Riterment…Change of Pace?

Nah… Bollocks to That!

Let me start with a small piece of admin.

I have just hit a fairly significant milestone. Technically retired, six decades-plus of life under my belt, and now waiting on a UK State Pension that I have paid into for more than fifty years. And I want to be very clear about that last part, because it matters… it is not their money. It is mine. It has always been mine. I just let the government look after it for half a century, which, in hindsight, may have been optimistic of me.

As a Brexit escapee living abroad, you’d think the system might have found a way to keep me in the loop. They have had my email address, my postal address, and my phone number for eight years. Eight years. And yet here I am, waiting. The response, when I can get one, is essentially “ooh, it’s a busy time of year, you understand?” No. I genuinely do not understand. You have been tracking me for fifty years, including a seven-year stretch as a Forces serviceman. You can’t tell me what’s happening with the taxes I have never once avoided paying?

Anyway. That’s the admin done. Now let’s talk about something bigger.

The Blame Game, and Why It’s Wearing Thin

I am a Baby Boomer. I know. I’ve heard it.

Apparently, my generation is responsible for… well, most things, if you read the right corners of the internet. The housing crisis. The political mess. Climate apathy. The general state of the world. We voted the wrong way, apparently, several decades ago, and the bill for that is now being handed to everyone younger than us.

Here’s what I’ll say to that, honestly and without defensiveness… we did what we thought was right, with the information we had at the time. That is all any generation ever does. You make your call based on what you know, what you’re told, what feels true from where you’re standing. You don’t get to vote with the benefit of hindsight. Nobody does.

Could some of those votes, those decisions, those assumptions have landed better? Of course. Do I carry some of that? Yes. But collective blame, aimed at an entire generation as though we were sitting in a room together conspiring against the future… that’s not analysis. That’s just frustration looking for a postcode.

And I understand the frustration. Truly. The world younger generations have inherited is genuinely difficult in ways that mine wasn’t. That’s real, and it’s not nothing.

But here’s the thing about blame… it’s the easiest move on the board. It requires nothing of you. It changes nothing around you. And it hands your power straight to the people who created the mess in the first place, because they’d far rather you spent your energy pointing fingers at each other than at them.

The Bit Nobody Wants to Hear

We are all being manipulated.

I don’t care which country you live in, which channel you watch, which feed you scroll through at half eleven at night. The information you are given… or more honestly, fed… is not necessarily the truth. It is curated. It is shaped. It serves a purpose, and that purpose is rarely yours.

I have lived long enough to watch this happen across multiple governments, multiple crises, multiple cycles of outrage and distraction. The machinery doesn’t change. Only the faces do.

So when you’re deciding what to believe, who to blame, who to vote for… or whether to vote at all… please factor that in. The story you’re being told has an author, and that author has an agenda.

What Actually Matters Now

I served. I put on a uniform and I did my time because I believed in something worth protecting. Not a government. Not a flag, particularly. A society. The idea that the people around me deserved safety and a fair shot at a decent life.

I know some of you look at the society you’ve been handed and struggle to find that same feeling. I get it. I’m not going to stand here and tell you the world is fine when it clearly isn’t.

But I will tell you this… nothing changes without action. Nothing. Ever.

You don’t have to join the military. Not everyone is built for it, and that’s perfectly fine. But you have a voice. You have opinions that matter, instincts that are valid, and a future that is genuinely yours to shape if you’re willing to engage with the machinery that shapes it.

Understand the politics of your society, even when it bores you. Especially when it bores you, actually, because boredom is often what they’re counting on. Push back on the things that don’t sit right. Vote, even when the options feel inadequate, because apathy is not neutrality… it’s a gift to whoever benefits from your silence.

And think beyond yourself. Think globally, not because it sounds noble, but because it’s accurate. You are not a remote participant in this world. You are part of it. What happens elsewhere lands here eventually. It always does.

The Thing We All Actually Want

Underneath all of it… the generational bickering, the political noise, the blame and the counter-blame… we all want the same things. Every one of us, regardless of age, nationality, or which decade we happened to be born into.

We want the people we love to be safe and happy.

We want to believe the future holds something worth building towards.

We want the world our children and grandchildren inherit to be better than the one we found.

That’s it. That’s the whole list.

Laying blame on what came before is easy. It’s also finished… it’s done, it’s history, and history, at its best, is a set of lessons rather than a list of crimes. Take the lessons. Apply them now. Make something better with what you’ve actually got.

The past is a pointer. The present is where you live.

Do something with it.

Until Next Time