When I compare my generation in the developed world with the generation above us, by which I mean our parents – and I realise I’m generalising the generations here, I see some opposite dynamics in terms of when you’re on the swings or the roundabouts of life, on the peaks or in the troughs.

A friend of mine has a saying. Our parents, he says, were hard in, easy out. We are on the other hand, are easy in, hard out.

What does he mean by this? Well, it’s a factor of economic prosperity, economic swings and demographics. Our parents – I’m middle aged so assume I’m talking about the generation who are currently 70 and over – had a fairly tough start to working lives once they left school or college. These were depressed economic times and they had to graft for a long time to get on the ladder and work there way up it. Now, having worked their allotted time, and with their occupational pensions intact, they can enjoy their retirement and spend their grey pounds/dollars/euros. Hard in, easy out.

Our generation on the other hand, well we had it easy to start with, certainly compared to them. Some of us stayed with steady jobs, some of us dabbled in the dot com stuff and perhaps started our own businesses. Then there was the huge economic reversal of a decade ago, from which some countries are still recovering. For a lot of us there have been underpayments or non-payments to our pension pots, which have compounded the issue by performing badly or in some cases disappearing altogether. Add to that the huge hammer blow of an increasingly large and ageing non-working society, with an increasingly smaller group of younger adults to prop it up, and you’re talking retirement ages which seem to go up a year every year. The net of this is that we’ll have less of our lives left to enjoy our retirement, even with the increased lifespans. Easy in, hard out.

And what about the generation we’ve given birth to and raised, the millennials? They’re almost certainly easy in too. Hopefully, if we can continue to improve our global lot without blowing ourselves to smithereens, they’ll be easy out. I’m not particularly confident of that though.