Work unto death.

There’s a particularly insidious type of propaganda that waxes and wanes in terms of its popularity. You see it in the results of studies conducted by right-wing think tanks, or in the headlines of right-wing newspapers, about how you live a longer happier life if you keep working into old age. How ‘keeping busy’ in a job staves off degenerative brain conditions for longer. How those in their 60s and 70s are going to save us from economic woe by working, thereby powering a new boom.

It's all bullshit. There is a difference between a person being lucky enough to have made a comfortable living doing something they love, something that defines them, and for them to continue doing it, be it related to art, such as writing, painting, sculpting, acting, directing or playing music, or engineering, such as designers or mechanics, or indeed anything else, and someone having to work long past the time they should have retired simply to be able to afford to put their heating on.

And those scummy misleading headlines and studies know it.

Yet I keep seeing the reality of it. The old man shuffling around Sainsbury’s in a uniform when he should be shuffling around his garden or chatting down the pub or something. My local Asda is a pretty depressing place for this. An elderly woman operating the till, going as fast as she can, but still going slowly. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and she loves it, but she didn’t strike me as someone enjoying herself.

It would be better if she was paid properly for it. If the people at the top of the hierarchy of that company didn’t make more in a month that she would make working full time for a whole year. The next till along is operated by a guy with a tube attached to his nose to assist with breathing. Looks to me like he’s just focusing on moving each item in front of the scanners at a steady pace and trying not to overtax himself. There are those that will tell you this is what people need to give them purpose, but doing something a machine can do for not really enough money to live on is not purpose.

As a populace we’ve fully bought into the bullshit that as a country we simply can’t afford to look after people. That the welfare state is just too much, and sadly there’s just no way to help the millions of families that have fallen below the poverty line since the said welfare state has started to be dismantled. That leaving the EU has already cost us more than the welfare state ever did doesn’t seem to register. That tax avoidance costs us orders of magnitude more every year doesn’t seem to register. Perhaps because the avoiders run much of the media and a chunk of the government. Hey look at that, propaganda works.

We can afford it. We could afford it if greedy arseholes paid their fair share and didn’t rig the whole thing to ensure they don’t. But we appear to be hardwired to kick against it. Some deep-rooted instinct to tip our hats to the gentry, being thankful for the dribble of scraps they deign to throw our way, contemptuous of those that fall behind, unable to get by on barely more than nothing. It’s truly bizarre, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Jam: Smithers Jones: “Work and work and work and work ‘til you die, ‘cause there’s plenty more fish in the sea to fry.”