The Future You Refuse to See: On Age, Disability, and the National Denial Complex

We are all heading in the same direction. Every one of us — regardless of class, career, or conviction — is moving steadily toward an inevitable state: older, slower, more fragile, more reliant. If not through age, then through accident, illness, or genetic lottery, we will all become disabled in some form. That is not a hypothesis. It is a biological guarantee.

And yet, look around.

Look at the way this country (the UK) talks about disabled people. Not as citizens with needs and contributions, but as economic burdens, as eligibility tests, as “difficult choices.” Look at the language of “reform” — how it is wielded like a scalpel across the backs of the most precarious. Look at the ease with which our elected officials slice off slices of humanity and offer them up to the public, as though it were a radio phone-in: 

Press 1 to believe them. Press 2 if you think they're faking it.

This is not policy. This is theatre. And the nation is watching in silence.

Over the past decade, the UK has normalised a staggering level of cruelty toward disabled and long-term sick people. The very idea that one must deserve to be helped has become a grotesque cultural reflex. If you're not starving, naked, and still smiling while you work 40 hours a week — well, you're not trying hard enough.

One comment beneath a recent disability reform article summed it up with unflinching clarity: We both work full-time but we are ducks barely keeping our heads above water. We don't eat regular meals, we struggle to keep on top of daily tasks and we often wear the same clothes for weeks because we can't keep on top of washing. We work, but to the detriment of everything else in our lives. That’s not laziness. That’s system failure.

But it's worse than failure — it's denial.

We are extending the working age, nudging retirement further into the future, while utterly refusing to address the real consequences. Where are the jobs for non-disabled 60-year-olds, let alone those managing complex health needs? Where is the honest conversation about the wear and tear of survival? And where, amidst all this bootstraps fantasy, is the recognition that no society can function if it punishes its own for growing old?

The denial is vast and structural. Government after government clings to a fantasy that productivity is infinite, that people can be coaxed or kicked into perpetual motion. But muscle fibres fray. Joints stiffen. Brains fog. Trauma builds. You cannot spreadsheet your way out of entropy.

This country has spent years pretending it can. Each new policy aimed at “saving” welfare is just another layer of bureaucratic ritual, a fresh maze for those already crawling. Instead of designing systems that support, we design ones that suspect. Instead of recognising the universal human need for interdependence, we cling to the myth of hyper-independence, even as that myth breaks the bodies of those still trying to live up to it.

It’s telling that no senior figure in government — or much of the media — publicly condemns the vulgarity of this slow-motion assault. Why aren’t the very people paid to uphold our public ethics standing up and saying: No. We don’t play shit-shows with the desperate. We don’t strip dignity from the vulnerable in public.

It’s not just an absence of compassion. It’s an absence of shame.

And it’s going to catch up with everyone. Because this isn’t only about “them.” It’s about you. About the version of yourself ten years from now, two decades from now, who moves slower, sees fuzzier, needs help with stairs or mornings or memory. What kind of world are you building for that person?

If you think you’ll be the exception, think again. Frailty is not failure. It’s part of the deal.

So why can’t we face that honestly?

Why can’t we create a serious national conversation — a grown-up, cross-party, evidence-based plan — for how we support people across the lifespan? Why can’t we invest in work environments that adapt rather than exclude? Why can’t we stop pretending the 62-year-old care worker with arthritis will suddenly retrain as a coder, or that the 58-year-old warehouse porter with a slipped disc should just “upskill” into consultancy?

We need a future-proofed system built on interdependence, not suspicion. One that offers help without humiliation. That sees aging not as decline, but as transition. That views disability not as economic inconvenience, but as part of the natural diversity of human experience.

That doesn’t ask people to work until they collapse and then punish them for falling.

We are not asking for luxury. We are asking for the basics: dignity, decency, support. We are asking for policies grounded in reality, not fantasy. For a society that knows how to care for its own, not just when it's convenient — but when it matters most.

And just for the hell of it let's throw AI and massive wealth inequality in the mix like a skip full of spanners in the works.

The country is lost and confused, yes. But not because the problems are too complex. It is lost because it refuses to look in the mirror and accept the simple truth: You will become one of us. And if we don’t build a system worthy of that inevitability, the suffering will not be distant. It will be yours.