boredom, loneliness and poverty” and create a huge dent in the British economy.

The findings are part of the research behind a new “action plan” to get older people back into work, launched by pensions minister Steve Webb. The report, Fuller Working Lives, concluded that the British economy missed out on £18bn last year because people left the workforce early.

The report focuses on those who have been forced to leave the workforce, largely through redundancy or ill health, rather than those who have chosen to retire in their 50s because they can afford to do so.

As if people aren’t knackered enough as it is, and as if the slave mentality weren’t already drummed into us almost from birth, but now the sick, the elderly, the redundant (lovely term, that, by the way), and those already physically damaged by work are being hassled into returning to work.

Again, the obsession with looking after the economy (ooh, the economy, everyone should roll up their sleeves to help the poor old ailing economy, will no one spare a thought for how the economy must be feeling?) leads to the reluctant enslavement of people who should be living their lives, should always have been living their lives, and have already given away the best years of their lives.

There are ways to address “boredom, loneliness and poverty“. Working in some demeaning job at the age of 50 is not one of them.

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Full Employment

This lovely animated short, El Empleo or The Employment explores a reality in which unemployment is no longer a problem.

Something else to think about on these lines is Anarchist Bob Black’s assertion that “[some] favor full employment [while] I favor full unemployment”.

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I Rose Slowly

Friend Fraser provides this quotation from Pulitzer-winning poet Charles Simic:

I was five minutes late from lunch at the insurance company where I was working and my boss chewed me out for being irresponsible in front of twenty or thirty other drudges. I sat at my desk for a while, fuming, then I rose slowly, wrapped my scarf around my neck and put my gloves on in plain view of everybody, and walked out without looking back. I didn’t have an overcoat and on the street it was snowing, but I felt giddy, deliriously happy at being free.

Buy the new Issue Ten in print or PDF today.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount.
Or buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price each issue.

Running on Empty

More grist for our mill arrives in the form of this opinion piece in the New York Times:

The way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep.

It comes complete with some handy statistics (Source: The Energy Project):

stats