It is often said that Rishi Sunak has no idea what it is like to survive on a low income but this failing is hardly confined to the über-rich: in reality, few people above median income really know what it’s like to be skint. People may think back to leaner years but, even then, if a few relatives or good friends had some cash to spare, it’s not the same. ‘But you’ll never get it right/ ’ Cause when you’re laid in bed at night/ Watching roaches climb the wall/ If you called your dad he could stop it all,’ as Jarvis Cocker has it.

There are many other predicaments we cannot really recreate in the imagination. Addiction – to gambling, say – is largely incomprehensible to most non-addicts. Depression and many physical ailments, too: until you suffer bad back pain, say, you cannot fully conceive of the unpleasantness.

Knowing this, while I was suffering from a bout of sciatica, and having already reached a point in my life where I can’t read the instructions on ready meals without a microscope, I decided to use the month for which the pain persisted as a simulation of what life might be like ten years hence, and to make note of the many indignities and inconveniences heaped on the elderly by the fact that an ageing population lives in a world mostly designed by young people. Ever wondered why you have to squint for 25 seconds every day to make out the words ‘shampoo’ or ‘conditioner’? The bottles were designed on a 50in screen by someone of 26.

Once you are slightly incapacitated, such indignities are everywhere. There are ‘disabled’ facilities, yes, but if you fall outside this categorisation, almost everything else is conceived with a complete disregard for people who are either elderly or, to use the Australian phrase, a bit crook. Station lavatories which force you down three flights of stairs so another coffee shop can be crammed in at ground level; rail tickets where you can’t tell the outbound from the return without a magnifying glass; parking spaces scarcely bigger than your car. And God help you if you need to sit down. London Bridge station was upgraded at a cost of about £400 million, but there are barely four crappy benches on every platform. Elizabeth Line trains have no on-board loos.

And try using a large airport when you are over 70. Once you are through security, your walk to the gate can be so long that there is a growing trend for older people to request wheelchairs to get to the plane, only to walk off it again in a sprightly fashion – an everyday ‘miracle’ airline employees have dubbed ‘Jetway Jesus’.

But if the physical environment isn’t bad enough already, the digital environment for the elderly is even worse. Under the guise of modernisation, IT is all too often used to save businesses and organisations money by outsourcing work to the customer. This was sensible when interacting online was one option among many. It has now become the only option, meaning that too much of our lives are spent on online form-filling. A single action for you – replacing your car, for instance – will now involve a whole weekend of digital bureaucracy, signing into umpteen different sites to inform various organisations of the change. A cost-saving for the DVLA, your insurance company, your local council residents’ parking office etc, but a massive pain for you. Something as simple as reading your gas bill requires a password and a text code sent to your phone. I cannot imagine how much typing will be required if I move house.

Or consider the recent trend where airports make passengers label their own bags. A few years ago I waited behind a vaguely familiar elderly man who was bemused by the machine passengers must use to tag their own luggage and realised he was a Nobel Laureate. An airport is not a fit place to make someone master a new interface. The same goes for car parks which demand you input a credit card number on a fiddly app. Waitrose recently annoyed a large proportion of its customers by sending discounts people could redeem only by smartphone. Many touchscreens do not work well for the elderly because your skin dries with age.

This explosion of digital admin also bedevils the workplace. You no longer merely hand your expenses to someone and get them paid; you must photograph them with a smartphone and upload them to some website while selecting from 47 draw-down menus. You can’t just sign into your email – no, you have to approve the log-in with, yes, a bloody smartphone app. All too often the work has not really been automated or reduced – instead, the admin staff have been dispensed with, leaving the remaining staff to perform the admin work themselves on top of their day jobs.

These are manifestations of the same con trick whereby cost-cutting masquerades as automation while not really reducing work at all. I suspect this has been a disaster for overall productivity but since it is easier to measure cost savings than it is to measure productivity, and since whole departments use these putative cost savings to justify their existence, the process is self-perpetuating. It is also a disaster for staff satisfaction. As you move up the corporate ladder the administrative burden gets greater, not less. The upshot is that IT firms have not reduced bureaucracy, they have expanded it. All the hard work of capitalism combined with the bureaucratic inefficiencies of Stalinism.

If, as I believe, this is ruining the quality of many people’s work, it has bigger implications than staff satisfaction. The biggest economic problem the UK faces is no longer unemployment but under-employment. Experienced staff are leaving the workforce at an ever younger age. In the UK, the number of people in employment has actually fallen since Covid, largely down to early retirement.

Ask GPs why they are retiring early and it’s likely they’ll mention this administrative burden. People are increasingly spending their time on work that has nothing to do with why they chose their profession. Even millionaire lawyers say they would not go into law if they lived their lives again. ‘You spend too little time doing, and too much time defending what you do.’ Or as one person described it: ‘It’s like a pie-eating competition where the prize is… more pies.’ Instead of automating accounting, we have just turned everyone into an accountant.

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