What The Actual Fuck!

This week has been a hard week. I’m not talking officially depressed hard, but it’s been challenging. I was ill at the start of the week. I also seem to be in a situation where no matter when I go to bed or when I get up I feel like I’ve not had enough sleep. Work is proving frustrating with a project that just involves a lot of continual thought. Thinking fatigue is certainly a thing.

Then the UK government choose to ideologically enact economic terrorism, collusion and corruption.

It’s this last thing that was the nail in the coffin and lead to the whole week being even more challenging. To understand the full, personal reason we have to step back in time a bit.

Update: I wrote this post on Friday 30th September and over the course of Saturday it looked like we might be looking second, wider financial crisis directly involving pensions. I posted this on Sunday 2nd October unchanged.

Economically shattered

It’s undoubtedly the case that my parents, and as a result my family, are a story of two financial halves and the switch is quite distinct.

There was a time we seemed to be doing quite well. I’ve only got memories of my younger years to support this but I am confident this was the case. We started life as a family in a caravan but moved into our own house. My father had a photography hobby and along with that cameras and could develop stuff in a dark room. We’d go on an annual holiday, not grand by today’s standards but not cheap at the time. We’d often get stuff first in the street. Not that it mattered, but looking back it was true. I remember getting one of the earliest game consoles and playing pong and that weird game where you jumped buses.

Then the eighties came and everything changed.

You see my father was a labourer. He was the definition of a low-skilled worker. Obviously, up to some point in time low skilled workers could still earn a good wage. Then things changed, the whole economic model switched around and he no longer could. He ended up on social security and it was never the same again, going from low paid job to low paid job. It reached a point where we actually got food delivered to us via the church, we were effectively going to a food bank.

I’d say we counted as poor. We weren’t out on the street poor, but the aspirational poor who liked to try at all costs to not let people see it or look down on them while having the pride to match. There was a reason, to this day, my mother is always proud of the fact we always had good shoes.

That sounds positively Dickensian when you write it down.

The aspiration generation

While my parents may have been shattered by economic change I benefited a lot from the time period in which I reached adulthood. I belong to the generation for which higher education was free, specifically degree education. You paid absolutely nothing to go to University. You had living costs and the like but the institutions and the courses were 100% free.

This meant there was very little excuse for my generation not to rise into different economic strata than their parents via education. The number of people of my age who are first-generation degree holders is significant if not ridiculously high. If you wanted to keep costs down you could just do what I did and remain at home and go to a local University.

In a fortuitous moment of serendipity, I then entered the workplace on the cusp of the longest running time of continuous, economic prosperity in history. While that has some context which means it wasn’t great for all, it probably helped me out.

Financial apocalypse

The financial crisis hit me hard. I wasn’t well positioned to weather it out as I was working in a small start-up at the time and I ended up out of a job. It was a very hard time. One of the hardest times in my life and it’s safe to say it’s forged my thinking going forward.

No one wants to lose their job, but this process was mentally scarring. I spent a long time being either out of a job or on short-term contracts. This has forged in me an attitude of low-risk decisions around my career so it never happens again.

In some ways, it was also beneficial, as I learned during this period to not link my self-worth to my career.

I’m missing some elements of this journey out for brevity, such as the crazy Australian migration and the fact I’ve been divorced. I’d paid the mortgage off at 45 and was in a very interesting position but the divorce reset all that.

Now we reach this week.

And here we are…

The actions by the government were just horrific and the key thing is it nearly caused the collapse of pension schemes. People are looking at rising prices, being offered crazy mortgage deals they just can’t afford and then they find that their pension has collapsed ruining their finances in later (or not so later) life.

It’s that last one that’s the kicker for many.

If you’ve read this far you probably realise why. It doesn’t keep me awake at night, but if I think about it too much the thought of being poor or living in a house I can’t maintain when I am actually really old fills me with actual dread. I’ve not even looked at my pension yet but I know my experiment in a shares ISA is down 14.5% last time I checked. It hit me right where it hurt. My anxiety about my financial future.

The 2008 crisis has never really ended. We’ve just extended the tail end of it. We’ve existed in an artificial, distorted end-stage capitalism economy ever since. It’s a false environment that is not sustainable and at some point has to come to an end. We even allowed some people to succeed during it, you just had to be focused on stock market assets rather than wanting just a simple wage. Throw in the climate crises, populism and geopolitical instability and I don’t think things are going to get better. Are we just delaying the inevitable? Doing various things to punt an existential danger down the road? Will we ever not be in one crisis or another?

That’s the truly scary bit.

That while what was done this week, was wrong, stupid, ideologically spiteful and willfully damaging for the average person, a series of challenges does exist that are inevitable and we have to talk seriously both strategically and tactically about how to manage the oncoming reckoning to rebalance or radically change the foundation we’ve been on since 2008 (and that itself is one problem of many).

And, Finally…

I’ll be highly surprised if we don’t get a change of government at the next election but never say never. What I don’t think we’ll get is something akin to the spirit of 1997. That’s not going to happen. The times have changed. The incoming Labour government of 1997 could align with the general economic consensus, tweak it around the edges to be more compassionate and ride that to three election victories.

The next government cannot do that.

It can’t because the reckoning is coming and it’s a torturous situation to manage while causing the least damage for people while also facing numerous, rolling existential crises. I’ve talked about this before in how I literally feel we are at the point we will, relatively shortly in generational terms, face The Star Trek Moment.

A bit like markets price in risk, I’ve started to psychological price in ‘pain’ in the latter years of my life. I’ll point out again, not a life-stopping, depressing pain (at least not at this point), but I have started to price it into my expectations.

The last third of my life, even ignoring not getting a serious illness, I’ve come to accept might not be as free of economic stress and freedom as I once hoped.

isn’t going to be a comfortable ride.