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Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Oh no – I’m not beautiful senor – I’m very plain.”

“To me, you are very beautiful – that is all that matters at this moment.”

His hand slipped down to her breasts and then all the way to the plump fleshy mound between her legs. It was as if he was familiarizing himself with her whole body. When his lips sought out her hard protruding nipples, a sense of excitement enveloped her. She became very flushed and her heart began to really pound in her chest.

Valentino sucked her tits so gently and beautifully, she thought she might cum at any moment. But when his finger slid deep into her hot wet pussy, she took a deep breath and totally lost it. Screaming loudly, she began to violently spasm, as a raging orgasm ripped through her torso. Her hired lover continued to work his magic between her legs, till she could feel her orgasm throbbing in her teeth. It made her toes curl to the point where they were practically touching the heels of her feet. When she finally landed back on Earth, she felt a little embarrassed. Cumming in front of a stranger! Maria was blushing from tits to toes but really looking forward to what he going to do next.

Although she couldn’t see her gigolo, she could feel his warm body next to hers and she ventured to explore it. When she moved her hand over his belly and then made contact with his rock hard dick, it was his turn to gasp. And Maria, who had never sucked a cock in her life, decided that this would be a golden opportunity to try it out.

Valentino was not used to his clients pampering him – he always thought that it was his duty, not theirs. But when her soft lips nibbled at the end of his cock, he decided to just lay back and enjoy the ride. Maria slowly moved mouth down his shaft until she had almost swallowed his monster rod right up to the hilt. With her fingers gently fondling his balls, she began to gleefully work up and down his boner. Valentino, who normally maintained his cool, was beginning groan and moan. He ran his fingers through her long hair and touched her shoulders lightly as the sensual sensations from her warm, wet knob-sucking got more and more intense.

Taking deep, frequent breaths, he gripped onto her arms and told her he was about to cum but she paid no attention. Soon, his body began to bounce up and down as he shot his creamy load into her mouth. It was hot and salty on her tongue. As there didn’t seem any other recourse, she swallowed it.

Valentino just lay by her side for a few moments, telling her how wonderful she was. Maria soaked up his compliments like they were a second helping of his jism. Then, once recovered and without warning, he grabbed hold of her legs and placed his face between them. She almost screamed, as his tongue began to slide it up and down her wet slit. The feeling of him kneading and massaging her swollen labia was overwhelming. Her clitoris was practically vibrating with desire as he dragged the tip of his tongue over her hood and all the way down to her perineum. When he opened her vagina up even wider, so he could penetrate her with his nimble fingers, she knew she was well on the way to orgasm number two.

As Valentino continued to explore and pleasure every crevice of Maria’s heavenly engorged twat, her body was tingling all over. She scooped up huge handfuls of the silky sheets in her fists as she felt a massive climax erupting within her. It felt like every nerve ending in her body was going to explode. Her clit was going off like a fire alarm. She let out a piercing. “FUCK!!” Her cum ravaged, sopping cunt was set ablaze. The poor girl almost writhed and bucked herself clean off the bed.

Valentino wasted no time in ramming his dick through her pink petals and deep into her tight pussy. She dug her nails into his shoulders as he forcefully drove it into her. His warm damp chest brushed against her tits as he increased his speed. Maria lifted up her pelvis to meet his urgent thrusts. Valentino’s face became red and strained as he neared the sweet release he so desperately sought. With a loud groan and one last mighty heave of his throbbing cock, he filled her delighted fuck-cave with he gooey spunk.

The feel of his semen spurting out of his wad and splashing against her insides was so amazing that she kept arching her back in order to soak every last sperm out of him. When he was finally completely drained of his fluids, Maria sighed, disappointed that it was all over.

“I have to tell you, that was quite spectacular,” he sighed diplomatically, tracing his finger around her tits once more. “Quite spectacular.”

Maria would’ve loved to have had his big stiff cock rammed deep inside her once again but when he sat up and turned on the radio, she realized that it was well and truly over. After saying their goodbyes in the dark, she groped her way to the door and inadvertently hit the light switch with her hand.

Automatically she turned to apologize and gasped. Valentino was not the handsome young man she imagined but had a face that only a mother could love.

Totally embarrassed and afraid that she might spread the news around town, Valentino offered her unlimited sex during the week and every other week-end. Now, the horny student that was spurned, even by men who had a fetish for ugly women, was getting it regularly and in every orifice – but she still insisted on doing it in the dark.
Valentino Battisti was a sort of professional gigolo. For the most part, his clientele were middle-aged women, but he was beginning to attract some younger customers. The details of his boudoir brilliance had spread around the city by word of mouth and caught the attention of college student Maria Sansa.

To put it kindly, she wasn’t the most beautiful girl around town and young men didn’t seem that interested in her. The unique thing about Valentino`s service was that it was discrete and it all took place in the dark.

First, Maria telephoned the number that had been passed on to her. The voice at the other end of the line was deep, sensual and re-assuring. A time and date were set and at the appointed time, with butterflies in her stomach, she walked down the dimly lit cobbled street to the Villa di Amore. When she rang the bell, the same sexy voice answered her. The door opened with a faint buzz and she stepped into a dimly lit corridor.

The mysterious but friendly voice told her to go to the door on the left. This turned out to be the disrobing room. Here, Maria was instructed to take off all of her clothes, and once completely naked, to open the next door.

“Come in, come in senorita, come over here and sit beside Valentino,” the sexy voice beckoned.

For a few moments, Maria’s heart seemed to stop beating and she would have loved to have turned around and hightailed home. She probably would have but she was naked – it was little too late to change her mind. She’d only taken two cautious steps into the pitch black room when a hand reached out and took hers.

“You’ll soon get used to the darkness,” he whispered. “Just feel with your other hand until you touch the bed.”

The hugely nervous student did as he suggested and sure enough, soon made contact with the soft silk sheets. Valentino slowly guided her down onto the mattress until she was lying beside him and could feel his warm breath on her neck. Maria let out a little gasp as his fingers began to gently explore the contours of her face. Her body was beginning to tremble all over and she felt terribly hot.

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The next morning they clung on to each other far more l
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his

Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

S

Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his

Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying through her whole body.

Justina was now feeling as horny as hell and would have liked to have had him bouncing on top of her but at the same time, she wanted this delicate treatment he was giving her to continue. She wasn’t sure where he had honed up his skills but he sure knew how to use his tongue, it found every sensitive nook and cranny on her body. When his lips finally made contact with her secret garden and his tongue flicked across her wet crevice she almost lost consciousness. It was that good.

As he continued to lick the petals of her vibrating pussy he fondled her tits with the palms of his hands. She began to take short sharp breaths and it wasn’t long before she started to moan and squirm and then just like an ecstasy bomb had exploded inside of her she began to scream and shake violently.

Poor Seth didn’t get any foreplay at this point as she was so anxious to feel his dick inside of her she pulled him on the top of her perspiring body and urged him to stick it in. When it slid into her very well lubricated pussy she gave a little shout and then grasping hold of his buttocks she pulled on them forcing it in even further.

He was dying to cum and so he began to slide it in and out at a steady pace only speeding up when Justina called out,” Faster – please – faster.” Now the gentle Seth turned into to a rampaging sex machine. He rammed it into her hard and fast as she dug her nails deep into his back. When he felt himself cumming he began to call out “Fuck” and this seemed to excite her and she moved her ass up and down causing Seth to blow his load and just scream out obscenities.

Justina was still cumming when he rolled off of her exhausted. It was a blue ribbon first night for any honeymoon couple as they continued to suck and fuck into the early hours.

The next morning they clung on to each other far more like two young honeymooners and the reporter got some great shots. It even got better in the afternoon when Seth managed to get a special license to get officially wed and invited the confused newspaper photographer to the ceremony.

Later that day a telegram arrived from Justina’s ex-fiance saying that he was sorry and would she have him back – she simply replied “Get lost dickhead,” and stripping off her clothes she leaped into bed with Seth and plunged his
Justina Morgan won a luxury honeymoon when she and her fiancé entered a newspaper competition but then, just before the wedding, he chickened out and the dream of that wonderful vacation in Rio seemed as though it was drifting away too. Fortunately, it was she that had filled in the entry forms and so it seemed as though she could take someone else along in her ex-fiance’s place but it would obviously have to be a young man. Enter her mailman Seth Bailey.

Seth was a 23-year-old who was adored in her neighborhood for his cheerful manner and kind deeds. Being an account executive in an advertising agency she would never have considered him as a boyfriend but for a purely platonic friend to accompany her to the beach he seemed ideal. When she approached him he was speechless however it didn’t take him long to make up his mind and say – “Yes!”

He’d often thought of asking Justina out but then he saw her dropped off by her boyfriend in his posh car and figured she was way out of his league. Seth still lived with his mother, drove a six-year-old Toyota and was not suave by any stretch of the imagination.

It took a bit of re-arranging to get his name on the airline tickets but she managed it and off they flew first class to Rio. There was only one unforeseen snag, a reporter for the newspaper turned up and began to take pictures of the happy couple. It meant that they had to do a lot of kissing and cuddling to convince her that they were indeed on their honeymoon. Seth co-operated and responded to her every request with enthusiasm.

Justina tried not to look worried but she was, their photos and names were going to appear on the pages of a popular daily newspaper and she was not sure how she was going to explain it to everyone. However, the deed was done and she decided she was going to pretend that Seth was her husband for the next week even though she was not going to extend any conjugal benefits to him.

The reporter had been instructed not to make herself obvious and to just take photos when the couple was least expecting it. Consequently, the pair had to play the romantic couple every time they were out in public, which Justina found a little bit embarrassing, while Seth relished every minute of it and couldn’t do enough for her. Back the airport he carried all of her luggage, went off to get her coffee and even helped her off the escalator.

Justina’s ex fiance’s manners left a lot to be desired, whereas Seth went out of his way not only to be nice to her but to everyone around them. He actually seemed to create an atmosphere and because he was pleasant to people they always seemed pleasant to him. When the plane was touching down in Rio Justina had nodded off and woke up to find herself snuggled on his shoulder. Although it was not that comfortable for him he sat there with a happy smile on his face. For Seth this whole experience was unbelievable, here he was sitting next to a very beautiful woman who he was about to spend a whole week within a tropical paradise.

The hotel suite was quite luxurious but having been designed specifically for honeymooners it only had one bed. It was an enormous circular one with silk sheets and it looked very inviting. There was also several vases of beautiful flowers, a bottle of free champagne and even a cute little box covered in hearts that contained a dozen colored condoms.

Seth said he would sleep on the huge sofa that occupied one end of the suite and although she felt a little guilty forcing him to do this she didn’t think they could occupy the same bed without something developing. Being late when they arrived, dinner was delivered to their room with a bottle of wine, and by the time they’d finished that both of them were feeling a little bit tipsy.

After taking a (cold) shower Seth walked around in the short robe provided by the hotel and Justina though he looked quite attractive. When she emerged from the bathroom similarly attired he just ended up with a big hard-on.

They settled down for the night leaving one small light on and she tossed and turned in bed unable to get to sleep while he lay looking up at the ceiling wondering what it would be like to slip his dick into her gorgeous body. He was soon to find out as the exasperated and frustrated Justina called out, “Seth – come and share my bed will you – please?”

He leaped off of the sofa and under the covers in three seconds flat. Putting his arms around her narrow waist he held on to her tight letting one hand stray to fondle her breast. She hugged him back and feeling his hardened dick poking into her she was under no illusions as to what was going to happen next.

Seth treated her so tenderly she was quite surprised; certainly, her ex-fiance had never treated her that way. He gently kissed her nipples, ran his tongue over her breasts and when he touched her flower with his finger it sent sparks flying thro

The one great thing about being a writer is that you can write yourself into any story, make love to the most beautiful women, live any lifestyle you please, you can even be a time traveler if you so desire. That’s what I’ve decided to do, write myself into a continuing story where I delve deeply into my past and make it a lot more interesting than it really was. The women who ignored me, rejected me and embarrassed me better watch out – I’m cumming for you!

The Story Begins

The short period I spent working for Major Bull made me realize that I had a pretty cushy number working for John Gannon. However, I frequently thought of Inge and how very pretty she was, and occasionally I even thought of Erika.

Although I did reject her advances at the time, as I’ve grown older I’ve often wondered what she had in mind for me had I responded in a positive manner. She only attempted a kiss me, but her plunging neckline that revealed two melon-sized tits indicated to me that she was not going to necessarily be satisfied with a little tongue wrestling. Consequently, I decided to go back to that moment in the Major’s dressing room when I was a skinny, baby-faced teenager looking into the fiery eyes of a mature horny woman.

I was actually brushing a tuxedo when she came in, put her arms around my neck and tried to force me onto a single bed that was in the corner of the room. In real time I struggled to free myself, told her I had to finish my task and she naturally took umbrage and made a quick exit with a scowl on her face.

In my time travel mode I transitioned into my former self the exact moment she put her arms around me, I tossed the tux to one side and allowed her to throw me onto the bed where she wasted no time in clamping her full lips to mine. My god, her tongue felt as if it was nine inches long and it was halfway down my throat before I could gasp for air.

As she was being so aggressive I thought I get straight in there and I put my hand down the front of her off shoulder blouse and grabbed onto one of her tits. She stopped the kissing and looked down at me with a quizzical expression on her face.

“You want come to my room?” she asked, in her thick German accent.

I said I’d love to and with that, she took my hand, helped up from the bed and led me out along the corridor to her hide-a-way. We furtively entered her room, she locked the door after us, put her arms around me and kissed me passionately.

Her room was one of two that had an en suite bathroom and after taking off each other’s clothes that was our destination. Naked, Erika was very appealing, particularly when she loosened her long black hair and shook it around, it cascaded well past her waist. Her tits, of course, were her prized possession, they were large and firm and the nipples, which were dark brown and prominent, called out to be sucked.

“Let’s go in bathroom and wash clean,” she said.

I followed her lovely ass as she sashayed through the door with my enormous boner poking it as we walked. Once inside she switched on the shower and then she turned to me quite aggressively, took my shoulders and forced me under, then she soaped up a large sponge and began to wash my chest with an almost evil grin on her face. A couple of times I reached out to touch those tits of hers but she moved back and shook her head as if to say,

“It’s not your turn yet.”

Erika was very thorough with the upper part of my body, even prompting me to raise up my arms while she soaped up my armpits. However, as she worked her way down my torso and slipped a sponge between my legs, I began to shake a little. I was dying for her to grab hold of my cock but although she gave my balls a good going over she steered clear of it.

Turning me around like I was a mannequin in a store window she did my back and went up and down the crack of my ass, then she surprised me. Tossing the sponge aside she sat on the tiled floor behind me, slipping her legs between mine.

The water was still coming down on us as she reached up and grabbed onto my balls with one hand and my dick with the other.

I didn’t know it was possible for a foreskin to come back quite that far, and I certainly didn’t know it could feel that good. Her face was resting on the cheek of my ass as she applied her magic hand and gave me the best hand job ever. By the time my cum was moving up my pipe my legs had turned to jelly and I yelled out loud as my goo shot up in the air.

It was such an intense experience I had to sit down on the floor with water still cascading down my body. Erika who had got back onto her feet came and stood before me with her legs spread apart and her hairy muff against my face, I had to slip down at a slight angle to get my mouth in position and supported myself on one arm while I reached up with the other to part the lips of her flower.

When my tongue made contact with her pink folds she grabbed onto my hair and threw her head back with a groan. I began to lick her slowly, starting near her anus and continue all the way up to her clit in massive swipes. Her fingers entwined in my hair and I continued to eat her out with a passion. It tasted so good I attacked it with enthusiasm, like a condemned man enjoying his last meal.

When she was about to come she began to move her hips like a belly dancer, rubbing her cunt against my mouth and breathing like she was about to have a heart attack. When she came she wrestled my head as though she was going to tear it off my shoulders and then she quickly plumped her ass down across from me and smiled.

“That – good,” she said, “Now fuck me.”

We rolled around on the wet floor, and I sucked on those gorgeous tits before opening up her legs and sliding into her damp bush. Oh my god, she had great muscle control and it felt as though she was sucking me off.

I grabbed onto her wrists and forced them behind her head as if she was my prisoner and then I hammered her cunt with all the strength I had. Erika was in a state of ecstasy and contorted her face as if she was in pain as I thrust it deep inside of her.

It wasn’t long before my balls began to ache and I could feel my sperm getting ready to shoot up and into her love tunnel. When it did I shouted out and she screamed and wrapped her legs around me trying to squeeze out the last drop.

We lay around on the floor for a few minutes with me still sucking on her nipples and then we got up and dried each other off. It seemed as if she was now in a hurry to get back to her duties before Mrs. Bull started looking for her.

I decided to stay in character and have lunch there – she was not only a good fuck but a good cook. Inge, looking as beautiful as ever, sat across from me, and seemed a bit suspicious as Erika and I exchanged glances. Little did she know that I’d been pounding her hairy mound only a few days before. The End of Part 8

The one great thing about being a writer is that you can write yourself into any story, make love to the most beautiful women, live any lifestyle you please, you can even be a time traveler if you so desire. That’s what I’ve decided to do, write myself into a continuing story where I delve deeply into my past and make it a lot more interesting than it really was. The women who ignored me, rejected me and embarrassed me better watch out – I’m cumming for you!

The Story Begins

The short period I spent working for Major Bull made me realize that I had a pretty cushy number working for John Gannon. However, I frequently thought of Inge and how very pretty she was, and occasionally I even thought of Erika.

Although I did reject her advances at the time, as I’ve grown older I’ve often wondered what she had in mind for me had I responded in a positive manner. She only attempted a kiss me, but her plunging neckline that revealed two melon-sized tits indicated to me that she was not going to necessarily be satisfied with a little tongue wrestling. Consequently, I decided to go back to that moment in the Major’s dressing room when I was a skinny, baby-faced teenager looking into the fiery eyes of a mature horny woman.

I was actually brushing a tuxedo when she came in, put her arms around my neck and tried to force me onto a single bed that was in the corner of the room. In real time I struggled to free myself, told her I had to finish my task and she naturally took umbrage and made a quick exit with a scowl on her face.

In my time travel mode I transitioned into my former self the exact moment she put her arms around me, I tossed the tux to one side and allowed her to throw me onto the bed where she wasted no time in clamping her full lips to mine. My god, her tongue felt as if it was nine inches long and it was halfway down my throat before I could gasp for air.

As she was being so aggressive I thought I get straight in there and I put my hand down the front of her off shoulder blouse and grabbed onto one of her tits. She stopped the kissing and looked down at me with a quizzical expression on her face.

“You want come to my room?” she asked, in her thick German accent.

I said I’d love to and with that, she took my hand, helped up from the bed and led me out along the corridor to her hide-a-way. We furtively entered her room, she locked the door after us, put her arms around me and kissed me passionately.

Her room was one of two that had an en suite bathroom and after taking off each other’s clothes that was our destination. Naked, Erika was very appealing, particularly when she loosened her long black hair and shook it around, it cascaded well past her waist. Her tits, of course, were her prized possession, they were large and firm and the nipples, which were dark brown and prominent, called out to be sucked.

“Let’s go in bathroom and wash clean,” she said.

I followed her lovely ass as she sashayed through the door with my enormous boner poking it as we walked. Once inside she switched on the shower and then she turned to me quite aggressively, took my shoulders and forced me under, then she soaped up a large sponge and began to wash my chest with an almost evil grin on her face. A couple of times I reached out to touch those tits of hers but she moved back and shook her head as if to say,

“It’s not your turn yet.”

Erika was very thorough with the upper part of my body, even prompting me to raise up my arms while she soaped up my armpits. However, as she worked her way down my torso and slipped a sponge between my legs, I began to shake a little. I was dying for her to grab hold of my cock but although she gave my balls a good going over she steered clear of it.

Turning me around like I was a mannequin in a store window she did my back and went up and down the crack of my ass, then she surprised me. Tossing the sponge aside she sat on the tiled floor behind me, slipping her legs between mine.

The water was still coming down on us as she reached up and grabbed onto my balls with one hand and my dick with the other.

I didn’t know it was possible for a foreskin to come back quite that far, and I certainly didn’t know it could feel that good. Her face was resting on the cheek of my ass as she applied her magic hand and gave me the best hand job ever. By the time my cum was moving up my pipe my legs had turned to jelly and I yelled out loud as my goo shot up in the air.

It was such an intense experience I had to sit down on the floor with water still cascading down my body. Erika who had got back onto her feet came and stood before me with her legs spread apart and her hairy muff against my face, I had to slip down at a slight angle to get my mouth in position and supported myself on one arm while I reached up with the other to part the lips of her flower.

When my tongue made contact with her pink folds she grabbed onto my hair and threw her head back with a groan. I began to lick her slowly, starting near her anus and continue all the way up to her clit in massive swipes. Her fingers entwined in my hair and I continued to eat her out with a passion. It tasted so good I attacked it with enthusiasm, like a condemned man enjoying his last meal.

When she was about to come she began to move her hips like a belly dancer, rubbing her cunt against my mouth and breathing like she was about to have a heart attack. When she came she wrestled my head as though she was going to tear it off my shoulders and then she quickly plumped her ass down across from me and smiled.

