A birth date tells you surprisingly little about who can afford the butter.
The man in front of me put the butter back.
He was wearing a good coat. Not a new coat. The sort that had been a good purchase some years ago and was now expected to continue being one indefinitely. He read the shelf label twice, then chose the cheaper spread.
Nothing dramatic happened. No music. No speech about the economy. Just a small adjustment to an ordinary shopping basket.
Later I read another argument about boomers being wealthy. It had the usual shape: older people defending a working life, younger people pointing towards house prices, pensions and opportunities that no longer exist in the same form.
There was truth in it. There was also a great deal of confident identification of the wrong culprit.
I understand why a younger person struggling with rent would look at older property owners and feel angry. Telling that person to be more positive would be both insulting and exceptionally unhelpful. You cannot put a deposit down with optimism.
But the man choosing the spread was not living the version of older age featured in the argument. His coat wasn’t evidence of a property portfolio. It was evidence of a coat.
Age tells you when somebody was born. It does not tell you whether the factory stayed open, whether their work came with a decent pension or whether the roof now requires money they don’t have.
The internet’s wealthy retiree tends to stand on a cruise ship holding a drink, apparently considering which flat to buy next. People like that exist. So do people whose cruise is the bus to the coast and whose captain’s table is the seat over the back wheel.
Having sat at a real captain’s table, I can report that the bus often has fewer speeches.
The joke doesn’t settle the question. It does expose how carelessly we have grouped people together.
Class doesn’t disappear at retirement. Neither does luck, illness or a working history in an industry that quietly ceased to need you. A person can have benefited from some features of their generation’s circumstances and still be struggling now. Both things can be true.
Equally, being older isn’t a defence against criticism. There are people who did very well and have chosen to describe everyone else’s difficulties as insufficient effort. I find them exhausting too.
What troubles me is the way a genuine grievance gets converted into a birth-date argument. It becomes possible to despise somebody standing in the same supermarket queue, making almost the same calculation, because the labels have told you that your interests cannot overlap.
The younger person postponing the idea of a home and the older person postponing a repair are not in identical situations. But neither is being well served by a contest to decide whose disappointment is legitimate.
I don’t have a neat answer. I would be suspicious of one. These are material problems, not misunderstandings that vanish when everybody speaks nicely.
Still, I would like us to notice the person before attaching the generation. The actual basket. The actual hesitation. The actual week they are trying to get through.
There is wealth in having time, and retirement has given me some of that. I won’t pretend it doesn’t count. But it is a strange currency: enough for a long afternoon looking at the sea, no use whatsoever at the checkout.
The man in the coat paid carefully and thanked the assistant. Then he carried his bag outside.
I don’t know what he thought of the argument. I doubt it made his shopping any easier.
Before you wander back into the ordinary noise of the day, do one small thing with this.
Not a grand reinvention. Not a ten-year vision board. Just a quiet refusal to drift.
Because later life has a habit of becoming whatever is left after everyone else has had their say: the pension provider, the calendar, the family WhatsApp, the old job still living rent-free in your head.
The danger is not that you fail to make a plan.
The danger is that you inherit one by default.
If this piece nudged something uncomfortable but useful, I’d start here:
The Second Act Playbook is for building the shape of the next chapter before life fills it in for you.
The Retirement Identity Check-In is for the quieter question underneath it all: who are you becoming when the old labels loosen?
One is Free the other isn’t I will leave it to you to have a look. Neither is about panic.
They are about not waking up five years from now with a tidy pension and a life that somehow forgot to include you.