Retirement – Balancing eels

With so many of us living so much longer, New Zealand is struggling to cope. The eligibility age for superannuation is a favourite election year topic, about as tricky as balancing an eel on the end of your nose, which is what Lewis Carroll’s character, Father William, could do. He was my childhood model of being old – an intriguing fellow who could do odd things, but oddest of all was that he lived so long.

When I first read the poem in the early 1950s, average life expectancy for men was 67. People in their 70s and 80s were rare birds, to be treated with curiosity and respect. Easy enough when there were so few.

Today, the average life expectancy is around 83 and rising. The country is not sure what to do with so many of us, apart from tucking away the 20 per cent who can afford it into retirement villages, where according to the TV ads they’re all having a great time.

But that doesn’t quieten the lingering murmur of discontent from younger New Zealanders about the disproportionate cost of keeping the elderly alive and well.

Not that it’s said out loud, yet. The message comes to us sideways, like Chloe Swarbrick’s famous line back in 2019, “OK Boomers”, aimed at old white male climate change deniers. The voting power of the Gold Card holders keeps the brakes on political reforms, constitutional change, bicultural partnerships and income redistribution. Most of us grow more cautious as we get older. Younger New Zealanders get frustrated with us. There’s a shift in tone in the national conversation, from tolerating to grumpy.

And there’s not much we can do about that. Older people reminding younger people that they’ve worked hard for their privileges gets us nowhere.

What we can do is keep doing the things we are doing to keep our communities and families going, and let that work speak for itself: the child minding, mentoring and volunteering; the charities, churches, service clubs, support groups and op shops that rely on our free and willing labour; not to mention the Banks of Mums and Dads.

TV One’s Seven Sharp featured an item recently about an 83-year-old on Great Barrier Island who runs an op shop that donates all its proceeds, thousands of dollars, to the local school, and in her spare time she maintains the island’s graveyard. Our communities are full of people like her who work, unsung, to hold us together through the hard times.

The social cement they provide doesn’t only take the form of charitable service. It’s also provided by the keeping of memories through storytelling, memoir writing, museum maintaining and the hundred other ways our collective Kiwi story is gathered and passed along to a new generation. Take the retirees out of that work we take for granted and you’d be left with blank pages.