“That – good,” she said, “Now fuck me.”

We rolled around on the wet floor, and I sucked on those gorgeous tits before opening up her legs and sliding into her damp bush. Oh my god, she had great muscle control and it felt as though she was sucking me off.

I grabbed onto her wrists and forced them behind her head as if she was my prisoner and then I hammered her cunt with all the strength I had. Erika was in a state of ecstasy and contorted her face as if she was in pain as I thrust it deep inside of her.

It wasn’t long before my balls began to ache and I could feel my sperm getting ready to shoot up and into her love tunnel. When it did I shouted out and she screamed and wrapped her legs around me trying to squeeze out the last drop.

We lay around on the floor for a few minutes with me still sucking on her nipples and then we got up and dried each other off. It seemed as if she was now in a hurry to get back to her duties before Mrs. Bull started looking for her.

I decided to stay in character and have lunch there – she was not only a good fuck but a good cook. Inge, looking as beautiful as ever, sat across from me, and seemed a bit suspicious as Erika and I exchanged glances. Little did she know that I’d been pounding her hairy mound only a few days before. The End of Part 8

The one great thing about being a writer is that you can write yourself into any story, make love to the most beautiful women, live any lifestyle you please, you can even be a time traveler if you so desire. That’s what I’ve decided to do, write myself into a continuing story where I delve deeply into my past and make it a lot more interesting than it really was. The women who ignored me, rejected me and embarrassed me better watch out – I’m cumming for you!

The Story Begins

The short period I spent working for Major Bull made me realize that I had a pretty cushy number working for John Gannon. However, I frequently thought of Inge and how very pretty she was, and occasionally I even thought of Erika.

Although I did reject her advances at the time, as I’ve grown older I’ve often wondered what she had in mind for me had I responded in a positive manner. She only attempted a kiss me, but her plunging neckline that revealed two melon-sized tits indicated to me that she was not going to necessarily be satisfied with a little tongue wrestling. Consequently, I decided to go back to that moment in the Major’s dressing room when I was a skinny, baby-faced teenager looking into the fiery eyes of a mature horny woman.

I was actually brushing a tuxedo when she came in, put her arms around my neck and tried to force me onto a single bed that was in the corner of the room. In real time I struggled to free myself, told her I had to finish my task and she naturally took umbrage and made a quick exit with a scowl on her face.

In my time travel mode I transitioned into my former self the exact moment she put her arms around me, I tossed the tux to one side and allowed her to throw me onto the bed where she wasted no time in clamping her full lips to mine. My god, her tongue felt as if it was nine inches long and it was halfway down my throat before I could gasp for air.

As she was being so aggressive I thought I get straight in there and I put my hand down the front of her off shoulder blouse and grabbed onto one of her tits. She stopped the kissing and looked down at me with a quizzical expression on her face.

“You want come to my room?” she asked, in her thick German accent.

I said I’d love to and with that, she took my hand, helped up from the bed and led me out along the corridor to her hide-a-way. We furtively entered her room, she locked the door after us, put her arms around me and kissed me passionately.

Her room was one of two that had an en suite bathroom and after taking off each other’s clothes that was our destination. Naked, Erika was very appealing, particularly when she loosened her long black hair and shook it around, it cascaded well past her waist. Her tits, of course, were her prized possession, they were large and firm and the nipples, which were dark brown and prominent, called out to be sucked.

“Let’s go in bathroom and wash clean,” she said.

I followed her lovely ass as she sashayed through the door with my enormous boner poking it as we walked. Once inside she switched on the shower and then she turned to me quite aggressively, took my shoulders and forced me under, then she soaped up a large sponge and began to wash my chest with an almost evil grin on her face. A couple of times I reached out to touch those tits of hers but she moved back and shook her head as if to say,

“It’s not your turn yet.”

Erika was very thorough with the upper part of my body, even prompting me to raise up my arms while she soaped up my armpits. However, as she worked her way down my torso and slipped a sponge between my legs, I began to shake a little. I was dying for her to grab hold of my cock but although she gave my balls a good going over she steered clear of it.

Turning me around like I was a mannequin in a store window she did my back and went up and down the crack of my ass, then she surprised me. Tossing the sponge aside she sat on the tiled floor behind me, slipping her legs between mine.

The water was still coming down on us as she reached up and grabbed onto my balls with one hand and my dick with the other.

I didn’t know it was possible for a foreskin to come back quite that far, and I certainly didn’t know it could feel that good. Her face was resting on the cheek of my ass as she applied her magic hand and gave me the best hand job ever. By the time my cum was moving up my pipe my legs had turned to jelly and I yelled out loud as my goo shot up in the air.

It was such an intense experience I had to sit down on the floor with water still cascading down my body. Erika who had got back onto her feet came and stood before me with her legs spread apart and her hairy muff against my face, I had to slip down at a slight angle to get my mouth in position and supported myself on one arm while I reached up with the other to part the lips of her flower.

When my tongue made contact with her pink folds she grabbed onto my hair and threw her head back with a groan. I began to lick her slowly, starting near her anus and continue all the way up to her clit in massive swipes. Her fingers entwined in my hair and I continued to eat her out with a passion. It tasted so good I attacked it with enthusiasm, like a condemned man enjoying his last meal.

When she was about to come she began to move her hips like a belly dancer, rubbing her cunt against my mouth and breathing like she was about to have a heart attack. When she came she wrestled my head as though she was going to tear it off my shoulders and then she quickly plumped her ass down across from me and smiled.

“That – good,” she said, “Now fuck me.”

We rolled around on the wet floor, and I sucked on those gorgeous tits before opening up her legs and sliding into her damp bush. Oh my god, she had great muscle control and it felt as though she was sucking me off.

I grabbed onto her wrists and forced them behind her head as if she was my prisoner and then I hammered her cunt with all the strength I had. Erika was in a state of ecstasy and contorted her face as if she was in pain as I thrust it deep inside of her.

It wasn’t long before my balls began to ache and I could feel my sperm getting ready to shoot up and into her love tunnel. When it did I shouted out and she screamed and wrapped her legs around me trying to squeeze out the last drop.

We lay around on the floor for a few minutes with me still sucking on her nipples and then we got up and dried each other off. It seemed as if she was now in a hurry to get back to her duties before Mrs. Bull started looking for her.

I decided to stay in character and have lunch there – she was not only a good fuck but a good cook. Inge, looking as beautiful as ever, sat across from me, and seemed a bit suspicious as Erika and I exchanged glances. Little did she know that I’d been pounding her hairy mound only a few days before. The End of Part 8

Brent Harmon knew that his new girlfriend had slept with a few guys before him and he was able to accept that but when Tami took him to her home in the country for the weekend he was faced with quite an unusual situation. A situation that was a little more difficult to cope with.

Her mother Emily, who was a pretty good looking woman for her age, greeted him with a smile, but then laid down the law to her daughter.

“I don’t know what you two get up to back in the city – but in my house, you’re going to have separate rooms.”

“Oh mom,”

“Don’t Oh mom me, you know the rules and I’m sure that Brent understands my position.”

He nodded his head in agreement because there seemed no alternative. The whole family appeared to be very pleasant and treated him well and so he settled himself in for an enjoyable weekend, even though it promised to be a celibate one. It was not until bedtime that he became aware of what “Oh Mom” really meant.

Brent kissed Tami goodnight outside her bedroom door and proceeded to his designated room to find her mother sitting on his bed in the nude. Of course, he thought he was in the wrong room for a moment but she soon informed him that wasn’t the case. She had two glasses of brandy on the bedside table and she held one out to him.

“I thought we’d have a little nightcap and a chat before retiring,” she said.

He was totally shocked by what was happening but at the same time the forty-year-old Mrs. Duncan had a great figure, and with her hair cascading down to her breasts like a legendary siren he was getting a bit excited.

“Do you think Tami will be Ok with you and me sitting like this,” he asked, taking the glass and placing his bum beside hers.

“Of course, I’ve fucked all her boyfriends at one time or another, and two of her girlfriends – it’s sort of a family ritual.”

“And Mr. Duncan?”

“Eric? He loves it – see that little hole in the wall over there,” she pointed to an area above the dressing table, “That hole is from our bedroom – he loves to watch – don’t you Eric,” she called out, giving him a little wave.

Poor Brent almost choked on his drink as Emily knocked hers back in one gulp. He wasn’t that keen on fucking his girl friend’s mother but in front of her father, that seemed completely obscene. However, when her hand rubbed up his thigh and gently stroked his dick he began to feel that maybe he was being a bit too prudish.

“Why don’t you take your clothes off and I’ll suck your cock for you,” she smiled, starting to help by unbuttoning his shirt. Then she added,

“Hurry up – dear Eric gets impatient leaning against the wall if there’s no action going on.”

Now Brent wasn’t completely convinced that what he was doing was right but he seemed cornered, and his dick was sticking up like a flagpole and so he slipped off his things and in an instant Emily threw him on the bed, opened up his legs like a chicken and went down on him.

Her generous lips, as soft as velvet, slid down his dick and completely took his breath away. She was just about to go up and down on again it when there was a knock on the wall.

“Oh shit,” she said, “I don’t think Eric can see what’s going on, can you move your ass around that way so he can get a clear few.”

Brent’s dick actually started to deflate a bit because he wasn’t really into to playing to a fucking audience. It didn’t deter Emily, she worked it with her hands, her lips and her tongue until it was as hard as a rock, and then she kept working it and stroking his balls until a gush of hot cum shot up his pipe and into her mouth.

He was still lying there breathing heavy when she got up from her knees, walked around the bed and climbing up at the back of him, reversed herself and stuck her cunt right over his face. It was warm and wet and spread out over his mouth and partially over his nose.

Brent knew what was required of him and so he began to lick up, down and sideways, at the same time reaching up to play with her tits. She loved it and started to call out things like, “Oh Brent your so naughty– but keep doing it, it’s lovely.”

She used a baby voice that was a bit creepy but he tried to not waiver in his enthusiasm and kept eating away, sometimes chewing at the lips, sometimes licking up and down the slit. When she came she screamed and started bouncing her ass up and down on his face. It took a few seconds for her to stop trembling then she flung herself onto her back and yelled, quite loudly, “Now fuck me like you fuck our Tami.”

Brent climbed between her legs and stuffed it in, her face broke out into an almost sinister smile and asked him to hold it there for a while. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do as he was dying to cum again. It must have been thirty seconds before she slapped his ass and yelled, “Go for it!”

He just rammed it into her hard and fast. Her tits, that were at least twice as big as Tami’s, jiggled and bounced as he pounded her pussy and he was just dying to cum inside of her of her warm wet crack. When his balls began to ache and he felt his goo traveling up his dick once more it was his turn to yell as he shot his load. It seemed to be streaming out forever and she held on to him tight as he gave her a cunt full.

The next morning when he arrived at the breakfast table Tami gave him a little kiss on the cheek and said, “I hear you did very well last night.” His face went little red and he tried to force a smile but then Eric chimed up, “Very well? He did fucking marvelous – I loved it – keep up the good work my boy.”

At that moment the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life came walking through the door. She had the figure of a supermodel and the face of an angel.

“This is my …” Tami began but was interrupted.

“Just call me Joanne – I’m delighted to meet you,”

The conversation that followed left him in no doubt that it would be Joanne that would be sharing his room that night – he got an enormous hard on just thinking about it.

As he strolled around the garden with Tami later than morning he remarked what a nice person Joanne was.

The Jacques family were old Louisiana stock and it was their plan to marry off their daughter April to an equally old American family. The problem was their daughter was a rebel and this is where Hadrian Parker came in.

The twenty-three-year-old carpenter was doing some work at Nevaeh Reagan’s house, she was a friend of April and the two were spending the day together, splashing in the pool, playing tennis on the grass court, riding horses and all the other things that wealthy people do on their lavish estates. Later in the afternoon, just as Hadrian was about to pack up his tools and go home, the girls invited him to sit with them on the patio to have a drink.

He wasn’t keen on the idea at first but a lot of pressure was applied and so eventually he sat down to a cold beer. The girls had been eying him all day and giggling every time they saw him. It didn’t particularly worry him, he thought they were just a couple of ignorant upper-class snobs putting down an honest working man. However, it turned out to be more than that – much more.

“It’s April the first on Saturday,” said April, “and I wondered if you’d like to earn some money playing a little joke?”

Hadrian was a bit suspicious of spoiled rich kids and so he approached the offer cautiously and asked what it was all about.

“Well my parents are set on me marrying one of their friend’s sons – either Thomas the banker or Henry the cosmetic surgeon. I don’t particularly mind because they’re both rich and if I don’t like them I can always fuck away from home.”

She looked at him as though he was supposed to know what she was getting at but when he said “So what?” it was Nevaeh that continued the story, in between giggling.

“She wants you to go over to her house for dinner on Friday night and she’s going to present you as her fiancé. It will blow their minds.”

“Yes – Friday night we always have a family movie after dinner and it’s usually after midnight when we finish,” April cut in, “At one minute after 12 we’ll both stand up and say April’s fooled you – won’t that be fun?”

He said he wasn’t interested but when she offered him $500 it began to sound as though it might be fun after all.

“You’ve got a decent blazer and slacks haven’t you?” she asked looking his working attire up and down.

He wasn’t too happy with the way he was being patronized but he did need the $500 and so he said he would look respectable. At that point April fumbled in her purse and gave him her card.

“You can arrive in that old pick-up truck if you like,” she said, “It will be a nice touch.”

Hadrian went away wondering whether he should call the whole thing off but in the end he decided to go ahead with the arrangement and he arrived at the Jacques mansion in his mud-splattered truck. April tripped down the steps to meet him, threw her arms around him and started to kiss him. He was taken by surprise but it felt good and so he reciprocated thinking it would probably be a long time before he’d kiss the heiress to a billion dollar fortune again.

Hand in hand they walked up the steps, the butler bowed as he entered and then it was into the formal drawing room to meet the family. Unlike the daughter, who was beauty queen material, Mrs. Jacques made Whistler’s mother look attractive. Mr. Jacques, who insisted that he called him Mr. Jacques, was a typical shifty-eyed tycoon and Hadrian thought that he would have made a very good concentration camp commandant.

In spite of April saying, “Isn’t he just the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen,” the reception was frigid, to say the least. Hadrian figured that sometime during the evening the old man would offer him a large check to break off the engagement and promise not to see his daughter ever again.

The dining room was sumptuous and the table was awash with silver and the finest china and crystal. Fortunately, Hadrian’s grandmother, who had worked as a housekeeper for a family like the Jacques, was always very formal and so he didn’t feel quite as uncomfortable as April thought he might.

There was lots of idle chatter at the table but he kept out of it. They didn’t ask him any questions probably because they had no intention of letting him marry their daughter. As they sat having a brandy and a cigar after dinner Mr. Jacques kept looking at his watch, making it obvious that they were anxious for him to be on his way.

April was about to suggest that they retired to the audiovisual theater for the movie, however, when she picked up on their anxiety to be rid of her supposed fiancé it kindled up the rebel deep inside of her.

“Why don’t you stay for the night Hadrian, then we can go over to Nevaeh’s place for a game of tennis first thing in the morning. Mrs. Jacques nearly choked on her brandy and her husband on his cigar.

“Well” her mother stammered, “We could get Jameson to make up a room for him I suppose,” and she said it as though she’d rather take poison given the option.

“Come on mother, we’re engaged to be married – he can sleep with me.”
It was Hadrian’s turn to choke on the brandy and when his eyes had stopped watering he saw her parent’s faces twisted in absolute disgust at the thought of their only daughter sharing a bed with a lowly carpenter.

“If you’re engaged – where’s the ring?” snapped, Mrs. Jacques.

“Oh it’s being re-sized – but it’s quite beautiful,” she sighed, “and no matter what people say it’s almost impossible to tell a Zircon from a real diamond.”

After more choking April took him by the hand and led him up the spiral staircase to her room, a room that turned out to be larger than most people’s apartments.

“Maybe my little scheme will have more impact if we go to breakfast in the morning and then shout April’s fooled you, although I losing enthusiasm for the whole thing,” she said, “They’re such snobs aren’t they.”

April began to strip off her clothes and suggested that he do the same so that they could shower together. He’d thought that she was very attractive the first time he saw her in her tennis outfit but naked she was absolutely fucking gorgeous. Her tits were nicely shaped and perky, her hips the sort that any man would love to hold on to and the sight of her pubic undergrowth made his dick double its size in anticipation.

He wasn’t the only one impressed, she looked him up and down and smiled with approval at his well-toned body and the fact that his dick was pointing menacingly in her direction. When they climbed in the shower he decided to take the sponge and lather every bump and crack on her nubile form. She threw her head back and sighed as he worked his way from her tits to her thighs, lingering a little longer in her pubic area.

When it was her turn she spent most of the time on his balls, they had never been so clean. She went down on her knees for a close-up inspection and he thought she might take it in her mouth but she didn’t – that was to come later.

The bed was king sized and when she spread her naked body across those crisp white sheets he would have liked to have just rammed it in and copulated there and then, but instead he took it slowly. He first moved a finger up the inside of her leg, pausing at her love orchid for a moment and then proceeding upwards to circle her tits. After a few trips up and down he took one of her nipples in his mouth while he pinched the other between his thumb and forefinger. April began to sigh and groan so he knew he was doing it right.

As he sucked her tits his finger strayed in a southerly direction until he inserted it gently in her groove – it was warm and very, very wet. He put two fingers in and moved them slowly in and out which caused her to grab him by the neck and press her lips against his. As their tongues entwined he kept on poking her with his two fingers and then suddenly moved down the bed and placed his face between her hot white thighs.

She gasped and moved her ass around, and when he parted her pink petals and began to flick them with his tongue her groans got louder.
It tasted so good and Hadrian kept working up and down her groove as she grabbed his hair and began to breath hard and fast. He increased his speed accordingly and she held on to him tightly as her body began to tremble. The muscles around her pussy begin to contract and then she screamed and pushed him away as if she could stand no more.

He lay beside her for a few moments as she kept on shaking and then she turned, looking at him with those big blue eyes and whispered,

“That was wonderful – you make me feel so good.”

She gave him a little hug and then slipped down the bed and started to finger his balls, she then spit on his dick and pulled back the foreskin as far as it would go. He gasped when she took it between those full lips of hers and sucked it gently, a little bit at the head and then driving the whole thing halfway down her throat.

April figured he’d have no problem cumming a couple of times in a row and so she began to work it in and out of her mouth, making soft grunting sounds as she did so. It wasn’t long before he felt shock waves surging through his body and an aching in his balls.

“I’m cumming – I’m cumming,” he called out but she kept on going until he exploded and shot a whole lot of cream filling into her mouth. She didn’t take it out right away she just sucked gently and stroked his balls to make sure his dick became rock hard again.

When it was to her satisfaction she climbed on top of him and lowered herself onto it. He held on to her tits as she moved up and down, gyrating her ass around as she did so. It was so hot and wet inside that he felt an urgency to cum but she was in charge.

She kept up her rodeo act for a while and then decided that she wanted him to ram it into her and so she rolled over, opened up her legs and sighed as she waited for him to bury his dick into her bush. He had trouble inserting the head at first but once he felt it gripping onto the end he rammed it into the hilt, as she yelled “Oh shit!” as if her cunt had never had to stretch that wide before.

He just held it in position for a while before beginning to slide it in and out slowly, but the sight of her jiggling tits and the fact that she was calling out “Fuck me – fuck me – fuck me,” drove Hadrian to give it all he’d got, and he soon felt his sperm moving up his pipes and shooting inside of her. April wrapped her legs around him and kissed him passionately as if they were real lovers.

Later, much to his surprise. she called down to the kitchen for a tray to be brought up and they sat in bed together talking and drinking hot chocolate. She didn’t seem like a snob anymore and to his amazement they shared such of lot of same values.

The morning of April the first, after another shower and another bout of intimate wrestling, they went down to face the two dragons in the breakfast room. Before anybody could say April Fools or any other shit Mr. Jacques waved a piece of paper in Hadrian’s face.

“Here’s a check for a hundred thousand dollars,” he said, “I want you to leave this house and sign an agreement that you will never try to see my daughter again, in other words – break off your engagement.”

Hadrian took the check and the agreement as April glanced over at him. He looked it over and then handed it back.

“I’m sorry Mr. Jacques, I love your daughter and you can’t pay me to stop to seeing her, however, if she wants to break our engagement that’s a different matter.”

He looked over to April and she was shaking her head, “I don’t want to break it off,” she sniffled as if she was about to cry and then she ran over to him and threw her arms around his neck.

“I can’t believe you turned down a hundred grand,” she whispered with her eyes tearing up, “And if Daddy decides to cut me off I may not even be able to pay you the five hundred I owe you.”

“In that case – I think you can say goodbye to that Zircon ring.”

Hugging each other they burst into laughter while Mr. and Mrs. Jacques, obviously defeated, decided to make the best of the situation and began to plan a lavish wedding. THE END

Jonathon Wade and his wife Heidi had been happily married for three years. He had a decent position in a local law firm and for the first two, she seemed to be quite contented to stay at home. However, after a while, she started to become restless and wanted a job.

