Chameleon Magazine

To our dear younger generation:

First off, we would like to offer a sincere, heartfelt apology.

When we entered the workforce nearly half a century ago, we were under the tragic, outdated delusion that life was a long-haul game. We stupidly believed the radical notion that if you worked 47 consecutive years, paid your taxes, sacrificed current pleasures to put money away, survived three economic meltdowns, and miraculously avoided dying of cancer or being wiped out by a random viral outbreak, you were actually allowed to spend your own deferred income in peace.

How unbelievably selfish of us.

We now realize our mistake. We foolishly spent five decades honoring a social contract, completely unaware that the rules would be retroactively updated by a 24-year-old political commentator on television who believes a pension pot is just a giant, unearned communal bingo jackpot that we happened to win.

We understand your perspective now:

 Our “Deferred Income” is your “Unfair Hoard”: We apologize for skipping holidays in 1984 to put £50 a month into a private fund. We didn’t realize that by not spending it back then, we were committing a micro-aggression against your future tax bracket.

 Surviving is bad form: We realize it is deeply insensitive to those who didn’t make it—and to those who simply couldn’t be bothered to save—that we had the audacity to stay alive long enough to actually draw down the money we were told to save.

 The “Just a Little Bit More” Clause: We admire your breathtaking generosity with our money. It takes real courage to sit in a TV studio and suggest that after funding national defense, infrastructure, and foreign aid for nearly five decades, we should really hand over the rest so everyone else can enjoy the retirement we spent 47 years earning.

So please, tell us again how we “don’t need all that money.” We’ll just sit here with our decades of receipts, holding our breath until the tax authority figures out how to tax our relief at having made it across the finish line.