She didn’t have any particular skills and so the best she could get was a position as a filing clerk for a large fabric distributor. Heidi was pretty and this didn’t go unnoticed, particularly by the owner of the company Calvin Willison. When he saw her bending over to retrieve some papers she’d dropped on the floor one day, he couldn’t help being turned on by her beautifully round bum and long shapely legs. The following morning he informed her that he wanted to take out to lunch, saying it was to discuss the possible implementation of a new filing system but Heidi wasn’t born yesterday.

The trip in his fancy Jaguar, the elegant restaurant and the smooth talking well dressed Mr. Willison made a great impression on her, and even more so as the lunches got more frequent and he began to give her a ride home after work. Inevitably this led to him being invited in for a coffee and soon they were fucking like two randy rabbits on the same bed that she serviced her husband. Unfortunately for him, this was becoming less and less frequent.

It wasn’t long before Jonathon latched on to what was happening and he made a few inquiries about Mr. Willison, who seemed to have built quite a reputation over the years. However, instead of confronting his wife, who he felt he probably couldn’t trust anymore, he decided on revenge. First, he set up a hidden video camera in the bedroom and over a few weeks collected some interesting footage. In fact, he found his wife, who often complained about giving him a blowjob, was sucking her boss’s dick as so it was the flavor of the month.
During his inquiries, he had learned that his wife’s lover lived in a rather palatial house with a very attractive wife named Clare, who had once been his secretary and the cause of his divorce from his first wife. One day he stopped by the Willison house and presented his business card to the fornicator’s spouse, and then over coffee, he discussed her husbands’ infidelity with Heidi.

At first, she wouldn’t believe it but when he fired up his laptop and showed some of the footage, that he’d had professionally edited, she was shocked. Not only shocked but the provocatively dressed Mrs. Willison started to get turned on.

“Do you know,” she mused, “Sometimes he doesn’t want me to suck his dick and here he is letting your wife make a meal of it.”

“I can tell you that she doesn’t do that for me very often.”

“What should I do Jonathon,” she asked, shaking her head, “Should I suck your dick to make things equal.”

“We could certainly try that – it might make us both feel better.”
Clare immediately knelt on the floor in front of him and almost hysterically tried to remove his pants while he was still sitting down. Not wanting to impede her progress he stood up and dropped them to the floor and she quickly plunged his boner into her mouth and crammed as much down her throat as was humanly possible.

As she slipped up and down his cock she made yummy sounds as though it was the best thing she’d ever tasted. Keeping one hand around the base of it, she used the other to fondle his balls and it didn’t take long before they started to ache and he could feel his sperms lining up for a breakout.

When he shot his load into her mouth Clare kept pumping away and he had to stop her as his nerve endings were threatening to self-combust.

“Do you fancy licking me out,” she asked, standing up and ripping off her skirt to expose the flimsiest of thongs.

He didn’t answer but went down on his knees, slipped the little bit of lace down her legs and started to lick her neatly trimmed pussy. She groaned out loud but he knew it was not the best of positions and so he lay her down on the carpet opened up her legs and placed his face between her warm firm thighs.

“Oh my god,” that feels good, she gasped as his tongue began to explore the folds of her juicy slit. Not wanting to rush things he stopped after a while, which frustrated her, but he moved up her body, struggled to remove her top and started to suck on her nipples. At the same time, he shoved two fingers up her cunt and began to move them in and out. Clare was groaning and blowing and rubbing her hands around his neck as though it was too much for her. When she started to tremble, the muscles in her pussy contracted around his fingers and she began to scream, arch her body and pull on his hair.

Jonathon slipped down between her legs again and parting her petals with his fingers he ran his tongue up and down the length of her slit. Within a very short time, she was writhing around as if she was going into a seizure and breathlessly calling out , “Fuck me – come on fuck me – fuck me – I want to be fucked.”

He tore off the rest of his clothes and then lay his naked body on hers. Clare gave a little grunt as his stiff throbbing cock penetrated deep inside her wet cunt. She dug her long painted fingernails into his back as he started to plow in and out of her with increasing speed.

He kept ramming it in hard and fast until he could feel his cum moving up through his tubes once more and then shooting into her vibrating vagina. As he continued to drive it into her she moved her ass up and down calling out “Oh shit – that was so good – Oh Jonathon you make me feel so good inside.”

When he removed his dripping knob she took her top that was lying beside her and gently dabbed the end. “If your wife prefers my husband’s lovemaking to yours – she’s got something wrong with her head,” she said, “That was the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. I’m going to be walking bow-legged for a week.”

After a few laughs, the couple got down to some serious business.

“I want you to be my lawyer,” she informed him, “I want to take the bastard for everything he’s got and maybe when it’s all over you and I could get together.”

He kissed her lightly on the lips, “Do you promise to give me a blowjob whenever I want one.”

He’d only met Serina in script meetings, where she was venomous as a Cobra, and wondered if she acted like that all the time or whether she sometimes let her hair down and relaxed. Granville was about to find out.

Despite her being critical of him on many occasions when confronted by serious dilemma she called on him to help her sort it out. A whole pile of scripts had been rejected for one thing or another by her co-producers and they wanted it all fixed in four days.

It was arranged that he go with her to a cabin she had up in the mountains and they would slug it out until it was done. He would rather have eaten a live cockroach than spending four days sequestered with Serina but he didn’t have much choice and the money was very good.

She picked him up in her BMW and drove like a bat out of hell until they reached their destination. The weather was warm and she just wore a halter top and a very short skirt. He thought she looked pretty good for a woman in her late thirties but when he got inside the building there was something even better – a very pretty Thai maid.

“This is Mani, she looks after the place for me – she’s a great cook so you’re in for a treat.”

The maid slipped out to unload the groceries and Granville gave her a hand. He could take his eyes of her firm little ass as he followed her up the steps nor could he ignore the view he got down her top as she struggled to put the bags down.

Meanwhile, his boss was piling up scripts on the coffee table.

“Stop looking at Mani’s tits and sit down here,” she called out, “We’re going to work like fuck.”

He was a little embarrassed but the maid gave him a friendly wink and a smile and he thought that was very encouraging. As he took his seat beside the Cobra she told him that they were going work right up until dinner at eight and then they were going to chill out – whatever that was supposed to mean.

Pens were drawn right away and they set to work trying to save some very bad writing. During what seemed to be an endless, tiresome day, she cursed like a sailor at both the original writers and him, threw things and occasional screamed and went into a full blown tantrum. Granville was so relieved when it was time for dinner.

The meal was punctuated with at least two bottles of wine between them and liqueurs to follow. Afterward, they all flopped on the big overstuffed sofa and he presumed this was her idea of chilling out. However, she did come up with something that rather surprised him

“I didn’t bring you up here to fuck you Granville but I wanted you to know that Mani and I usually sleep in the same bed and diddle each other’s pussies.”

The Thai girl giggled.

“It’s a king sized bed so there’s plenty of room if you want to join in. You can have a separate room if you want it’s up to you.”

He was quite shocked by her suggestion but as he eyed the young women over, he thought he’d be a prize fool to refuse such an opportunity. Mani looked rather pleased with his acceptance and he couldn’t wait to fondle that neat little body of hers.

By ten they were all showering and preparing for bed. Nobody seemed to want to dress after that and they just walked around naked. It felt like he’d been paid an enormous bonus as he watched the two girls with their beautiful tits and shaved pussies leap onto the bed and then smile, as if to say, “Are you coming?”

Before he could climb into bed the two of them were kissing but that stopped when he hit the covers.

“Let’s play a little game,” said Serina and she picked up the clock from the bedside table.” You have to make both of us cum Granville, and we’ll time it to see who cums first. You can start with Mani.”

That was music to his ears because although Serina was extremely attractive he figured she’d be telling him what to do all the way through to orgasm – and that’s if she had one. Mani snuggled up to him and he started off by kissing her. Her soft warm lips caused his dick to grow another couple of inches and when he began to suck her small but beautifully shaped tits he felt as if was about to cum already.

She whimpered a little as he licked her nipples and then taking his tongue down the center of her belly he put his face between her thighs. Now she was groaning in anticipation and when he parted her pink folds and began to flick his tongue up and down she shouted out loud. She swore very well for someone who only spoke English as a second language.

Granville slipped off of the bed dragging her legs so that he could kneel on the floor and bury his face in her wet crack. He began to work her pussy with his tongue and his finger with one hand still free to reach up and squeeze a nipple.

It didn’t take long at all before she was screaming “I’m cumming, I’m cumming,” and her whole body seemed to be going into a spasm.

The Cobra was impressed. “Now I know as your boss you’ll be expecting me to give you instructions but I’m not – do whatever you want – you can even be a little bit rough if you want to.”

He figured that was subtle instructions in itself and he saw it as an opportunity to be at least a little dominant.

“OK lie over me,” he said.

She did as she was told and her tits hung down within easy reach of his mouth. He then grabbed them with his hands and started to suck them hard. Serina moaned as he kneaded them like he was making two cottage loaves and then he slid his body between her legs and started to lick her wet slit.

With a struggle, he was able to reach back to keep playing with her boobs while his tongue traveled the length of her crack again, and again, and again. When Serena reached the Big O she went into a frenzy and slipping off the bed she began to kiss him all over the face as if she really fancied him.

As Mani, with the clock in hand, declared herself the winner Serina went down on his dick and she didn’t stop sucking until he blew a big load in her mouth. The Thai beauty not wanting to left out of the action joined them on the floor and started to play with his balls attempting to get him hard again. When it did return to its former glory Serina encouraged him to fuck Mani, “It will be my turn tomorrow night,” she said.

Back on the bed, the petite Mani lay there smiling up at him as he slid his shaft deep inside her tight little crack. Granville couldn’t believe how good it felt and as he began to pound her pussy those gorgeous brown tits bounced to and fro driving him to increase his pace until he yelled, “Fuck it’s cumming,” and she started to squirm around like a frog in a sock as he shot his load into her.

Serina was still diddling herself when they stopped and continued until she started writhing all over the bed in self-induced ecstasy.

The following day she was back in the caustic producer mode. She criticized and bullied, threw his revisions up in the air and once told him he was a talentless worm. It went on until he could stand it no longer.

“Shut the Fuck up or you’ll have to fuck yourself tonight,” he yelled.

Poor Mami, who picking some the papers froze on the spot as if she was terrified but the Cobra didn’t strike. She certainly didn’t say she was sorry but she started to act like a normal human being – that was until she was in bed of course. THE END

“No ma’am,”

“Have you ever desired someone much older than yourself, let’s say you were trapped in here with Sandra Bullock naked would you be tempted.”

“I sure would.”

“Well as Sandra Bullock isn’t here but I am – how does that make you feel.”

“Do you mean you want me to fuck you?” he stammered, rearing to go but wondering if he could really be that lucky.

“It’s not very comfortable but if you’re interested we could try it.”

Larry made a sudden grab for her but she slowed him down, then she took off the T shirt and exposed her great tits. He knelt down in front of her and started to suck. Because she was perspiring from the heat she tasted rather salty and he liked that.

Lora rubbed his muscular shoulders as he continued to lick and fondle her gorgeous tits and then he struggled to insert a finger into her hairy crack. She slid forward a little on the seat to make it easier for him. When his finger was firmly inserted in her warm wet love tunnel he began to move it around while continuing to suck on her nipples.
She moaned and groaned and pulled him closer to her but then he broke her gr grief,” she cried out, as he parted her petals with his strong fingers and pressed his face into her damp crack.

His tongue began to work up and down the lips of her pussy and when he hit certain nerve centers she would jump and cry out as if it was so good she couldn’t stand it. After a while, she placed her hands under his armpits and encouraged him to move up so that his hard dick was nestled between her tits. They were soft, warm and well lubricated with her sweat so he was able to slide it up and down her cleavage quite easily.

She didn’t want him to cum and so when his face began to look tense and contorted she quickly got up and turned around placing her hands on the side of the cabinet. He grabbed onto her hip bones and drove his dick into her, creating a slapping sound has his thighs slammed into beautiful round ass.

As he pumped it into her crack at a steady pace she began to cry out, “Make me cum, do it faster and make me cum.” He increased his muzzle velocity until he was driving in and out of her at a frenzied pace. Lora could feel herself cumming and as he moved into the short strokes, and reached round to grab onto her tits, she went absolutely insane. She screamed out loud and her body vibrated so much he had a job to keep his cock embedded in her cunt.

Even when he’d emptied the contents of his balls into her cock pocket Larry hung onto those tits and kept on banging it in. The snooty Lady Mayor seemed disappointed when he gave that final thrust with a big grunt and backed away.

They fucked a further two times and then at midnight Larry casually put his finger in the hole where the door knob had been, turned it a little and the door swung open.

“You fucking bastard,” she cried, “You devious cock-sucking little bastard, you knew you could do that all along.”

“Yes I’ve been planning to fix that handle for some time but I’m rather pleased I didn’t now – aren’t you?.”

Lora didn’t answer she just shoved past him and grabbed her clothes that were hanging outside. As she put them on she looked at him and shook her head,

“I want you to report to my office after college tomorrow – you can say goodbye to your janitorial duties – there’s a future for you in politics my boy.” THE END

2. Cold War 2.0


Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer—nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion—and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.


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That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering—it is baffling—it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”

The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”

Last September, at a G-20 summit, in China, Obama confronted Putin about the hacking, telling him to “cut it out,” and, above all, to keep away from the balloting in November, or there would be “serious consequences.” Putin neither denied nor confirmed the hacking efforts, but replied that the United States has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs.
Cartoon


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Tweet



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In October, as evidence of Russian meddling mounted, senior national-security officials met to consider a plan of response; proposals included releasing damaging information about Russian officials, including their bank accounts, or a cyber operation directed at Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry was concerned that such plans might undercut diplomatic efforts to get Russia to coöperate with the West in Syria—efforts that eventually failed. In the end, security officials unanimously agreed to take a measured approach: the Administration issued a statement, on October 7th, declaring it was confident that the Russians had hacked the D.N.C. The Administration did not want to overreact in a way that could seem political and amplify Trump’s message that the vote was rigged.

The White House watched for signs that Russian intelligence was crossing what a senior national-security official called “the line between covert influence and adversely affecting the vote count”—and found no evidence that it had done so. At the time, Clinton was leading in the race, which, the official said, reinforced Obama’s decision not to respond more aggressively. “If we have a very forceful response, it actually helps delegitimize the election.”

That sense of caution continued during the transition, when Obama was intent on an orderly transfer of power. Secretary of State Kerry proposed the creation of an independent bipartisan group to investigate Russian interference in the election. It would have been modelled on the 9/11 Commission, a body consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats who interviewed more than twelve hundred people. According to two senior officials, Obama reviewed Kerry’s proposal but ultimately rejected it, in part because he was convinced that Republicans in Congress would regard it as a partisan exercise. One aide who favored the idea says, “It would have gotten the ball rolling, making it difficult for Trump to shut it down. Now it’s a lot harder to make it happen.”


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During the transition, officials in the Obama Administration were hearing that Trump was somehow compromised or beholden to Russian interests. “The Russians make investments in people not knowing the exact outcome,” one senior Administration official said. “They obtain leverage on those people, too.” No conclusive evidence has yet emerged for such suspicions about Trump. Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coördinating the interference with the election. “We had no clear information—that I was aware of—of collusion,” the official said. That question, however, persists, and will likely be a central focus for congressional investigators.

By Inauguration Day, January 20th, the evidence of a wide-scale Russian operation had prompted the formation of a joint task force, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the financial-crimes unit of the Treasury Department. Three Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee, have launched inquiries; some Democrats worry that the Trump Administration will try to stifle these investigations. Although senators on the Intelligence Committee cannot reveal classified information, they have ways of signalling concern. Three weeks after the election, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and six other members of the committee sent a public letter to Obama, declaring, “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.” At a hearing in January, Wyden pushed further. While questioning James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., Wyden cited media reports that some Trump associates had links to Russians who are close to Putin. Wyden asked if Comey would declassify information on that subject and “release it to the American people.” Comey said, “I can’t talk about it.” Wyden’s questioning had served its purpose.

Later, in an interview, Wyden said, “My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security. We wanted to get that out before a new Administration took place. I can’t remember seven senators joining a declassification request.” Asked if he suspects that there has been improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russian interests, Wyden said, “I can’t get into that”—without revealing classified information. “But what I can tell you is, I continue to believe, as I have for many months, that there is more that could be declassified.” He added, “When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s business as usual,’ and leave it at that. There’s a historical imperative here, too.” After viewing the classified materials, Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the Russia investigation, “This may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”

Two weeks before the Inauguration, intelligence officers briefed both Obama and Trump about a dossier of unverified allegations compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The thirty-five-page dossier, which included claims about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 trip to Moscow, had been shopped around to various media outlets by researchers opposed to Trump’s candidacy. The dossier concluded that Russia had personal and financial material on Trump that could be used as blackmail. It said that the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for years. According to current and former government officials, prurient details in the dossier generated skepticism among some members of the intelligence community, who, as one put it, regarded it as a “nutty” product to present to a President. But, in the weeks that followed, they confirmed some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals. “They are continuing to chase down stuff from the dossier, and, at its core, a lot of it is bearing out,” an intelligence official said. Some officials believe that one reason the Russians compiled information on Trump during his 2013 trip was that he was meeting with Russian oligarchs who might be stashing money abroad—a sign of disloyalty, in Putin’s eyes.


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Trump denounced the dossier as a fake. Putin’s spokesman called it “pulp fiction.” But, before the dossier became public, Senator John McCain passed it along to the F.B.I.; later, some of his colleagues said that it should be part of an investigation of Trump. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vowed to investigate “everywhere the intelligence tells us to go.”

For many national-security officials, the e-mail hacks were part of a larger, and deeply troubling, picture: Putin’s desire to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances—diplomatic, financial, and military—that have shaped the postwar world.

Not long before leaving the White House, Benjamin Rhodes said that the Obama Administration was convinced that Putin had gone into an “offensive mode beyond what he sees as his sphere of influence,” setting out to encourage the “breakup” of the European Union, destabilize NATO, and unnerve the object of his keenest resentment—the United States. Rhodes said, “The new phase we’re in is that the Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order.” Samantha Power offered a similar warning, shortly before leaving her post as United Nations Ambassador. Russia, she said, was “taking steps that are weakening the rules-based order that we have benefitted from for seven decades.”

For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.”

The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that nato’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.

Robert Gates, who was Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, describes relations between Obama and Putin as having been “poisonous” and casts at least some of the blame on Obama; referring to Russia as a “regional power,” as Obama did, was “the equivalent of referring to ISIS as a J.V. team,” in his view. “I think the new Administration has a big challenge in front of it in terms of stopping the downward spiral in the U.S.-Russia relationship while pushing back against Putin’s aggression and general thuggery,” Gates said. “Every time NATO makes a move or Russia makes a move near its border, there is a response. Where does that all stop? So there is a need to stop that downward spiral. The dilemma is how do you do that without handing Putin a victory of huge proportions?”

Some in Moscow are alarmed, too. Dmitry Trenin, a well-connected political and military analyst for the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that in early fall, before Trump’s victory, “we were on a course for a ‘kinetic’ collision in Syria.” He said that the Kremlin expected that, if Clinton won, she would take military action in Syria, perhaps establishing no-fly zones, provoking the rebels to shoot down Russian aircraft, “and getting the Russians to feel it was Afghanistan revisited.” He added, “Then my imagination just left me.”


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Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep, according to Sergey Rogov, the academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow. “I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,” Rogov said. “We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.”



2. Cold War 2.0


Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer—nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion—and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.


Advertisement


That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering—it is baffling—it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”

The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”

Last September, at a G-20 summit, in China, Obama confronted Putin about the hacking, telling him to “cut it out,” and, above all, to keep away from the balloting in November, or there would be “serious consequences.” Putin neither denied nor confirmed the hacking efforts, but replied that the United States has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs.
Cartoon


Share
Tweet



Buy a cartoon

In October, as evidence of Russian meddling mounted, senior national-security officials met to consider a plan of response; proposals included releasing damaging information about Russian officials, including their bank accounts, or a cyber operation directed at Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry was concerned that such plans might undercut diplomatic efforts to get Russia to coöperate with the West in Syria—efforts that eventually failed. In the end, security officials unanimously agreed to take a measured approach: the Administration issued a statement, on October 7th, declaring it was confident that the Russians had hacked the D.N.C. The Administration did not want to overreact in a way that could seem political and amplify Trump’s message that the vote was rigged.

The White House watched for signs that Russian intelligence was crossing what a senior national-security official called “the line between covert influence and adversely affecting the vote count”—and found no evidence that it had done so. At the time, Clinton was leading in the race, which, the official said, reinforced Obama’s decision not to respond more aggressively. “If we have a very forceful response, it actually helps delegitimize the election.”

That sense of caution continued during the transition, when Obama was intent on an orderly transfer of power. Secretary of State Kerry proposed the creation of an independent bipartisan group to investigate Russian interference in the election. It would have been modelled on the 9/11 Commission, a body consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats who interviewed more than twelve hundred people. According to two senior officials, Obama reviewed Kerry’s proposal but ultimately rejected it, in part because he was convinced that Republicans in Congress would regard it as a partisan exercise. One aide who favored the idea says, “It would have gotten the ball rolling, making it difficult for Trump to shut it down. Now it’s a lot harder to make it happen.”


Advertisement


During the transition, officials in the Obama Administration were hearing that Trump was somehow compromised or beholden to Russian interests. “The Russians make investments in people not knowing the exact outcome,” one senior Administration official said. “They obtain leverage on those people, too.” No conclusive evidence has yet emerged for such suspicions about Trump. Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coördinating the interference with the election. “We had no clear information—that I was aware of—of collusion,” the official said. That question, however, persists, and will likely be a central focus for congressional investigators.

By Inauguration Day, January 20th, the evidence of a wide-scale Russian operation had prompted the formation of a joint task force, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the financial-crimes unit of the Treasury Department. Three Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee, have launched inquiries; some Democrats worry that the Trump Administration will try to stifle these investigations. Although senators on the Intelligence Committee cannot reveal classified information, they have ways of signalling concern. Three weeks after the election, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and six other members of the committee sent a public letter to Obama, declaring, “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.” At a hearing in January, Wyden pushed further. While questioning James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., Wyden cited media reports that some Trump associates had links to Russians who are close to Putin. Wyden asked if Comey would declassify information on that subject and “release it to the American people.” Comey said, “I can’t talk about it.” Wyden’s questioning had served its purpose.

Later, in an interview, Wyden said, “My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security. We wanted to get that out before a new Administration took place. I can’t remember seven senators joining a declassification request.” Asked if he suspects that there has been improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russian interests, Wyden said, “I can’t get into that”—without revealing classified information. “But what I can tell you is, I continue to believe, as I have for many months, that there is more that could be declassified.” He added, “When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s business as usual,’ and leave it at that. There’s a historical imperative here, too.” After viewing the classified materials, Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the Russia investigation, “This may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”

Two weeks before the Inauguration, intelligence officers briefed both Obama and Trump about a dossier of unverified allegations compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The thirty-five-page dossier, which included claims about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 trip to Moscow, had been shopped around to various media outlets by researchers opposed to Trump’s candidacy. The dossier concluded that Russia had personal and financial material on Trump that could be used as blackmail. It said that the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for years. According to current and former government officials, prurient details in the dossier generated skepticism among some members of the intelligence community, who, as one put it, regarded it as a “nutty” product to present to a President. But, in the weeks that followed, they confirmed some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals. “They are continuing to chase down stuff from the dossier, and, at its core, a lot of it is bearing out,” an intelligence official said. Some officials believe that one reason the Russians compiled information on Trump during his 2013 trip was that he was meeting with Russian oligarchs who might be stashing money abroad—a sign of disloyalty, in Putin’s eyes.


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Trump denounced the dossier as a fake. Putin’s spokesman called it “pulp fiction.” But, before the dossier became public, Senator John McCain passed it along to the F.B.I.; later, some of his colleagues said that it should be part of an investigation of Trump. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vowed to investigate “everywhere the intelligence tells us to go.”

For many national-security officials, the e-mail hacks were part of a larger, and deeply troubling, picture: Putin’s desire to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances—diplomatic, financial, and military—that have shaped the postwar world.

Not long before leaving the White House, Benjamin Rhodes said that the Obama Administration was convinced that Putin had gone into an “offensive mode beyond what he sees as his sphere of influence,” setting out to encourage the “breakup” of the European Union, destabilize NATO, and unnerve the object of his keenest resentment—the United States. Rhodes said, “The new phase we’re in is that the Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order.” Samantha Power offered a similar warning, shortly before leaving her post as United Nations Ambassador. Russia, she said, was “taking steps that are weakening the rules-based order that we have benefitted from for seven decades.”

For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.”

The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that nato’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.

Robert Gates, who was Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, describes relations between Obama and Putin as having been “poisonous” and casts at least some of the blame on Obama; referring to Russia as a “regional power,” as Obama did, was “the equivalent of referring to ISIS as a J.V. team,” in his view. “I think the new Administration has a big challenge in front of it in terms of stopping the downward spiral in the U.S.-Russia relationship while pushing back against Putin’s aggression and general thuggery,” Gates said. “Every time NATO makes a move or Russia makes a move near its border, there is a response. Where does that all stop? So there is a need to stop that downward spiral. The dilemma is how do you do that without handing Putin a victory of huge proportions?”

Some in Moscow are alarmed, too. Dmitry Trenin, a well-connected political and military analyst for the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that in early fall, before Trump’s victory, “we were on a course for a ‘kinetic’ collision in Syria.” He said that the Kremlin expected that, if Clinton won, she would take military action in Syria, perhaps establishing no-fly zones, provoking the rebels to shoot down Russian aircraft, “and getting the Russians to feel it was Afghanistan revisited.” He added, “Then my imagination just left me.”


Advertisement


Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep, according to Sergey Rogov, the academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow. “I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,” Rogov said. “We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.”

2. Cold War 2.0


Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer—nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion—and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.


Advertisement


That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering—it is baffling—it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”

The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”

Last September, at a G-20 summit, in China, Obama confronted Putin about the hacking, telling him to “cut it out,” and, above all, to keep away from the balloting in November, or there would be “serious consequences.” Putin neither denied nor confirmed the hacking efforts, but replied that the United States has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs.
Cartoon


Share
Tweet



Buy a cartoon

In October, as evidence of Russian meddling mounted, senior national-security officials met to consider a plan of response; proposals included releasing damaging information about Russian officials, including their bank accounts, or a cyber operation directed at Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry was concerned that such plans might undercut diplomatic efforts to get Russia to coöperate with the West in Syria—efforts that eventually failed. In the end, security officials unanimously agreed to take a measured approach: the Administration issued a statement, on October 7th, declaring it was confident that the Russians had hacked the D.N.C. The Administration did not want to overreact in a way that could seem political and amplify Trump’s message that the vote was rigged.

The White House watched for signs that Russian intelligence was crossing what a senior national-security official called “the line between covert influence and adversely affecting the vote count”—and found no evidence that it had done so. At the time, Clinton was leading in the race, which, the official said, reinforced Obama’s decision not to respond more aggressively. “If we have a very forceful response, it actually helps delegitimize the election.”

That sense of caution continued during the transition, when Obama was intent on an orderly transfer of power. Secretary of State Kerry proposed the creation of an independent bipartisan group to investigate Russian interference in the election. It would have been modelled on the 9/11 Commission, a body consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats who interviewed more than twelve hundred people. According to two senior officials, Obama reviewed Kerry’s proposal but ultimately rejected it, in part because he was convinced that Republicans in Congress would regard it as a partisan exercise. One aide who favored the idea says, “It would have gotten the ball rolling, making it difficult for Trump to shut it down. Now it’s a lot harder to make it happen.”


Advertisement


During the transition, officials in the Obama Administration were hearing that Trump was somehow compromised or beholden to Russian interests. “The Russians make investments in people not knowing the exact outcome,” one senior Administration official said. “They obtain leverage on those people, too.” No conclusive evidence has yet emerged for such suspicions about Trump. Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coördinating the interference with the election. “We had no clear information—that I was aware of—of collusion,” the official said. That question, however, persists, and will likely be a central focus for congressional investigators.

By Inauguration Day, January 20th, the evidence of a wide-scale Russian operation had prompted the formation of a joint task force, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the financial-crimes unit of the Treasury Department. Three Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee, have launched inquiries; some Democrats worry that the Trump Administration will try to stifle these investigations. Although senators on the Intelligence Committee cannot reveal classified information, they have ways of signalling concern. Three weeks after the election, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and six other members of the committee sent a public letter to Obama, declaring, “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.” At a hearing in January, Wyden pushed further. While questioning James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., Wyden cited media reports that some Trump associates had links to Russians who are close to Putin. Wyden asked if Comey would declassify information on that subject and “release it to the American people.” Comey said, “I can’t talk about it.” Wyden’s questioning had served its purpose.

Later, in an interview, Wyden said, “My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security. We wanted to get that out before a new Administration took place. I can’t remember seven senators joining a declassification request.” Asked if he suspects that there has been improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russian interests, Wyden said, “I can’t get into that”—without revealing classified information. “But what I can tell you is, I continue to believe, as I have for many months, that there is more that could be declassified.” He added, “When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s business as usual,’ and leave it at that. There’s a historical imperative here, too.” After viewing the classified materials, Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the Russia investigation, “This may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”

Two weeks before the Inauguration, intelligence officers briefed both Obama and Trump about a dossier of unverified allegations compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The thirty-five-page dossier, which included claims about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 trip to Moscow, had been shopped around to various media outlets by researchers opposed to Trump’s candidacy. The dossier concluded that Russia had personal and financial material on Trump that could be used as blackmail. It said that the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for years. According to current and former government officials, prurient details in the dossier generated skepticism among some members of the intelligence community, who, as one put it, regarded it as a “nutty” product to present to a President. But, in the weeks that followed, they confirmed some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals. “They are continuing to chase down stuff from the dossier, and, at its core, a lot of it is bearing out,” an intelligence official said. Some officials believe that one reason the Russians compiled information on Trump during his 2013 trip was that he was meeting with Russian oligarchs who might be stashing money abroad—a sign of disloyalty, in Putin’s eyes.


Advertisement


Trump denounced the dossier as a fake. Putin’s spokesman called it “pulp fiction.” But, before the dossier became public, Senator John McCain passed it along to the F.B.I.; later, some of his colleagues said that it should be part of an investigation of Trump. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vowed to investigate “everywhere the intelligence tells us to go.”

For many national-security officials, the e-mail hacks were part of a larger, and deeply troubling, picture: Putin’s desire to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances—diplomatic, financial, and military—that have shaped the postwar world.

Not long before leaving the White House, Benjamin Rhodes said that the Obama Administration was convinced that Putin had gone into an “offensive mode beyond what he sees as his sphere of influence,” setting out to encourage the “breakup” of the European Union, destabilize NATO, and unnerve the object of his keenest resentment—the United States. Rhodes said, “The new phase we’re in is that the Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order.” Samantha Power offered a similar warning, shortly before leaving her post as United Nations Ambassador. Russia, she said, was “taking steps that are weakening the rules-based order that we have benefitted from for seven decades.”

For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.”

The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that nato’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.

Robert Gates, who was Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, describes relations between Obama and Putin as having been “poisonous” and casts at least some of the blame on Obama; referring to Russia as a “regional power,” as Obama did, was “the equivalent of referring to ISIS as a J.V. team,” in his view. “I think the new Administration has a big challenge in front of it in terms of stopping the downward spiral in the U.S.-Russia relationship while pushing back against Putin’s aggression and general thuggery,” Gates said. “Every time NATO makes a move or Russia makes a move near its border, there is a response. Where does that all stop? So there is a need to stop that downward spiral. The dilemma is how do you do that without handing Putin a victory of huge proportions?”

Some in Moscow are alarmed, too. Dmitry Trenin, a well-connected political and military analyst for the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that in early fall, before Trump’s victory, “we were on a course for a ‘kinetic’ collision in Syria.” He said that the Kremlin expected that, if Clinton won, she would take military action in Syria, perhaps establishing no-fly zones, provoking the rebels to shoot down Russian aircraft, “and getting the Russians to feel it was Afghanistan revisited.” He added, “Then my imagination just left me.”


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Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep, according to Sergey Rogov, the academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow. “I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,” Rogov said. “We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.”


2. Cold War 2.0


Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer—nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion—and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.


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That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering—it is baffling—it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”

The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”

Last September, at a G-20 summit, in China, Obama confronted Putin about the hacking, telling him to “cut it out,” and, above all, to keep away from the balloting in November, or there would be “serious consequences.” Putin neither denied nor confirmed the hacking efforts, but replied that the United States has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs.
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In October, as evidence of Russian meddling mounted, senior national-security officials met to consider a plan of response; proposals included releasing damaging information about Russian officials, including their bank accounts, or a cyber operation directed at Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry was concerned that such plans might undercut diplomatic efforts to get Russia to coöperate with the West in Syria—efforts that eventually failed. In the end, security officials unanimously agreed to take a measured approach: the Administration issued a statement, on October 7th, declaring it was confident that the Russians had hacked the D.N.C. The Administration did not want to overreact in a way that could seem political and amplify Trump’s message that the vote was rigged.

The White House watched for signs that Russian intelligence was crossing what a senior national-security official called “the line between covert influence and adversely affecting the vote count”—and found no evidence that it had done so. At the time, Clinton was leading in the race, which, the official said, reinforced Obama’s decision not to respond more aggressively. “If we have a very forceful response, it actually helps delegitimize the election.”

That sense of caution continued during the transition, when Obama was intent on an orderly transfer of power. Secretary of State Kerry proposed the creation of an independent bipartisan group to investigate Russian interference in the election. It would have been modelled on the 9/11 Commission, a body consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats who interviewed more than twelve hundred people. According to two senior officials, Obama reviewed Kerry’s proposal but ultimately rejected it, in part because he was convinced that Republicans in Congress would regard it as a partisan exercise. One aide who favored the idea says, “It would have gotten the ball rolling, making it difficult for Trump to shut it down. Now it’s a lot harder to make it happen.”


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During the transition, officials in the Obama Administration were hearing that Trump was somehow compromised or beholden to Russian interests. “The Russians make investments in people not knowing the exact outcome,” one senior Administration official said. “They obtain leverage on those people, too.” No conclusive evidence has yet emerged for such suspicions about Trump. Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coördinating the interference with the election. “We had no clear information—that I was aware of—of collusion,” the official said. That question, however, persists, and will likely be a central focus for congressional investigators.

By Inauguration Day, January 20th, the evidence of a wide-scale Russian operation had prompted the formation of a joint task force, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the financial-crimes unit of the Treasury Department. Three Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee, have launched inquiries; some Democrats worry that the Trump Administration will try to stifle these investigations. Although senators on the Intelligence Committee cannot reveal classified information, they have ways of signalling concern. Three weeks after the election, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and six other members of the committee sent a public letter to Obama, declaring, “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.” At a hearing in January, Wyden pushed further. While questioning James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., Wyden cited media reports that some Trump associates had links to Russians who are close to Putin. Wyden asked if Comey would declassify information on that subject and “release it to the American people.” Comey said, “I can’t talk about it.” Wyden’s questioning had served its purpose.

Later, in an interview, Wyden said, “My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security. We wanted to get that out before a new Administration took place. I can’t remember seven senators joining a declassification request.” Asked if he suspects that there has been improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russian interests, Wyden said, “I can’t get into that”—without revealing classified information. “But what I can tell you is, I continue to believe, as I have for many months, that there is more that could be declassified.” He added, “When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s business as usual,’ and leave it at that. There’s a historical imperative here, too.” After viewing the classified materials, Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the Russia investigation, “This may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”

Two weeks before the Inauguration, intelligence officers briefed both Obama and Trump about a dossier of unverified allegations compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The thirty-five-page dossier, which included claims about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 trip to Moscow, had been shopped around to various media outlets by researchers opposed to Trump’s candidacy. The dossier concluded that Russia had personal and financial material on Trump that could be used as blackmail. It said that the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for years. According to current and former government officials, prurient details in the dossier generated skepticism among some members of the intelligence community, who, as one put it, regarded it as a “nutty” product to present to a President. But, in the weeks that followed, they confirmed some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals. “They are continuing to chase down stuff from the dossier, and, at its core, a lot of it is bearing out,” an intelligence official said. Some officials believe that one reason the Russians compiled information on Trump during his 2013 trip was that he was meeting with Russian oligarchs who might be stashing money abroad—a sign of disloyalty, in Putin’s eyes.


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Trump denounced the dossier as a fake. Putin’s spokesman called it “pulp fiction.” But, before the dossier became public, Senator John McCain passed it along to the F.B.I.; later, some of his colleagues said that it should be part of an investigation of Trump. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vowed to investigate “everywhere the intelligence tells us to go.”

For many national-security officials, the e-mail hacks were part of a larger, and deeply troubling, picture: Putin’s desire to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances—diplomatic, financial, and military—that have shaped the postwar world.

Not long before leaving the White House, Benjamin Rhodes said that the Obama Administration was convinced that Putin had gone into an “offensive mode beyond what he sees as his sphere of influence,” setting out to encourage the “breakup” of the European Union, destabilize NATO, and unnerve the object of his keenest resentment—the United States. Rhodes said, “The new phase we’re in is that the Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order.” Samantha Power offered a similar warning, shortly before leaving her post as United Nations Ambassador. Russia, she said, was “taking steps that are weakening the rules-based order that we have benefitted from for seven decades.”

For nearly two decades, U.S.-Russian relations have ranged between strained and miserable. Although the two countries have come to agreements on various issues, including trade and arms control, the general picture is grim. Many Russian and American policy experts no longer hesitate to use phrases like “the second Cold War.”

The level of tension has alarmed experienced hands on both sides. “What we have is a situation in which the strong leader of a relatively weak state is acting in opposition to weak leaders of relatively strong states,” General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said. “And that strong leader is Putin. He is calling the shots at the moment.” Shirreff observes that nato’s withdrawal of military forces from Europe has been answered with incidents of Russian aggression, and with a sizable buildup of forces in the vicinity of the Baltic states, including an aircraft-carrier group dispatched to the North Sea, an expanded deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin, for its part, views the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders as itself a provocation, and points to such U.S. measures as the placement of a new ground-based missile-defense system in Deveselu, Romania.

Robert Gates, who was Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, describes relations between Obama and Putin as having been “poisonous” and casts at least some of the blame on Obama; referring to Russia as a “regional power,” as Obama did, was “the equivalent of referring to ISIS as a J.V. team,” in his view. “I think the new Administration has a big challenge in front of it in terms of stopping the downward spiral in the U.S.-Russia relationship while pushing back against Putin’s aggression and general thuggery,” Gates said. “Every time NATO makes a move or Russia makes a move near its border, there is a response. Where does that all stop? So there is a need to stop that downward spiral. The dilemma is how do you do that without handing Putin a victory of huge proportions?”

Some in Moscow are alarmed, too. Dmitry Trenin, a well-connected political and military analyst for the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that in early fall, before Trump’s victory, “we were on a course for a ‘kinetic’ collision in Syria.” He said that the Kremlin expected that, if Clinton won, she would take military action in Syria, perhaps establishing no-fly zones, provoking the rebels to shoot down Russian aircraft, “and getting the Russians to feel it was Afghanistan revisited.” He added, “Then my imagination just left me.”


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Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep, according to Sergey Rogov, the academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow. “I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,” Rogov said. “We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.”



2. Cold War 2.0


Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer—nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion—and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.


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That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering—it is baffling—it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”

The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”

Last September, at a G-20 summit, in China, Obama confronted Putin about the hacking, telling him to “cut it out,” and, above all, to keep away from the balloting in November, or there would be “serious consequences.” Putin neither denied nor confirmed the hacking efforts, but replied that the United States has long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddle in Russian affairs.
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In October, as evidence of Russian meddling mounted, senior national-security officials met to consider a plan of response; proposals included releasing damaging information about Russian officials, including their bank accounts, or a cyber operation directed at Moscow. Secretary of State John Kerry was concerned that such plans might undercut diplomatic efforts to get Russia to coöperate with the West in Syria—efforts that eventually failed. In the end, security officials unanimously agreed to take a measured approach: the Administration issued a statement, on October 7th, declaring it was confident that the Russians had hacked the D.N.C. The Administration did not want to overreact in a way that could seem political and amplify Trump’s message that the vote was rigged.

The White House watched for signs that Russian intelligence was crossing what a senior national-security official called “the line between covert influence and adversely affecting the vote count”—and found no evidence that it had done so. At the time, Clinton was leading in the race, which, the official said, reinforced Obama’s decision not to respond more aggressively. “If we have a very forceful response, it actually helps delegitimize the election.”

That sense of caution continued during the transition, when Obama was intent on an orderly transfer of power. Secretary of State Kerry proposed the creation of an independent bipartisan group to investigate Russian interference in the election. It would have been modelled on the 9/11 Commission, a body consisting of five Republicans and five Democrats who interviewed more than twelve hundred people. According to two senior officials, Obama reviewed Kerry’s proposal but ultimately rejected it, in part because he was convinced that Republicans in Congress would regard it as a partisan exercise. One aide who favored the idea says, “It would have gotten the ball rolling, making it difficult for Trump to shut it down. Now it’s a lot harder to make it happen.”


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During the transition, officials in the Obama Administration were hearing that Trump was somehow compromised or beholden to Russian interests. “The Russians make investments in people not knowing the exact outcome,” one senior Administration official said. “They obtain leverage on those people, too.” No conclusive evidence has yet emerged for such suspicions about Trump. Another Administration official said that, during the transfer of power, classified intelligence had shown multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russian representatives, but nothing that rose to the level of aiding or coördinating the interference with the election. “We had no clear information—that I was aware of—of collusion,” the official said. That question, however, persists, and will likely be a central focus for congressional investigators.

By Inauguration Day, January 20th, the evidence of a wide-scale Russian operation had prompted the formation of a joint task force, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the financial-crimes unit of the Treasury Department. Three Senate committees, including the Intelligence Committee, have launched inquiries; some Democrats worry that the Trump Administration will try to stifle these investigations. Although senators on the Intelligence Committee cannot reveal classified information, they have ways of signalling concern. Three weeks after the election, Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and six other members of the committee sent a public letter to Obama, declaring, “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public.” At a hearing in January, Wyden pushed further. While questioning James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., Wyden cited media reports that some Trump associates had links to Russians who are close to Putin. Wyden asked if Comey would declassify information on that subject and “release it to the American people.” Comey said, “I can’t talk about it.” Wyden’s questioning had served its purpose.

Later, in an interview, Wyden said, “My increasing concern is that classification now is being used much more for political security than for national security. We wanted to get that out before a new Administration took place. I can’t remember seven senators joining a declassification request.” Asked if he suspects that there has been improper contact between the Trump campaign and Russian interests, Wyden said, “I can’t get into that”—without revealing classified information. “But what I can tell you is, I continue to believe, as I have for many months, that there is more that could be declassified.” He added, “When a foreign power interferes with American institutions, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s business as usual,’ and leave it at that. There’s a historical imperative here, too.” After viewing the classified materials, Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the Russia investigation, “This may very well be the most important thing I do in my public life.”

Two weeks before the Inauguration, intelligence officers briefed both Obama and Trump about a dossier of unverified allegations compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The thirty-five-page dossier, which included claims about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 trip to Moscow, had been shopped around to various media outlets by researchers opposed to Trump’s candidacy. The dossier concluded that Russia had personal and financial material on Trump that could be used as blackmail. It said that the Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for years. According to current and former government officials, prurient details in the dossier generated skepticism among some members of the intelligence community, who, as one put it, regarded it as a “nutty” product to present to a President. But, in the weeks that followed, they confirmed some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals. “They are continuing to chase down stuff from the dossier, and, at its core, a lot of it is bearing out,” an intelligence official said. Some officials believe that one reason the Russians compiled information on Trump during his 2013 trip was that he was meeting with Russian oligarchs who might be stashing money abroad—a sign of disloyalty, in Putin’s eyes.


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Trump denounced the dossier as a fake. Putin’s spokesman called it “pulp fiction.” But, before the dossier became public, Senator John McCain passed it along to the F.B.I.; later, some of his colleagues said that it should be part of an investigation of Trump. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vowed to investigate “everywhere the intelligence tells us to go.”

For many national-security officials, the e-mail hacks were part of a larger, and deeply troubling, picture: Putin’s desire to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances—diplomatic, financial, and military—that have shaped the postwar world.

Not long be

n April 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the K.G.B., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “active measures”—aktivniye meropriyatiya—against the reëlection campaign of President Ronald Reagan. Unlike classic espionage, which involves the collection of foreign secrets, active measures aim at influencing events—at undermining a rival power with forgeries, front groups, and countless other techniques honed during the Cold War. The Soviet leadership considered Reagan an implacable militarist. According to extensive notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin, a high-ranking K.G.B. officer and archivist who later defected to Great Britain, Soviet intelligence tried to infiltrate the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees, popularize the slogan “Reagan Means War!,” and discredit the President as a corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex. The effort had no evident effect. Reagan won forty-nine of fifty states.

Active measures were used by both sides throughout the Cold War. In the nineteen-sixties, Soviet intelligence officers spread a rumor that the U.S. government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the eighties, they spread the rumor that American intelligence had “created” the AIDS virus, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. They regularly lent support to leftist parties and insurgencies. The C.I.A., for its part, worked to overthrow regimes in Iran, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Chile, and Panama. It used cash payments, propaganda, and sometimes violent measures to sway elections away from leftist parties in Italy, Guatemala, Indonesia, South Vietnam, and Nicaragua. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early nineties, the C.I.A. asked Russia to abandon active measures to spread disinformation that could harm the U.S. Russia promised to do so. But when Sergey Tretyakov, the station chief for Russian intelligence in New York, defected, in 2000, he revealed that Moscow’s active measures had never subsided. “Nothing has changed,” he wrote, in 2008. “Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the U.S.”

Vladimir Putin, who is quick to accuse the West of hypocrisy, frequently points to this history. He sees a straight line from the West’s support of the anti-Moscow “color revolutions,” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, which deposed corrupt, Soviet-era leaders, to its endorsement of the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Five years ago, he blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. “She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal,” Putin said. “They heard this and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work.” (No evidence was provided for the accusation.) He considers nongovernmental agencies and civil-society groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the election-monitoring group Golos to be barely disguised instruments of regime change.

The U.S. officials who administer the system that Putin sees as such an existential danger to his own reject his rhetoric as “whataboutism,” a strategy of false moral equivalences. Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser under President Obama, is among those who reject Putin’s logic, but he said, “Putin is not entirely wrong,” adding that, in the past, “we engaged in regime change around the world. There is just enough rope for him to hang us.”*






The 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States was of keen interest to Putin. He loathed Obama, who had applied economic sanctions against Putin’s cronies after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine. (Russian state television derided Obama as “weak,” “uncivilized,” and a “eunuch.”) Clinton, in Putin’s view, was worse—the embodiment of the liberal interventionist strain of U.S. foreign policy, more hawkish than Obama, and an obstacle to ending sanctions and reëstablishing Russian geopolitical influence. At the same time, Putin deftly flattered Trump, who was uncommonly positive in his statements about Putin’s strength and effectiveness as a leader. As early as 2007, Trump declared that Putin was “doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.” In 2013, before visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, Trump wondered, in a tweet, if he would meet Putin, and, “if so, will he become my new best friend?” During the Presidential campaign, Trump delighted in saying that Putin was a superior leader who had turned the Obama Administration into a “laughingstock.”



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For those interested in active measures, the digital age presented opportunities far more alluring than anything available in the era of Andropov. The Democratic and Republican National Committees offered what cybersecurity experts call a large “attack surface.” Tied into politics at the highest level, they were nonetheless unprotected by the defenses afforded to sensitive government institutions. John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a former chief of staff of Bill Clinton’s, had every reason to be aware of the fragile nature of modern communications. As a senior counsellor in the Obama White House, he was involved in digital policy. Yet even he had not bothered to use the most elementary sort of defense, two-step verification, for his e-mail account.


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“The honest answer is that my team and I were over-reliant on the fact that we were pretty careful about what we click on,” Podesta said. In this instance, he received a phishing e-mail, ostensibly from “the Gmail team,” that urged him to “change your password immediately.” An I.T. person who was asked to verify it mistakenly replied that it was “a legitimate e-mail.”

The American political landscape also offered a particularly soft target for dezinformatsiya, false information intended to discredit the official version of events, or the very notion of reliable truth. Americans were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in two decades, according to the Pew Research Center. American trust in the mainstream media had fallen to a historic low. The fractured media environment seemed to spawn conspiracy theories about everything from Barack Obama’s place of birth (supposedly Kenya) to the origins of climate change (a Chinese hoax). Trump, in building his political identity, promoted such theories.







“Free societies are often split because people have their own views, and that’s what former Soviet and current Russian intelligence tries to take advantage of,” Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general, who has lived in the United States since 1995, said. “The goal is to deepen the splits.” Such a strategy is especially valuable when a country like Russia, which is considerably weaker than it was at the height of the Soviet era, is waging a geopolitical struggle with a stronger entity.

In early January, two weeks before the Inauguration, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, released a declassified report concluding that Putin had ordered an influence campaign to harm Clinton’s election prospects, fortify Donald Trump’s, and “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.” The declassified report provides more assertion than evidence. Intelligence officers say that this was necessary to protect their information-gathering methods.

Critics of the report have repeatedly noted that intelligence agencies, in the months before the Iraq War, endorsed faulty assessments concerning weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence community was deeply divided over the actual extent of Iraq’s weapons development; the question of Russia’s responsibility for cyberattacks in the 2016 election has produced no such tumult. Seventeen federal intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia was responsible for the hacking.

In testimony before the Senate, Clapper described an unprecedented Russian effort to interfere in the U.S. electoral process. The operation involved hacking Democrats’ e-mails, publicizing the stolen contents through WikiLeaks, and manipulating social media to spread “fake news” and pro-Trump messages.

At first, Trump derided the scrutiny of the hacking as a “witch hunt,” and said that the attacks could have been from anyone—the Russians, the Chinese, or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds.” In the end, he grudgingly accepted the finding, but insisted that Russian interference had had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” Yevgenia Albats, the author of “The State Within a State,” a book about the K.G.B., said that Putin probably didn’t believe he could alter the results of the election, but, because of his antipathy toward Obama and Clinton, he did what he could to boost Trump’s cause and undermine America’s confidence in its political system. Putin was not interested in keeping the operation covert, Albats said. “He wanted to make it as public as possible. He wanted his presence to be known,” and to “show that, no matter what, we can enter your house and do what we want.”






Illustrations by Cristiana Couceiro

By Laurie Coker
Rating: B-

It just feels good to watch Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin interact, even if the story in their new Going in Style, feels familiar, forced and a bit muddled. These charming veteran actors fill the screen with their palpable personalities, and we are the luckier for it. Director Zach Braff’s Going in Style plays primarily as a comedy, but the movie’s themes are far more serious than that. There is the realization that old age happens, nothing is guaranteed and that friendship and family may be all we can really count on. Ultimately, it is this engaging cast and their notable talent and timing that make the movie a gem.

Yet another remake, sort of, Going in Style is loosely based on a 1979 George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg film of the same title, but it doesn’t feel quite as clever. The plot unfolds with a transparency that makes the film flounder. The trio, former coworkers, longtime buddies and Brooklyn neighbors Willie (Freeman), Joe (Caine) and Al (Arkin) lose their pensions from years of working as steelworkers. Broke and still ready to live a little, they scheme to steal from the bank that robbed them of their retirement checks. Going in Style is predictable from beginning to end and is riddled with holes big enough to drive a get-away van through, but it is still enjoyable and entertaining.

Any of the film’s faults should fall on Braff and more so on screenwriter Ted Melfim’s lackluster script and not on Freeman, Caine, and Arkin or the sound ensemble cast. Thankfully, these fellows demonstrate a carefree ease with their crisp chemistry and silly banter and sillier antics. Smaller roles, by wild-eyed Christopher Lloyd and the still sexy, Ann-Margaret and the much younger Matt Dillon and John Ortiz, make the film even more amusing. Joey King, as Joe’s granddaughter, brings a fresh, youthful and loving take on relationships to the story. Her character’s living situation and her relationship with her estranged father add yet another element to a film filled with messages about accepting responsibility, respecting the elderly, growing old, facing death and living life to the fullest. The storyline also touches on current issues with the cost of living and the shakiness of social security and precariousness of pensions. These are weighty issues for a comedy, but Braff manages to weave them in with a light enough hand.

Freeman, Caine, and Arkin deserve these roles and many more to come. There is a wonderful scene where Willie, Joe and Al, drunk on too much champagne, sing and stumble their way down the street that I wish had taken longer and hilarious, well-timed jokes about getting old and all that entails. These guys are delectable, delicious, and delightful – I wanted to hug them all and eat them up. I am placing a B- in the grade book. Going in Style is not going to win any awards, but the trio should, but then they have in their long careers. I’d just like to see them together again sooner than later.

By Mark Saldana

Rating: 3 (Out of 4 Stars)

Cinema has tackled the drama of a child custody battle for decades now. As this type of case is rather common in reality, filmmakers have used this scenario and its variations multiple times with results ranging from excellent to melodramatic. Writer Tom Flynn and director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) now have the latest foray into family courtroom drama. Starring Chris Evans, Mckenna Grace, Jenny Slate and Octavia Spencer, Gifted brings a different angle to custody battle, but has trouble avoiding some of the usual tropes that often come from this kind of story. The film does have a few surprises, but in the end, plays out with a certain degree of predictability. With genuinely stellar performances from the cast, Gifted may not be as extraordinary as its lead child character, but it does have a lot of heart. Read more »

One of my favorite things to do is come home from work, take a bubble bath and change into something comfortable. Whether it’s just the two of us relaxing at home or we’re having friends over for a casual dinner, I love to slip into something cozy as soon as possible. True & Co has so many amazing pieces from loungewear to bras + panties to chic lingerie. I just ordered this black lace bralette, these blush pink leggings and this sweet, little ivory camisole. Take this quick, two minute quiz here to see which items work best for you and be sure to sign up to have emails sent directly to your inbox with promotions + new arrivals!”

Starring: Felicity Jones, James Franco, Jonah Hill

Summary: When disgraced New York Times reporter Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill) meets accused killer Christian Longo (James Franco) — who has taken on Finkel’s identity — his investigation morphs into an unforgettable game of cat and mouse. Based on actual events, Finkel’s relentless pursuit of Longo’s true story encompasses murder, love, deceit, and… Expand


Director: Rupert Goold

Genre(s): Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Rating: R

Runtime: 99 min

Personally, I monitor my credit each month through a service called True Credit. Using this service has allowed me to raise my credit score over one hundred points (yes you read that correctly) and it has prevented me from accidentally lowering my score by applying for things I might not get approved for. Forewarned was forearmed in my case.

The Lowdown:

For $15 a month True Credit bought me access to all three of my credit reports and scores in an easy to read format. The sad fact is, not all of my creditors were reporting to all three bureaus, and I was shocked to find that my score varied wildly from place to place.

How True Credit Helped Me:
1.As soon as I signed up I was able to look at my reports from all three credit bureaus. It turns out, I had incorrect information on all three credit reports. I was able to immediately challenge an incorrect past address, and several old collection accounts that had already been paid off but were still reporting as open accounts. That is what raised my score.
Now, it is important to note that you do not have to pay for a credit monitoring service to challenge items on your credit report – that is free. However, having everything in one place, printable, and easy to compare side- by- side made the process much easier for me. In my opinion that alone was well worth the $15 because it saved me time and stress.

2.I had a former friend who stole my personal information and used it to open an account in my name. I had previously resolved that issue, but keeping tabs on my report each month lets me be very, very sure that they do not do it again. Once your personal information has been stolen, you can never really be sure that the thief won’t use it again, or give it to someone else.
Using True Credit gives me enormous peace of mind. No more identity theft here – I’m going to know it as soon as it happens and be able to take action on it. They also give me the ability to freeze and un-freeze my credit report with the click of a button. If I ever do notice suspicious activity, I can stop it right then and there.




3.Knowing my credit scores has save me from making several bad decisions. Once I knew what my score was I stopped applying for credit card offers that I probably could not get approved for, like platinum cash back rewards cards. Before, when I did not know my credit score, I always figured,
“What the heck? Maybe I will get approved and that is a good offer!”

Now, let me tell you that was the wrong way to go about it. Applying for any new loan can lower your credit score so while I was happily applying (and getting rejected) for several cards a year, my score was plummeting.

4.True Credit allowed me to time the purchase of our last car. I was able to wait until my score had gone up some (and because I monitored them, I knew exactly what all three of my scores were). Because of that, we were able to finance at a better interest rate than we would have gotten several months earlier, and we came out on top of the deal.



5.I noticed an interesting psychological effect – Once I started paying to monitor my credit, I started taking my score more seriously. I felt more in charge, and more comfortable with the credit side of my finances. It would be interesting to know if any of you have had that same effect come from monitoring your credit? Did you notice any change in the way you handled things while you were monitoring vs. when you were not?

Superinsulated House Specs

Two cold-climate designers choose optimal wall designs, roof designs, insulation R-values, and window glazing

Posted on Feb 11 2011 by Martin Holladay



Image 1 of 3

R-49 walls and an R-66 roof. Jim Riggins is building this superinsulated house in Monument, Colorado.


Designing a superinsulated house can be tough. How much insulation should you install under a slab? Should your walls be sheathed with rigid foam, or should you go with double-stud walls? Could SIP walls save you money? Does the added cost of triple glazing make sense?

The answers depend on your climate, your performance goals, and your budget. Coming up with an optimized design requires careful heat-loss calculations, multiple energy simulations, and construction cost estimates. For those who haven’t yet struggled with these calculations, it can be instructive to compare the conclusions of thoughtful designers who have gone through the exercises.


Energy-efficient homes in Massachusetts

Two recent magazine articles describe cold-climate superinsulated homes designed by experienced professionals who did their homework. Their conclusions are instructive.

The first article, “High-Performance Homes on a Budget” by John Abrams, appeared in the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Light Construction. In his excellent article, Abrams provides the specifications for a cluster of superinsulated homes built on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The designs were perfected with the help of energy consultant Marc Rosenbaum. (For a photo of one of the homes, see Airtight Wall and Roof Sheathing.)

Abrams built his walls with double rows of 2x4 studs. He explains the decision this way: “After years of experimentation with a variety of approaches, we have settled on cost-effective wall and roof assemblies that meet our insulation standards ... and minimize thermal bridging — and that our carpenters and other tradespeople are comfortable with.”


Minimizing residential energy use in Colorado

The second article, “Heading for Zero: Smart Strategies for Home Design” by Jim Riggins, appeared in the February / March 2011 issue of Home Power. Riggins describes the multiple calculations and simulations he used to design a superinsulated house in Monument, Colorado.

When Riggins began the design process, he guessed that his walls and roofs would be made with SIPs. After running the numbers, however, he settled on double-stud walls. “Overall, SIP exterior wall construction ran 14% higher than the double-wall, and the 2x6 with exterior foam ran 5% higher. .. The double-wall technique uses more lumber but goes up more quickly than a single wall with two layers of exterior foam plus more intricate sealing and trim work around the windows.”

Here’s a table showing the specs of the two homes:


Read more: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/superinsulated-house-specs#ixzz4cjJUV1fe
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FOUNDATION
‐ 8’2” XI Superior Walls Foundation System (9’ & 10’ optional)
‐ 3” Steel Support Posts
‐ 2” x 10” Pressure Treated Sill Plate with Sill Seal
‐ Spray Foam between Foundation Wall and Sill Plate
‐ Radon Pipe Installed around Interior Perimeter of Foundation
‐ Poured and Finished Basement Floor
‐ Basement Floor Sloped to Sump Pit or Floor Drains
‐ (2) Vinyl Casement Windows w/ Screens (flat lot)
‐ (2) Windows w/ Screens to Match House (sloping lot)
‐ Step Unit w/ Steel Exterior Door @ Bottom of Stairs (flat lot)
‐ 6068 Steel Swinging Patio Door (sloping lot)
‐ Basement Stairs & Railing ‐ Built of SPF 2x10’s with closed treads and risers
CONSTRUCTION
‐ All Lumber is SPF #2 or Higher
‐ 2” x 6” Exterior Walls w/ 7/16” OSB Sheathing
‐ 2” x 4” Interior Walls
‐ 2” x 10” Floor Joists w/ Solid Block Bridging (Model Specific)
‐ 3/4” OSB Tongue & Groove Floor Decking – Glued & Stapled
‐ 1/2” OSB Roof Sheathing w/ H‐clips
INSULATION
‐ R‐21 Exterior Walls w/ Vapor Barrier (STD where applicable)
‐ R‐41 Blown Ceiling w/ Vapor Barrier (STD where applicable)
(R‐30 HD batt for 7/12 storage, 9/12, or 12/12 roof pitches)
‐ Floor Insulation Installed Around Perimeter Per Code
‐ R‐11 Basement Entry Walls
‐ Fiberglass Insulated Exterior Doors
‐ Foam Gaskets on All Exterior Wall Receptacles & Switches
‐ Fiberglass Insulation Around Windows to Stop Air Infiltration
‐ Sealed Around Windows to Stop Air Infiltration
‐ Caulked Seams on Exterior Sheathing
‐ Air Filtration Barrier Wrap All Around Home
‐ Insulated Solid Headers with a 1” Foam
EXTERIOR FINISH
‐ 30 year Architectural Shingles & Crane Siding
‐ 5” Seamless Gutters and 4” Downspouts to Grade.
‐ Ice Shield
‐ MW Classic Low‐E Vinyl Thermopane Single Hung Tilt Windows w/ Screens
‐ 4x4 or 4.5 x 4.5 (Dutch Lap) Siding
HEATING
‐ Electric Baseboard (alternative heating options available)
PLUMBING
‐ Install All Drain Lines (PVC) to Sewer or Septic System
‐ Install All Water Supply Lines to Water Source
‐ Install (2) Frost Free Outside Faucets
‐ Pressure Test All Plumbing Lines
‐ Extend and Install Vent Pipes as Needed
ELECTRICAL
‐ Install and Wire Meter Base with Mounting Platform
‐ Install and Wire 40‐space Panel Box
‐ Most Models to Include Generator Sub‐Panel
‐ Includes 3rd Party Electrical Inspection
‐ Nickel or Bronze Interior Lights with Bulbs
‐ Most Models to Include (6) Basement Receptacles
‐ Most Models to Include (6) Porcelain Basement Lights
‐ Wire for Well Pump, Septic Alarm & Septic Pump (if applicable)
‐ Blocking for Kitchen and Bath Electrical Boxes
INTERIOR FINISH
‐ 1/2” Drywall Throughout All Rooms (including closets)
‐ 5/8” Drywall Ceilings Throughout
‐ (3) Coats of Drywall Compound ‐ Sanded and Primer Painted
‐ White 6‐Panel Interior Doors with Nickel or Bronze Locksets & door stop bumpers
‐ White Colonial Wood Residential Base Moulding
‐ White Colonial Wood Residential Colonial Case Moulding
‐ Blocking for Cabinet Installation
‐ Dupont stain protected carpet
‐Tight mesh shelves (3) in pantries and linens
‐ Final Cleaning
‐ Includes 6 Month Drywall Punch List
KITCHEN
‐ Legacy Crafted Cabinetry Available in Oak, Maple & Cherry Featuring:
‐ 3/4” Adjustable Shelves
‐ Dovetail Hardwood Full Extension Drawer Boxes
‐ Soft‐Self Close Undermount Drawer Guides
‐ 100lb Static Load Rating
‐ Concealed Hinges on Cabinet Doors
‐ Broan Ventless Range Hood
‐ 8” Deep Stainless Steel Sink
BATH
‐ Single Level Anti‐scald Faucet on Showers (chrome)
‐ Wood Mirror over all Vanity Bowls (Match Cabinets)
‐ Drywall Flange Around Tubs and Showers
UTILITIES
‐Full size 200amp main service with circuit breaker protection
‐ GFI protection for two exterior receptacles (one front & one rear)
‐Plumbing for washer and wire for dryer
‐ Water shut‐off valves throughout
GENERAL
‐ 10 Year Structural Warranty, Plus All Supplier Warranties
‐ House Placement and Staking Out of Lot
‐ Site Inspection by Designer Homes with Homeowner
Throughout Project
‐ Floor Plan Design and Modification – No Extra Charge
‐ Certificate of Occupancy Upon Completion
BENCHMARK STANDARD SPECIFICATIONS

Our Specs


Every home we build is customized based on your needs and price range. We always start with a minimum set of building specifications but there a many features you can include as you design your home.
◾ 9‘ ceilings on 1st Floor
◾Hardwood flooring Kitchen, Hall and Dining room, Tile in bathrooms
◾Granite counters in kitchen
◾Gas fireplace with granite or stone surround and Mantle
◾Concrete walk
◾Landscape package

Foundation: All footings and walls are cast-in-place 3000 psi concrete, 4” PVC footing drain around perimeter of house. Insulated to frost line.

Basement and Garage Slab: 3500 psi concrete reinforced with fiber mesh on 6-9” crushed stone, with 2” perimeter drain. Control joints cut in all slabs.

Rough Framing: #2 or better graded lumber, kiln-dried. All sub floors are 3/4” tongue and groove Advantech OSB Structural sheathing. Exterior wall and roof sheathing is 1/2” OSB structural sheathing.

Roofing: GAF Lifetime warranty Asphalt-fiberglass architectural shingles installed over 15lb asphalt felt paper. All eaves and valleys have bituminous self-adhesive membrane(2 courses ice shield at eaves) All ridges vented.

Windows: Anderson 200 series or Simonton Profinish tilt in – Double pane low-e with argon insulating glazing.

Exterior Doors: ThermaTru insulated Steel entry doors.

Exterior Siding & Trim: Vinyl siding, trim and shakes.

Plumbing: All supply piping is PEX, drainage and venting schedule 40 PVC. We use Kohler fixtures and Delta faucets with an allowance for finishes and styles.

HVAC: High efficiency gas fired warm air furnace with direct vent and in line humidifier.

Electrical: 200 amp 40 circuit panel. Pre-wired for 4 cable, 3 phone. And 4 computer (RJ-6) jacks (category 5e wire). All light fixtures included with an allowance.

Insulation: R-38 cellulose in ceiling, 2×6 exterior walls have R-21friction-fit fiberglass. Garage wall have R-13 and garage ceiling have R-30. All eaves to be vented along the underside of sheathing. All plates caulked and openings air sealed per NYS code and Energy Star Specifications.

Flooring: All wood floors are installed over existing sub floor and 15lb asphalt felt paper. All ceramic tile is installed over 1/4” Denshield underlayment. All carpet is installed over 8lb pad.

Kitchens: We start with Schrock raised panel maple cabinetry, dovetail, smart stop drawers and granite counters and backsplash. Appliance allowance.

Interior Doors: 2 panel painted Masonite with Schlage lock sets.

Casing and baseboard: all windows and doors start with 3 1/4” colonial trim and 5 1/4” baseboard with all inside corners coped. We have a large variety of solid wood trim selections either painted or stained. All of our trim and finish work is done in house (Richard Stewart, founder of Stewart Construction and Master Carpenter with 50 years of experience building homes)

Closets: always have a minimum of one rod and wire mesh shelf with 4 shelves in linen and pantry, we also offer solid wood or laminate shelving.

Paint: We recommend flat latex on all walls and ceilings, two coats, with eggshell finish in the baths and semigloss on the trim and doors.

Change orders: All change orders are priced out and approved by both Stewart Construction and Homeowner so there are no surprises at the end of the project.

This is a brief overview, all of our contracts include individualized detailed building specifications explaining exactly what we include and provide during the building of your home.

•Decorative front door-others to paint

Another narrow lot plan, and often the choice for folks who are looking to spec a house or use as a rental, the Northbrook has a very welcoming front appearance, lots of open space in the living area and a dining area that flows perfectly from the kitchen. Built to sell, to rent or just to live in. Others have loved this little plan and so will you!

With offices in Tacoma, Tri-Cities, Spokane and Vancouver, True Built Home has been successfully helping families create their dream homes across the state of Washington. Building a True Built Home may be simpler, more affordable and economically more sensible than you think. All of our homes come standard with pre-painted doors, real wood trim stained to match your cabinet choice, high-end faucets, Cemplank Lap Siding by Hardie, 8lb pad and 7 year tread retention carpets and FreedomRail closet organizers. A True Built Home comes with standard features that other on-your-lot builders nickel and dime you for. Check out our “Standard Features” to see what some of our standards look like. On average, we save our client about $23,000. Want to see how? Some say “why settle for less?” At True Built Home we ask, why not settle for more!

To meet the July 1st 2016 Washington State Revised Energy Code all homes 1500 square feet and above get the following:
1.High efficient electric furnace package along with high efficient heat pump system- natural gas packages cost more and are an upgrade
2.Low-flow Moen faucets-rated #1 JD Powers-all customers
3.R38 under the floor
4.LowE .28 windows
5.Heat pump (hybrid) electric water heater

Oregon and Idaho customers would need to add about 10% to the base cost of the home to get the aforementioned items built into their new True Built Home. Below are a number of outstanding items we do standard for all True Built Home customers.
•Hardwood Trim
•Electric Furnace Package- natural gas packages cost more and are an upgrade
•Pre-Painted Interior Doors with 5 paint colors to choose from
•Garage door opener
•JD Powers #1 rated faucet package by Moen-low flow
•Cemplank concrete fire resistant siding
•Front exterior windows get additional architectural trim package all windows get wrapped
•Simulated cedar shake siding front gables of the home only
•8 lb carpet pad

•36” cabinets entire home•4 standard light packages to choose from
•Decorative front door-others to paint
•Most plans have a man door in garage

Click here to see our standard features along with some recommended upgrades.

This is getting a bit more suejictbve, but I much prefer the Zune Marketplace. The interface is colorful, has more flair, and some cool features like Mixview' that let you quickly see related albums, songs, or other users related to what you're listening to. Clicking on one of those will center on that item, and another set of neighbors will come into view, allowing you to navigate around exploring by similar artists, songs, or users. Speaking of users, the Zune Social is also great fun, letting you find others with shared tastes and becoming friends with them. You then can listen to a playlist created based on an amalgamation of what all your friends are listening to, which is also enjoyable. Those concerned with privacy will be relieved to know you can prevent the public from seeing your personal listening habits if you so choose.

When I first learned about Zeiler’s work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. But that’s not what happened at all. The results weren’t even close: the pigeons pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasn’t guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.

Decades after Zeiler published his results, in 2012, a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. The site already had 200 million users at the time – a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a “like button”.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link or status update. A post with zero “likes” wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed. Facebook was the first major social networking force to introduce the like button, but others now have similar functions. You can like and repost tweets on Twitter, pictures on Instagram, posts on Google+, columns on LinkedIn, and videos on YouTube.

The act of liking became the subject of etiquette debates. What did it mean to refrain from liking a friend’s post? If you liked every third post, was that an implicit condemnation of the other posts? Liking became a form of basic social support – the online equivalent of laughing at a friend’s joke in public.

Web developer Rameet Chawla developed an app as a marketing exercise, but also a social experiment, to uncover the effect of the like button. When he launched it, Chawla posted this introduction on its homepage: “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. I’m talking about likes. They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.”


Chawla’s app, called Lovematically, was designed to automatically like every picture that rolled through its users’ newsfeeds. It wasn’t even necessary to impress them any more; any old post was good enough to inspire a like. Apart from enjoying the warm glow that comes from spreading good cheer, Chawla – for the first three months, the app’s only user – also found that people reciprocated. They liked more of his photos, and he attracted an average of 30 new followers a day, a total of almost 3,000 followers during the trial period. On Valentine’s Day 2014, Chawla allowed 5,000 Instagram users to download a beta version of the app. After only two hours, Instagram shut down Lovematically for violating the social network’s terms of use.

“I knew way before launching it that it would get shut down by Instagram,” Chawla said. “Using drug terminology, you know, Instagram is the dealer and I’m the new guy in the market giving away the drug for free.”

Chawla was surprised, though, that it happened so quickly. He’d hoped for at least a week of use, but Instagram pounced immediately.


When I moved to the United States for postgraduate studies in 2004, online entertainment was limited. These were the days before Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube – and Facebook was limited to students at Harvard. One evening, I stumbled on a game called Sign of the Zodiac (Zodiac for short) that demanded very little mental energy.

Zodiac was a simple online slot machine, much like the actual slot machines in casinos: you decided how much to wager, lazily clicked a button over and over again, and watched as the machine spat out wins and losses. At first, I played to relieve the stress of long days filled with too much thinking, but the brief “ding” that followed each small win, and the longer melody that followed each major win, hooked me fast. Eventually screenshots of the game would intrude on my day. I’d picture five pink scorpions lining up for the game’s highest jackpot, followed by the jackpot melody that I can still conjure today. I had a minor behavioural addiction, and these were the sensory hangovers of the random, unpredictable feedback that followed each win.

My Zodiac addiction wasn’t unusual. For 13 years, Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, studied gamblers and the machines that hook them. She collected descriptions of slot machines from gambling experts and current and former addicts, which included the following: “Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling … electronic morphine ... the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man … Slots are the premier addiction delivery device.”

These are sensationalised descriptions, but they capture how easily people become hooked on slot-machine gambling. I can relate, because I became addicted to a slots game that wasn’t even doling out real money. The reinforcing sound of a win after the silence of several losses was enough for me.

In the US, banks are not allowed to handle online gambling winnings, which makes online gambling practically illegal. Very few companies are willing to fight the system, and the ones that do are quickly defeated. That sounds like a good thing, but free and legal games such as Sign of the Zodiac can also be dangerous. At casinos, the deck is stacked heavily against the player; on average the house has to win. But the house doesn’t have to win in a game without money.

As David Goldhill, the chief executive officer of the Game Show Network, which also produces many online games, told me: “Because we’re not restricted by having to pay real winnings, we can pay out $120 for every $100 played. No land-based casino could do that for more than a week without going out of business.” As a result, the game can continue forever because the player never runs out of chips. I played Sign of the Zodiac for four years and rarely had to start a new game. I won roughly 95% of the time. The game only ended when I had to eat or sleep or attend class in the morning. And sometimes it didn’t even end then.

Casinos win most of the time, but they have a clever way of convincing gamblers that the outcomes are reversed. Early slot machines were incredibly simple devices: the player pulled the machine’s arm to spin its three mechanical reels. If the centre of the reels displayed two or more of the same symbol when they stopped spinning, the player won a certain number of coins or credits. Today, slot machines allow gamblers







1 2 3 4 5 Mar 29, 2017


Technical, insulated full-body suit for climbing 8,000-metre peaks

n the night of his 30th birthday, after a few drinks, Dean Karnazes decided that he would celebrate by running all the way from San Francisco down the coast to the town of Half Moon Bay, a distance of 30 miles. So began a career as an endurance runner. He has run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days in all 50 states, and taken part in such extreme competitions as a marathon to the South Pole and a 135-mile race through Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth. Karnazes once ran 350 miles in 81 hours and 44 minutes, without stopping to sleep. His account of his feats of distance running, Ultramarathon Man, is a bestseller. Karnazes’s superhuman exertions are sponsored by The North Face, the company that make the kit he wears in his coaching videos.

The North Face, a Bay Area-based outdoor clothing manufacturer, sells garments and gear for climbing, backpacking, running, and skiing. Its stores are decorated with huge photographs of people climbing icy peaks and running through meadows. Central to the brand’s ethos are the professional athletes it sponsors, people not widely known but celebrated in their fields – names such as Karnazes and Pete Athans, who has climbed Everest seven times. The North Face sells the idea of adventure – of pushing limits – whether running long distances, climbing an untried rockface, or sleeping outside at sub-zero temperatures. Its tagline is “never stop exploring”. (“We have actually been approached with partnerships about spacesuits to Mars and things like that,” one publicist told me recently.)





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This canny marketing of adventure has made The North Face the dominant player in a booming outdoor-wear market – a $4bn industry in the US alone. And its closest rival in the contest to sell the thrill of the wilderness to the masses may be a company whose origins and history are tightly intertwined with its own: Patagonia.

If The North Face aims to appeal to the overachieving weekend warrior, Patagonia is for the slightly more mellow soul who wants to soak up the fresh air and enjoy the view as he ascends a craggy mountain. The company’s ethos is encapsulated in Let My People Go Surfing, the memoir-cum-management classic about Patagonia, by the company’s founder Yvon Chouinard – reissued last year in a 10th-anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Naomi Klein. The book contains lavish colour pictures of people in genial communion with nature. To browse the book is to dive into a world of life-affirming outdoor feats followed by nights around the fire, swapping heroic tales.

Unlike other billion-dollar sports brands, neither company sells balls or bats. They do not cater to team sports. They are, above all, selling the allure of the great outdoors, offering their customers technically advanced gear for going off into the wilds with a friend or two. (Or, if you prefer, alone: the cover of the winter 2016 Patagonia catalogue features a man on a motorbike – carrying a pair of skis under one arm – smiling at a squirrel as it crosses the road.)

Both companies understand that the appeal of endurance sports has something to do with acquiring kit that boasts the most advanced technology. For genuine adventure, their marketing implies, you need top-quality gear. And top-quality gear designed to withstand the harshest conditions and last a lifetime does not come cheap. You can buy an Inferno sleeping bag from The North Face that will, for $729 (£593), keep you warm in temperatures as cold as -40C. For $529 (£430), you can get a neoprene-free, natural rubber, hooded wetsuit from Patagonia for use in water temperatures down to 0C.

Both companies also understand that the largest market for their products is not explorers stocking up for Arctic expeditions. The real money comes from selling products designed for hardcore outdoor adventure to urban customers who lead relatively unadventurous lives. For the most part, people wear North Face and Patagonia gear while doing everyday things: cycling, shopping, walking the dog. “You can take a backpack to school but you feel like you’re in Yosemite just because it says North Face,” Dean Karnazes told me one afternoon in San Francisco. “I think that aspirational element is really big.”

It’s a sales pitch that has yielded big profits. The North Face reported annual revenue of $2.3bn last year, with 200 stores around the world. Patagonia is smaller, but growing more rapidly. The company had sales of $800m in 2016, twice as much as in 2010, and has 29 standalone stores in the US, 23 in Japan, and others in locations such as Chamonix, the French ski resort.

While The North Face sells $5,500 (£4,480) two-metre tents and Patagonia sells $629 waders for fly fishing, many of the most popular products for both companies are everyday wear: waterproof anoraks, leggings, fleeces, and, most important of all, puffer jackets. “Everyone is trying to reinvent and reinterpret the black puffy jacket,” said Jeff Crook, the chief product officer at Mountain Equipment Co-Op, an outdoor department store that has 20 stores across Canada, “whether it spends most of its time on the mountain peak or at the bus stop.”





Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure

The flagship jackets for both companies are the product of decades of technological refinement to make them increasingly warm, durable, and light. The most advanced models today have been engineered to solve the problem of how to insulate the wearer against cold and wet while remaining “breathable” – so you don’t overheat while you’re scaling that cliff face. At Patagonia, there is the Nano-Air ($249; £180 in the UK), a quilted, but not very puffy, water resistant jacket that uses a trademarked synthetic insulation that the company described as “revolutionary” upon its release in 2014. The North Face Thermoball ($199; £150) has its own proprietary synthetic insulation, which uses clusters of fibre to trap heat in a manner that mimics down. Both jackets are fit for a mountaineering expedition, but are each more likely to be bought to keep warm while taking the kids to the park.

Neither company regards the other as a rival – at least not publicly. But aside from the fact they sell the same kind of stuff to the same kind of customers (urban, affluent), the two companies have quite a bit of shared history. Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure. Both men started out making their own specialist equipment; both went on to found companies selling outdoor wear; both felt distinctly uncomfortable doing office jobs, and still more uncomfortable running companies.

“I’ve been a businessman for almost 60 years,” Chouinard writes in the introduction to Let My People Go Surfing. “It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or lawyer.” And together, while promoting the glories of exploring the unspoiled wilderness, both men have been central to the mass popularisation of outdoor activities such as hiking and climbing, which may, in turn, make nature a little less unspoiled.

Selling professional-grade gear to people with no intention of using it professionally isn’t exactly a new trick in marketing, as the makers of SUVs, digital cameras and headphones can tell you. Most people who buy the Nike trainers advertised by Mo Farah don’t use them to run long distances.

But North Face and Patagonia are both wrestling with a more consequential paradox, one that is central to contemporary consumerism: we want to feel morally good about the things we buy. And both companies have been phenomenally successful because they have crafted an image that is about more than just being ethical and environmentally friendly, but about nature, adventure, exploration – ideas more grandiose than simply selling you a jacket, taking your money and trying not to harm the earth too much along the way. But the paradox is that by presenting themselves this way, they are selling a lot more jackets. In other words, both companies are selling stuff in part by looking like they’re not trying too hard to sell stuff, which helps them sell more stuff – and fills the world with more and more stuff.

You might call this the authenticity problem. And for all their similarities, the two companies are taking radically different approaches to solving it.


Doug Tompkins and Yvon Choiunard were the kind of outcast adolescents who found a home in the great outdoors. Both men became passionate about climbing and surfing in the American west in the middle of the last century. Back in the 1950s and 60s, climbing was “an unusual sport with just a small group of renegades who were, you know, misfits”, said Rick Ridgeway, an accomplished mountaineer and adventurer. (Rolling Stone magazine once called him “The Real Indiana Jones.”) An old friend of both Tompkins and Choiunard, he is now vice president for public engagement at Patagonia.

Both The North Face and Patagonia have their roots in exploring the sort of remote places about which guidebooks had not been written. In those days, getting back to uncorrupted nature and reading Thoreau by the campfire slotted in well with the nascent counterculture. “We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society,” Chouinard wrote in Let My People Go Surfing.

Tompkins opened the first The North Face retail store selling mountaineering equipment in the North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco in 1966. The Grateful Dead played at the opening, and there was a fashion show featuring Joan Baez and her sister, the late singer and activist Mimi Fariña.

In Southern California, Chouinard, who was among the pioneers of what has since become known as the “golden age of Yosemite climbing”, had begun making his own equipment in the late 1950s. At first, he created and forged reusable steel pitons that were hammered into rock faces and then removed. Then, to help preserve climbing routes from disfigurement, Chouinard changed to aluminium chocks that could be wedged in by hand and did not leave a trace behind. The ambition at the time was to do as little damage as possible – as the Sierra climber Doug Robinson put it: “Organic climbing for the natural man.”

The two men met in the mid-60s when Tompkins began to distribute Chouinard’s equipment through The North Face. Early in their friendship, a white-water kayaking trip together in California ended with Chouinard getting 15 stitches in his face. And in 1968 the two drove a Ford Econoline van from Ventura, California, to the remote region of Chile and Argentina named Patagonia.

That same year, Tompkins sold his stake in The North Face for $50,000, and with his then wife, Susie, founded the San Francisco-based casualwear brand Esprit, whose hip version of sportswear became synonymous with 1980s style. After reading Bill Devall’s environmental call to arms Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered in the 1980s, Tompkins decided to leave the apparel business and devote himself full time to saving the environment. By the time Esprit was sold in 1990, its annual sales were estimated to be $1bn.


The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966.







The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966. Photograph: Suki HIll / The North Face

Chouinard had also branched out from mountaineering equipment. He had begun to import climbing wear, for sale, and in 1973, founded a new company named Patagonia. One of his earliest employees was Kris McDivitt, a downhill ski-racer. She became general manager and then CEO of Patagonia, before she met Doug Tompkins, who was then divorced.They married in 1993, a union of sorts between the two companies. Together the couple eventually bought 2.2m acres in Patagonia to conserve and live on full-time. They planned to protect this tract of wilderness, using the fortune he made from fuelling people’s ambitions to explore the outdoors.

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If Tompkins’s response to his dawning realisation that the apparel industry was damaging the environment was to sell his business and take direct action to save the Earth, then Chouinard, by contrast, decided to keep his company in private hands and run it in a way that might minimise environmental damage – a nearly impossible task that seems to weigh very heavily on him. “Evil always wins if we do nothing,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing.

The challenge of taking the moral high ground while still making and selling things is something that Rick Ridgeway also thinks about a great deal. “Our mission is to build the best product, causing no unnecessary harm, then that second part of our mission is essentially saying that we’ve got to do less bad,” he said. “We’re going to make our product with the smallest footprint possible, but it is a footprint.”

For both men – who would not disagree with the radical environmentalist Edward Abbey’s famous remark that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” – running an ethical business is an almost impossible challenge, if not a contradiction. Populating the world with more stuff that will eventually get thrown away is bad for the planet; the popularising of outdoor culture of all sorts is bad for specific places of natural beauty, which risk being overrun with people; and finally – and most difficult – the entire ethos of growth and profit and consumption is unsustainable for humanity and the health of the planet.

Jill Dumain, the director of environment strategy, who has been at Patagonia for more than 27 years, can easily list all the ways the company is trying to do the right thing, among them the decision, in the 1990s, to use only organic cotton, and in 2013 to switch to torture-free goose down. (The North Face made the same move in 2014.) It has tried to replace as many of its synthetic materials as possible with recycled ones, although finding recycled zippers and buttons has been a struggle. Socially, it is committed to fair trade in its supply chain, in the mills and sewing factories it works with. This has led to the company splitting up with suppliers who were not willing or able to make the changes it demanded. These are the sorts of problems that Patagonia has chosen to explore to an almost obsessive degree. The idea of businesses being “transparent” is wholly overused but, in Patagonia’s case, it is fitting.

Over time, Chouinard and Ridgeway matured into their roles as aging renegades: they appear as delightfully cranky old friends in a 2010 documentary, 180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless, which follows a young writer and photographer as he attempts to retrace their now-legendary 1968 trip from California to Chile.

Their adventures continued into December of 2015, when Chouinard, Ridgeway, Tompkins, and three other friends went on a seemingly gentle five-day kayaking trip to southern Chile. Ridgeway, who is 67, and Tompkins, 72, shared a kayak and it capsized in heavy waves in 4C water. The six men were rescued via patrol boat and helicopter but Tompkins suffered from severe hypothermia. He died in a hospital that night.

“Doug had a visceral dislike for authority and always relished breaking the rules,” Chouinard wrote. It was a heartfelt tribute to his old friend. In his book, Chouinard comes off as a grumpy, seasoned old-timer, constantly bemoaning the lack of credibility in everyone, everywhere. “Yvon calls himself the biggest pessimist in the world,” says Dumain.


Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face.







Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face. Photograph: Reuters

Chouinard and his wife Malinda divide their time between Ventura and their long-time home in Jackson Hole, a mountain resort town in Wyoming now known as a playground for the super-rich – Harrison Ford, Sandra Bullock and Dick Cheney all have homes there.

Patagonia employees talk about Chouinard with the devotion usually reserved for cult leaders, but with a tone that suggests that they also view him as a somewhat mercurial genius. “He spends a lot of time outdoors like he always has,” says Rose Marcario, Patagonia’s CEO, “a lot of time fishing, or teaching kids how to fish.” When I called, he was always off somewhere; no one seemed to know quite where.

By keeping Patagonia as a privately owned business, Chouinard has been able to run it in a way that stays true to his values. (Patagonia is organised as a for-profit company, known as a B-Corp, with certification for its social and environmental commitment.) “When the company becomes the fatted calf, it’s sold for a profit, and its resources and holdings are often ravaged and broken apart, leading to the disruption of family ties and the long-term health of local economies,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing. “When you get away from the idea that a company is a product to be sold to the highest bidder in the shortest amount of time, all future decisions in the company are affected.”

Patagonia’s competitors, The North Face included, are mostly public companies driven by shareholders. “The mission and the values of Patagonia have never been really about that,” says Marcario. “They’ve been about how much influence we can have on preserving and conserving the wild places that we love and play in, and how much influence we can have as a business to help change the model.”

But, while Tompkins left business altogether to save the wilderness, Chouinard seems like a man who will never stop being conflicted about what running a successful business entails. “Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible,” he has written. “It will never make a totally sustainable non-damaging product. But it is committed to trying.”


Patagonia’s headquarters are in Ventura, a small beach town in Southern California in between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. The buildings occupy a 5.5-acre campus and are painted in a signature buttery ochre colour used in most of the Patagonia retail stores around the world. There’s a large playground for the onsite creche – an employee benefit so rare in the US that Patagonia published a book last summer about its child-friendly philosophy. The company prides itself in hiring relatively few people but looking after them all.

There is something about being on the Patagonia campus that feels like being in a Scandinavian country – albeit one with banana plants, blooming agaves and jacaranda trees. There are solar panels, piles of surfboards for employees to use, and a car with a licence plate that reads BUMKIN. Offices have bean bags and stability balls to sit on, and the canteen serves organic kale blackberry salad. Then there’s the shed that originally housed Chouinard’s blacksmithing workshop, where he made climbing gear. It now feels a bit like a museum piece, frozen in the 1970s, but apparently Chouinard still tinkers around in it from time to time.

The campus is the setting for many ostentatious efforts to do good. “One day I was walking down the steps and there were pieces of paper all over the sidewalks, and they all had arrows [on them] and said, ‘Careful. Watch out. Butterfly chrysalis,’” Dean Carter, the vice president of human resources, told me.

If this conspicuous altruism is grating to some people, they do not work at Patagonia. Still, the company says that it does not only recruit environmentally conscious do-gooders. “If we picked people who fit a specific mould, it could feel really culty,” Carter said. “But we’re just looking for threads; we’re not looking for the entire quilt. We’re looking for threads of caring for the environment, threads of caring about the outdoors, and threads of caring about families, collaborating, working.”

In a not-necessarily-cultish way, a lot of Patagonia employees go on to marry other Patagonia employees, and family members often work there too. Carter’s own daughter is a receptionist.


Yvon Chouinard in his workshop at the Patagonia headquarters in Ventura, California.

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Yvon Chouinard in his workshop at the Patagonia headquarters in Ventura, California. Photograph: Victoria Sayer Pearson/AP

Companies wishing to improve their public image drop by to see if a little ethical stardust will rub off on them. Coca-Cola flew in a team from South Africa. There was even a visit from Chick-Fil-A, the US fast food chain famous for taking a public stance against same-sex marriage in 2012. I registered my surprise. “Exactly! And I have a partner. So they asked me if they could come. I was kind of like, ‘Are you sure?’” Carter says. “And obviously we don’t share their values. But they have their very specific culture that they’re living. And they were really sweet and kind.”

When Neil Blumenthal, co-founder of the fashionable eyewear startup Warby Parker, came to visit, he was impressed by how much work went into research and development – he mentioned the way Patagonia tests its raincoats with waters of various alkalinity to mimic rain in different parts of the world. But what really struck him, he said, was the venue for his meeting with two Patagonia executives: “Instead of taking the meeting in a conference room, we took a walk to the beach. For me it was pretty special; for them it was quite ordinary.”

Ridgeway – whose job as vice president of public engagement is to represent the company, whether at conferences or universities, or to executives who come to the Ventura headquarters – described the process of meeting visitors: “They go on a tour, we walk around and talk about the values and how we live the values. Usually we get some local organically grown food and we answer questions and share a story,” Ridgeway told me. “And then we are curious what their story is.”

Ridgeway can sometimes sound a little weary at having to explain to outsiders a way of life that comes quite naturally to him. “We don’t want to hold ourselves up in some arrogant exclusivity,” Ridgeway said, but then described the kind of customer that Patagonia does not “necessarily want to invite under our umbrella”. Namely, people who want to climb Mount Everest for bragging rights – the sort of affluent adventurers, drawn to climbing in part by Patagonia, whose impact Chouinard now regrets so much. “Someone who has paid $100,000 for a guided climb where the sherpas put the route in and risked their lives fixing the lines and carried all your stuff up for you and positioned your oxygen balls so you could go up and come back and say you climbed Everest. That doesn’t work for us,” Ridgeway says. “And we don’t mind saying it publicly.”

In its pursuit of authenticity, Patagonia tries to avoid malls, and only takes over spaces that mean something to the community. (One of its four Manhattan stores is located on the Bowery, next to the former location of the punk club CBGB, which is now a John Varvatos boutique.) It prides itself on pushing up against the limits of how ethical a company can be while actually still selling things: quality goods, ethical labour and manufacturing, no debt, even a tax strategy, according to Chouinard’s book, “to pay our fair share and not a penny more”.

The company is hyper-aware of these contradictions, perhaps to the point of tying itself in knots. In 2011, on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in the US, Patagonia ran an ad featuring a photo of a plush blue fleece, and copy that read DON’T BUY THIS JACKET. The advert invited customers to make a commitment to reduce what they buy, repair their gear and recycle the stuff they no longer need. (Patagonia’s campus in Reno, Nevada houses the largest garment repair facility in North America.) But it had the opposite effect: Patagonia’s Black Friday sales increased by 30% over the previous year. The anti-sales message, as they might have expected, made consumers feel better about buying more.


Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket advert.

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Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket advert. Photograph: PR

The company’s attempts to expand into new markets have a similar blend of moral commitment and financial savvy. In 2013, it launched a venture fund to invest in environmentally and socially responsible for-profit startups. In 2012, the company launched a food line named Patagonia Provisions, which includes buffalo jerky, smoked wild Sockeye salmon and, beginning last October, a beer made with a grain called kernza, which can be grown year-round. The target market is “concerned moms that want to make sure they’re giving their kids organic, non-GMO food”, Rose Marcario told me. The new food division, she added, has won the company “a whole new set of customers”.


At the headquarters of The North Face in Alameda – just across the bay from San Francisco – there is a similar preoccupation with being green and avoiding waste. During a visit last summer, I had a lunch of sustainably raised salmon with Todd Spaletto, who became president of the company in 2011. The building where we dined was insulated with recycled blue jeans, and there were composting bins, solar panels and free charging stations for electric cars. One building housed a vast area dedicated to repairing clothes under the company’s lifetime warranty. As we ate, a team out on the lawn was testing out the set-up of a large, complicated-looking hexagonal tent.

A visitor to The North Face campus encounters the same sporty feel as at Patagonia HQ – but instead of Patagonia’s crunchy “soul surfer” vibe, here there is an edge of elite athleticism, whether in the form of employees doing bootcamp workouts and agility drills in the well-equipped gym, or a casual mention that Dean Karnazes was there just the other day, leading a group run along the water.

“One of my first weeks on the job, I was talking to somebody and they were like, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’” Spaletto recalled, smiling. “I was like, ‘I’m pretty excited, I’m running a half-marathon.’ And they were like” – and here he adopted a tone reserved for motivating small children – “‘That’s great, you gotta start somewhere!’”

Lately The North Face has been focusing more and more on a younger, casual customer whose main interest in hiking is the part where they get to drink beer around a campfire. “Why does the youthful millennial consumer go outdoors?” Spaletto asked. “They value one thing above all else. It’s this whole idea of these genuine experiential moments that you share with your friends.”

These youthful consumers may even decide they can afford to skip the hike and go straight to the beer. But as The North Face positions itself as a fashion brand as much as an outdoor wear company, a new dilemma arises. The casual customer is drawn both to style and to the authenticity of owning real technical gear – but if the gear itself announces its technical utility too loudly, it ceases to be fashionable.

“The outdoor industry has prided itself on showing the technology on the outside – seams sealed, zippers taped. That is very much core to this industry, everybody does it,” said Sumie Scott, the senior product director for “mountain culture” at The North Face. “But the more youthful consumer wants hidden technology. So that’s the challenge, how do you get them to know that technology exists?”

“What The North Face tries to push is this high, high performance extremity,” said Cathy Begien, who worked in visual merchandising at The North Face a decade ago, and has since gone on to work at Prada, Opening Ceremony, and Warby Parker. “They would say, ‘Cathy use Everest imagery or rock climbing.’ But I’m in a mall and people are pushing strollers around at 8am. I don’t think they care about whether an alpinist would want this, or an ultra-marathoner,” Begien recalled. “Holiday season was the only time I didn’t have to talk about mountain climbing or water rafting and could just show a bunch of jackets in a way the typical mall consumer can understand: this one is gonna keep you warm, this one is gonna keep you warmer, this one is gonna keep you warmest.”

The high cost of North Face gear creates high expectations: “You get a fairly affluent customer who expects meticulous service. You have to behave as though you’re working at a Vuitton or a Gucci,” said Caitlin Kelly, a journalist who took a job at a North Face outlet in suburban New York after losing her reporting job during the 2008 recession, and wrote a book, titled Malled, about the experience. “It was a long, narrow store. And when you walked in, half the store was fashion, half was ‘Let’s climb Everest’. It was massively confusing to the shopper.”

The North Face wants to do style and adventure. It has collaborated on slippers and puffer jackets with Supreme, the skateboarding brand with a cult following. (Drake wore a jacket from the collection in the video for his 2011 single The Motto.) The trend among makers of serious technical gear is for designs that don’t look like you are about to climb to Camp 4 on Everest – while at the same time, couture designers are increasingly showing items inspired by authentic outdoor gear. Patrik Ervell, Steven Alan and Louis Vuitton have all designed fleece jackets that appear to be a riff on Patagonia’s Retro-X; puffer jackets have started to appear on the covers of fashion magazines, thanks in part to Balenciaga’s $3,000 parkas.

The desire to broadcast a sense of adventure while still looking good may have something to do with the biggest trend in athletic gear in recent years: the rise of “athleisure” – clothes that suggest, rather than insist on, performance, designed to transition from workout to sofa. Leggings – whether made by The Gap or Alexander Wang – are the most popular form of sporting loungewear (or is it lounging sportswear), having replaced denim as the preferred casual wear for women. The UK sportswear market will surpass £8bn by 2020, fuelled by the rise of athleisure. In addition to gear for high-altitude camping and open-water diving, both The North Face and Patagonia sell leggings and sweatpants and T-shirts and all manner of gear best suited for hanging out.


When I first learned about Zeiler’s work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. But that’s not what happened at all. The results weren’t even close: the pigeons pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasn’t guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.

Decades after Zeiler published his results, in 2012, a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. The site already had 200 million users at the time – a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a “like button”.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link or status update. A post with zero “likes” wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed. Facebook was the first major social networking force to introduce the like button, but others now have similar functions. You can like and repost tweets on Twitter, pictures on Instagram, posts on Google+, columns on LinkedIn, and videos on YouTube.

The act of liking became the subject of etiquette debates. What did it mean to refrain from liking a friend’s post? If you liked every third post, was that an implicit condemnation of the other posts? Liking became a form of basic social support – the online equivalent of laughing at a friend’s joke in public.

Web developer Rameet Chawla developed an app as a marketing exercise, but also a social experiment, to uncover the effect of the like button. When he launched it, Chawla posted this introduction on its homepage: “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. I’m talking about likes. They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.”


Chawla’s app, called Lovematically, was designed to automatically like every picture that rolled through its users’ newsfeeds. It wasn’t even necessary to impress them any more; any old post was good enough to inspire a like. Apart from enjoying the warm glow that comes from spreading good cheer, Chawla – for the first three months, the app’s only user – also found that people reciprocated. They liked more of his photos, and he attracted an average of 30 new followers a day, a total of almost 3,000 followers during the trial period. On Valentine’s Day 2014, Chawla allowed 5,000 Instagram users to download a beta version of the app. After only two hours, Instagram shut down Lovematically for violating the social network’s terms of use.

“I knew way before launching it that it would get shut down by Instagram,” Chawla said. “Using drug terminology, you know, Instagram is the dealer and I’m the new guy in the market giving away the drug for free.”

Chawla was surprised, though, that it happened so quickly. He’d hoped for at least a week of use, but Instagram pounced immediately.


When I moved to the United States for postgraduate studies in 2004, online entertainment was limited. These were the days before Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube – and Facebook was limited to students at Harvard. One evening, I stumbled on a game called Sign of the Zodiac (Zodiac for short) that demanded very little mental energy.

Zodiac was a simple online slot machine, much like the actual slot machines in casinos: you decided how much to wager, lazily clicked a button over and over again, and watched as the machine spat out wins and losses. At first, I played to relieve the stress of long days filled with too much thinking, but the brief “ding” that followed each small win, and the longer melody that followed each major win, hooked me fast. Eventually screenshots of the game would intrude on my day. I’d picture five pink scorpions lining up for the game’s highest jackpot, followed by the jackpot melody that I can still conjure today. I had a minor behavioural addiction, and these were the sensory hangovers of the random, unpredictable feedback that followed each win.

My Zodiac addiction wasn’t unusual. For 13 years, Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, studied gamblers and the machines that hook them. She collected descriptions of slot machines from gambling experts and current and former addicts, which included the following: “Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling … electronic morphine ... the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man … Slots are the premier addiction delivery device.”

These are sensationalised descriptions, but they capture how easily people become hooked on slot-machine gambling. I can relate, because I became addicted to a slots game that wasn’t even doling out real money. The reinforcing sound of a win after the silence of several losses was enough for me.

In the US, banks are not allowed to handle online gambling winnings, which makes online gambling practically illegal. Very few companies are willing to fight the system, and the ones that do are quickly defeated. That sounds like a good thing, but free and legal games such as Sign of the Zodiac can also be dangerous. At casinos, the deck is stacked heavily against the player; on average the house has to win. But the house doesn’t have to win in a game without money.

As David Goldhill, the chief executive officer of the Game Show Network, which also produces many online games, told me: “Because we’re not restricted by having to pay real winnings, we can pay out $120 for every $100 played. No land-based casino could do that for more than a week without going out of business.” As a result, the game can continue forever because the player never runs out of chips. I played Sign of the Zodiac for four years and rarely had to start a new game. I won roughly 95% of the time. The game only ended when I had to eat or sleep or attend class in the morning. And sometimes it didn’t even end then.

Casinos win most of the time, but they have a clever way of convincing gamblers that the outcomes are reversed. Early slot machines were incredibly simple devices: the player pulled the machine’s arm to spin its three mechanical reels. If the centre of the reels displayed two or more of the same symbol when they stopped spinning, the player won a certain number of coins or credits. Today, slot machines allow gamblers







1 2 3 4 5 Mar 29, 2017


Technical, insulated full-body suit for climbing 8,000-metre peaks

n the night of his 30th birthday, after a few drinks, Dean Karnazes decided that he would celebrate by running all the way from San Francisco down the coast to the town of Half Moon Bay, a distance of 30 miles. So began a career as an endurance runner. He has run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days in all 50 states, and taken part in such extreme competitions as a marathon to the South Pole and a 135-mile race through Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth. Karnazes once ran 350 miles in 81 hours and 44 minutes, without stopping to sleep. His account of his feats of distance running, Ultramarathon Man, is a bestseller. Karnazes’s superhuman exertions are sponsored by The North Face, the company that make the kit he wears in his coaching videos.

The North Face, a Bay Area-based outdoor clothing manufacturer, sells garments and gear for climbing, backpacking, running, and skiing. Its stores are decorated with huge photographs of people climbing icy peaks and running through meadows. Central to the brand’s ethos are the professional athletes it sponsors, people not widely known but celebrated in their fields – names such as Karnazes and Pete Athans, who has climbed Everest seven times. The North Face sells the idea of adventure – of pushing limits – whether running long distances, climbing an untried rockface, or sleeping outside at sub-zero temperatures. Its tagline is “never stop exploring”. (“We have actually been approached with partnerships about spacesuits to Mars and things like that,” one publicist told me recently.)





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This canny marketing of adventure has made The North Face the dominant player in a booming outdoor-wear market – a $4bn industry in the US alone. And its closest rival in the contest to sell the thrill of the wilderness to the masses may be a company whose origins and history are tightly intertwined with its own: Patagonia.

If The North Face aims to appeal to the overachieving weekend warrior, Patagonia is for the slightly more mellow soul who wants to soak up the fresh air and enjoy the view as he ascends a craggy mountain. The company’s ethos is encapsulated in Let My People Go Surfing, the memoir-cum-management classic about Patagonia, by the company’s founder Yvon Chouinard – reissued last year in a 10th-anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Naomi Klein. The book contains lavish colour pictures of people in genial communion with nature. To browse the book is to dive into a world of life-affirming outdoor feats followed by nights around the fire, swapping heroic tales.

Unlike other billion-dollar sports brands, neither company sells balls or bats. They do not cater to team sports. They are, above all, selling the allure of the great outdoors, offering their customers technically advanced gear for going off into the wilds with a friend or two. (Or, if you prefer, alone: the cover of the winter 2016 Patagonia catalogue features a man on a motorbike – carrying a pair of skis under one arm – smiling at a squirrel as it crosses the road.)

Both companies understand that the appeal of endurance sports has something to do with acquiring kit that boasts the most advanced technology. For genuine adventure, their marketing implies, you need top-quality gear. And top-quality gear designed to withstand the harshest conditions and last a lifetime does not come cheap. You can buy an Inferno sleeping bag from The North Face that will, for $729 (£593), keep you warm in temperatures as cold as -40C. For $529 (£430), you can get a neoprene-free, natural rubber, hooded wetsuit from Patagonia for use in water temperatures down to 0C.

Both companies also understand that the largest market for their products is not explorers stocking up for Arctic expeditions. The real money comes from selling products designed for hardcore outdoor adventure to urban customers who lead relatively unadventurous lives. For the most part, people wear North Face and Patagonia gear while doing everyday things: cycling, shopping, walking the dog. “You can take a backpack to school but you feel like you’re in Yosemite just because it says North Face,” Dean Karnazes told me one afternoon in San Francisco. “I think that aspirational element is really big.”

It’s a sales pitch that has yielded big profits. The North Face reported annual revenue of $2.3bn last year, with 200 stores around the world. Patagonia is smaller, but growing more rapidly. The company had sales of $800m in 2016, twice as much as in 2010, and has 29 standalone stores in the US, 23 in Japan, and others in locations such as Chamonix, the French ski resort.

While The North Face sells $5,500 (£4,480) two-metre tents and Patagonia sells $629 waders for fly fishing, many of the most popular products for both companies are everyday wear: waterproof anoraks, leggings, fleeces, and, most important of all, puffer jackets. “Everyone is trying to reinvent and reinterpret the black puffy jacket,” said Jeff Crook, the chief product officer at Mountain Equipment Co-Op, an outdoor department store that has 20 stores across Canada, “whether it spends most of its time on the mountain peak or at the bus stop.”





Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure

The flagship jackets for both companies are the product of decades of technological refinement to make them increasingly warm, durable, and light. The most advanced models today have been engineered to solve the problem of how to insulate the wearer against cold and wet while remaining “breathable” – so you don’t overheat while you’re scaling that cliff face. At Patagonia, there is the Nano-Air ($249; £180 in the UK), a quilted, but not very puffy, water resistant jacket that uses a trademarked synthetic insulation that the company described as “revolutionary” upon its release in 2014. The North Face Thermoball ($199; £150) has its own proprietary synthetic insulation, which uses clusters of fibre to trap heat in a manner that mimics down. Both jackets are fit for a mountaineering expedition, but are each more likely to be bought to keep warm while taking the kids to the park.

Neither company regards the other as a rival – at least not publicly. But aside from the fact they sell the same kind of stuff to the same kind of customers (urban, affluent), the two companies have quite a bit of shared history. Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure. Both men started out making their own specialist equipment; both went on to found companies selling outdoor wear; both felt distinctly uncomfortable doing office jobs, and still more uncomfortable running companies.

“I’ve been a businessman for almost 60 years,” Chouinard writes in the introduction to Let My People Go Surfing. “It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or lawyer.” And together, while promoting the glories of exploring the unspoiled wilderness, both men have been central to the mass popularisation of outdoor activities such as hiking and climbing, which may, in turn, make nature a little less unspoiled.

Selling professional-grade gear to people with no intention of using it professionally isn’t exactly a new trick in marketing, as the makers of SUVs, digital cameras and headphones can tell you. Most people who buy the Nike trainers advertised by Mo Farah don’t use them to run long distances.

But North Face and Patagonia are both wrestling with a more consequential paradox, one that is central to contemporary consumerism: we want to feel morally good about the things we buy. And both companies have been phenomenally successful because they have crafted an image that is about more than just being ethical and environmentally friendly, but about nature, adventure, exploration – ideas more grandiose than simply selling you a jacket, taking your money and trying not to harm the earth too much along the way. But the paradox is that by presenting themselves this way, they are selling a lot more jackets. In other words, both companies are selling stuff in part by looking like they’re not trying too hard to sell stuff, which helps them sell more stuff – and fills the world with more and more stuff.

You might call this the authenticity problem. And for all their similarities, the two companies are taking radically different approaches to solving it.


Doug Tompkins and Yvon Choiunard were the kind of outcast adolescents who found a home in the great outdoors. Both men became passionate about climbing and surfing in the American west in the middle of the last century. Back in the 1950s and 60s, climbing was “an unusual sport with just a small group of renegades who were, you know, misfits”, said Rick Ridgeway, an accomplished mountaineer and adventurer. (Rolling Stone magazine once called him “The Real Indiana Jones.”) An old friend of both Tompkins and Choiunard, he is now vice president for public engagement at Patagonia.

Both The North Face and Patagonia have their roots in exploring the sort of remote places about which guidebooks had not been written. In those days, getting back to uncorrupted nature and reading Thoreau by the campfire slotted in well with the nascent counterculture. “We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society,” Chouinard wrote in Let My People Go Surfing.

Tompkins opened the first The North Face retail store selling mountaineering equipment in the North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco in 1966. The Grateful Dead played at the opening, and there was a fashion show featuring Joan Baez and her sister, the late singer and activist Mimi Fariña.

In Southern California, Chouinard, who was among the pioneers of what has since become known as the “golden age of Yosemite climbing”, had begun making his own equipment in the late 1950s. At first, he created and forged reusable steel pitons that were hammered into rock faces and then removed. Then, to help preserve climbing routes from disfigurement, Chouinard changed to aluminium chocks that could be wedged in by hand and did not leave a trace behind. The ambition at the time was to do as little damage as possible – as the Sierra climber Doug Robinson put it: “Organic climbing for the natural man.”

The two men met in the mid-60s when Tompkins began to distribute Chouinard’s equipment through The North Face. Early in their friendship, a white-water kayaking trip together in California ended with Chouinard getting 15 stitches in his face. And in 1968 the two drove a Ford Econoline van from Ventura, California, to the remote region of Chile and Argentina named Patagonia.

That same year, Tompkins sold his stake in The North Face for $50,000, and with his then wife, Susie, founded the San Francisco-based casualwear brand Esprit, whose hip version of sportswear became synonymous with 1980s style. After reading Bill Devall’s environmental call to arms Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered in the 1980s, Tompkins decided to leave the apparel business and devote himself full time to saving the environment. By the time Esprit was sold in 1990, its annual sales were estimated to be $1bn.


The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966.







The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966. Photograph: Suki HIll / The North Face

Chouinard had also branched out from mountaineering equipment. He had begun to import climbing wear, for sale, and in 1973, founded a new company named Patagonia. One of his earliest employees was Kris McDivitt, a downhill ski-racer. She became general manager and then CEO of Patagonia, before she met Doug Tompkins, who was then divorced.They married in 1993, a union of sorts between the two companies. Together the couple eventually bought 2.2m acres in Patagonia to conserve and live on full-time. They planned to protect this tract of wilderness, using the fortune he made from fuelling people’s ambitions to explore the outdoors.

* * *




If Tompkins’s response to his dawning realisation that the apparel industry was damaging the environment was to sell his business and take direct action to save the Earth, then Chouinard, by contrast, decided to keep his company in private hands and run it in a way that might minimise environmental damage – a nearly impossible task that seems to weigh very heavily on him. “Evil always wins if we do nothing,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing.

The challenge of taking the moral high ground while still making and selling things is something that Rick Ridgeway also thinks about a great deal. “Our mission is to build the best product, causing no unnecessary harm, then that second part of our mission is essentially saying that we’ve got to do less bad,” he said. “We’re going to make our product with the smallest footprint possible, but it is a footprint.”

For both men – who would not disagree with the radical environmentalist Edward Abbey’s famous remark that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” – running an ethical business is an almost impossible challenge, if not a contradiction. Populating the world with more stuff that will eventually get thrown away is bad for the planet; the popularising of outdoor culture of all sorts is bad for specific places of natural beauty, which risk being overrun with people; and finally – and most difficult – the entire ethos of growth and profit and consumption is unsustainable for humanity and the health of the planet.

Jill Dumain, the director of environment strategy, who has been at Patagonia for more than 27 years, can easily list all the ways the company is trying to do the right thing, among them the decision, in the 1990s, to use only organic cotton, and in 2013 to switch to torture-free goose down. (The North Face made the same move in 2014.) It has tried to replace as many of its synthetic materials as possible with recycled ones, although finding recycled zippers and buttons has been a struggle. Socially, it is committed to fair trade in its supply chain, in the mills and sewing factories it works with. This has led to the company splitting up with suppliers who were not willing or able to make the changes it demanded. These are the sorts of problems that Patagonia has chosen to explore to an almost obsessive degree. The idea of businesses being “transparent” is wholly overused but, in Patagonia’s case, it is fitting.

Over time, Chouinard and Ridgeway matured into their roles as aging renegades: they appear as delightfully cranky old friends in a 2010 documentary, 180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless, which follows a young writer and photographer as he attempts to retrace their now-legendary 1968 trip from California to Chile.

Their adventures continued into December of 2015, when Chouinard, Ridgeway, Tompkins, and three other friends went on a seemingly gentle five-day kayaking trip to southern Chile. Ridgeway, who is 67, and Tompkins, 72, shared a kayak and it capsized in heavy waves in 4C water. The six men were rescued via patrol boat and helicopter but Tompkins suffered from severe hypothermia. He died in a hospital that night.

“Doug had a visceral dislike for authority and always relished breaking the rules,” Chouinard wrote. It was a heartfelt tribute to his old friend. In his book, Chouinard comes off as a grumpy, seasoned old-timer, constantly bemoaning the lack of credibility in everyone, everywhere. “Yvon calls himself the biggest pessimist in the world,” says Dumain.


Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face.







Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face. Photograph: Reuters

Chouinard and his wife Malinda divide their time between Ventura and their long-time home in Jackson Hole, a mountain resort town in Wyoming now known as a playground for the super-rich – Harrison Ford, Sandra Bullock and Dick Cheney all have homes there.

Patagonia employees talk about Chouinard with the devotion usually reserved for cult leaders, but with a tone that suggests that they also view him as a somewhat mercurial genius. “He spends a lot of time outdoors like he always has,” says Rose Marcario, Patagonia’s CEO, “a lot of time fishing, or teaching kids how to fish.” When I called, he was always off somewhere; no one seemed to know quite where.

By keeping Patagonia as a privately owned business, Chouinard has been able to run it in a way that stays true to his values. (Patagonia is organised as a for-profit company, known as a B-Corp, with certification for its social and environmental commitment.) “When the company becomes the fatted calf, it’s sold for a profit, and its resources and holdings are often ravaged and broken apart, leading to the disruption of family ties and the long-term health of local economies,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing. “When you get away from the idea that a company is a product to be sold to the highest bidder in the shortest amount of time, all future decisions in the company are affected.”

Patagonia’s competitors, The North Face included, are mostly public companies driven by shareholders. “The mission and the values of Patagonia have never been real

Not long ago, I stepped into a lift on the 18th floor of a tall building in New York City. A young woman inside the lift was looking down at the top of her toddler’s head with embarrassment as he looked at me and grinned. When I turned to push the ground-floor button, I saw that every button had already been pushed. Kids love pushing buttons, but they only push every button when the buttons light up. From a young age, humans are driven to learn, and learning involves getting as much feedback as possible from the immediate environment. The toddler who shared my elevator was grinning because feedback – in the form of lights or sounds or any change in the state of the world – is pleasurable.








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But this quest for feedback doesn’t end with childhood. In 2012, an ad agency in Belgium produced an outdoor campaign for a TV channel that quickly went viral. The campaign’s producers placed a big red button on a pedestal in a quaint square in a sleepy town in Flanders. A big arrow hung above the button with a simple instruction: Push to add drama. You can see the glint in each person’s eye as he or she approaches the button – the same glint that came just before the toddler in my elevator raked his tiny hand across the panel of buttons.



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Psychologists have long tried to understand how animals respond to different forms of feedback. In 1971, a psychologist named Michael Zeiler sat in his lab across from three hungry white carneaux pigeons. At this stage, the research programme focused on rats and pigeons, but it had lofty aims. Could the behaviour of lower-order animals teach governments how to encourage charity and discourage crime? Could entrepreneurs inspire overworked shift workers to find new meaning in their jobs? Could parents learn how to shape perfect children?

Before Zeiler could change the world, he had to work out the best way to deliver rewards. One option was to reward every desirable behaviour. Another was to reward those same desirable behaviours on an unpredictable schedule, creating some of the mystery that encourages people to buy lottery tickets. The pigeons had been raised in the lab, so they knew the drill. Each one waddled up to a small button and pecked persistently, hoping that the button would release a tray of Purina pigeon pellets. During some trials, Zeiler would programme the button so it delivered food every time the pigeons pecked; during others, he programmed the button so it delivered food only some of the time. Sometimes the pigeons would peck in vain, the button would turn red, and they would receive nothing.


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When I first learned about Zeiler’s work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. But that’s not what happened at all. The results weren’t even close: the pigeons pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasn’t guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.

Decades after Zeiler published his results, in 2012, a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. The site already had 200 million users at the time – a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a “like button”.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link or status update. A post with zero “likes” wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed. Facebook was the first major social networking force to introduce the like button, but others now have similar functions. You can like and repost tweets on Twitter, pictures on Instagram, posts on Google+, columns on LinkedIn, and videos on YouTube.

The act of liking became the subject of etiquette debates. What did it mean to refrain from liking a friend’s post? If you liked every third post, was that an implicit condemnation of the other posts? Liking became a form of basic social support – the online equivalent of laughing at a friend’s joke in public.

Web developer Rameet Chawla developed an app as a marketing exercise, but also a social experiment, to uncover the effect of the like button. When he launched it, Chawla posted this introduction on its homepage: “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. I’m talking about likes. They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.”


Chawla’s app, called Lovematically, was designed to automatically like every picture that rolled through its users’ newsfeeds. It wasn’t even necessary to impress them any more; any old post was good enough to inspire a like. Apart from enjoying the warm glow that comes from spreading good cheer, Chawla – for the first three months, the app’s only user – also found that people reciprocated. They liked more of his photos, and he attracted an average of 30 new followers a day, a total of almost 3,000 followers during the trial period. On Valentine’s Day 2014, Chawla allowed 5,000 Instagram users to download a beta version of the app. After only two hours, Instagram shut down Lovematically for violating the social network’s terms of use.

“I knew way before launching it that it would get shut down by Instagram,” Chawla said. “Using drug terminology, you know, Instagram is the dealer and I’m the new guy in the market giving away the drug for free.”

Chawla was surprised, though, that it happened so quickly. He’d hoped for at least a week of use, but Instagram pounced immediately.


When I moved to the United States for postgraduate studies in 2004, online entertainment was limited. These were the days before Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube – and Facebook was limited to students at Harvard. One evening, I stumbled on a game called Sign of the Zodiac (Zodiac for short) that demanded very little mental energy.

Zodiac was a simple online slot machine, much like the actual slot machines in casinos: you decided how much to wager, lazily clicked a button over and over again, and watched as the machine spat out wins and losses. At first, I played to relieve the stress of long days filled with too much thinking, but the brief “ding” that followed each small win, and the longer melody that followed each major win, hooked me fast. Eventually screenshots of the game would intrude on my day. I’d picture five pink scorpions lining up for the game’s highest jackpot, followed by the jackpot melody that I can still conjure today. I had a minor behavioural addiction, and these were the sensory hangovers of the random, unpredictable feedback that followed each win.

My Zodiac addiction wasn’t unusual. For 13 years, Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, studied gamblers and the machines that hook them. She collected descriptions of slot machines from gambling experts and current and former addicts, which included the following: “Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling … electronic morphine ... the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man … Slots are the premier addiction delivery device.”

These are sensationalised descriptions, but they capture how easily people become hooked on slot-machine gambling. I can relate, because I became addicted to a slots game that wasn’t even doling out real money. The reinforcing sound of a win after the silence of several losses was enough for me.

In the US, banks are not allowed to handle online gambling winnings, which makes online gambling practically illegal. Very few companies are willing to fight the system, and the ones that do are quickly defeated. That sounds like a good thing, but free and legal games such as Sign of the Zodiac can also be dangerous. At casinos, the deck is stacked heavily against the player; on average the house has to win. But the house doesn’t have to win in a game without money.

As David Goldhill, the chief executive officer of the Game Show Network, which also produces many online games, told me: “Because we’re not restricted by having to pay real winnings, we can pay out $120 for every $100 played. No land-based casino could do that for more than a week without going out of business.” As a result, the game can continue forever because the player never runs out of chips. I played Sign of the Zodiac for four years and rarely had to start a new game. I won roughly 95% of the time. The game only ended when I had to eat or sleep or attend class in the morning. And sometimes it didn’t even end then.

Casinos win most of the time, but they have a clever way of convincing gamblers that the outcomes are reversed. Early slot machines were incredibly simple devices: the player pulled the machine’s arm to spin its three mechanical reels. If the centre of the reels displayed two or more of the same symbol when they stopped spinning, the player won a certain number of coins or credits. Today, slot machines allow gamblers to play multiple lines. Every time you play, you’re more likely to win on at least one line, and the machine will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes. If you play 15 lines, and you win on two of the lines, you make a net loss, and yet you enjoy the positive feedback that follows a win – a type of win that Schüll and other gambling experts call a “loss disguised as a win”.

Losses disguised as wins only matter because players don’t classify them as losses – they classify them as wins. This is what makes modern slot machines – and modern casinos – so dangerous. Like the little boy who hit every button in my lift, adults never really grow out of the thrill of attractive lights and sounds. If our brains convince us that we’re winning even when we’re actually losing, it becomes almost impossible to muster the self-control to stop playing.


‘Every time you play a slot machine it will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes’







‘Every time you play a slot machine it will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes’ Photograph: imageBROKER/Rex/Shutterstock


The success of slot machines is measured by “time on device”. Since most players lose more money the longer they play, time on device is a useful proxy for profitability. Video-game designers use a similar measure, which captures how engaging and enjoyable their games are. The difference between casinos and video games is that many game designers are more concerned with making their games fun than with making buckets of money. Bennett Foddy, who teaches game design at New York University’s Game Center, has created a number of successful free-to-play games, but each was a labour of love rather than a money-making vehicle.





At its peak in 2013, Candy Crush Saga generated more than $600,000 in revenue per day

“Video games are governed by microscopic rules,” Foddy says. “When your mouse cursor moves over a particular box, text will pop up, or a sound will play. Designers use this sort of micro-feedback to keep players more engaged and more hooked in.”

A game must obey these microscopic rules, because gamers are likely to stop playing a game that doesn’t deliver a steady dose of small rewards that make sense given the game’s rules. Those rewards can be as subtle as a “ding” sound or a white flash whenever a character moves over a particular square. “Those bits of micro-feedback need to follow the act almost immediately, because if there’s a tight pairing in time between when I act and when something happens, then I’ll think I was causing it.”

The game Candy Crush Saga is a prime example. At its peak in 2013, the game generated more than $600,000 in revenue per day. To date, its developer, King, has earned around $2.5 billion from the game. Somewhere between half a billion and a billion people have downloaded Candy Crush Saga on their smartphones or through Facebook. Most of those players are women, which is unusual for a blockbuster.

It’s hard to understand the game’s colossal success when you see how straightforward it is. Players aim to create lines of three or more of the same candy by swiping candies left, right, up, and down. Candies are “crushed” – they disappear – when you form these matching lines, and the candies above them drop down to take their place. The game ends when the screen fills with candies that cannot be matched. Foddy told me that it wasn’t the rules that made the game a success – it was juice. Juice refers to the game’s surface feedback. It isn’t essential to the game, but it’s essential to the game’s success. Without juice, the game loses its charm.

“Novice game designers often forget to add juice,” Foddy said. “If a character in your game runs through the grass, the grass should bend as he runs through it. It tells you that the grass is real and that the character and grass are in the same world.” When you form a line in Candy Crush Saga, a reinforcing sound plays, the score associated with that line flashes brightly, and sometimes you hear words of praise intoned by a hidden, deep-voiced narrator.

Juice amplifies feedback, but it’s also designed to unite the real world and the gaming world. The most powerful vehicle for juice must surely be virtual reality (VR) technology, which is still in its infancy. VR places the user in an immersive environment, which the user navigates as she might the real world. Advanced VR also introduces multisensory feedback, including touch, hearing and smell.

In a podcast last year, the author and sports columnist Bill Simmons spoke to billionaire investor Chris Sacca, an early Google employee and Twitter investor, about his experience with VR. “I’m afraid for my kids, a little bit,” Simmons said. “I do wonder if this VR world you dive into is almost superior to the actual world you’re in. Instead of having human interactions, I can just go into this VR world and do VR things and that’s gonna be my life.”

Sacca shared Simmons’ concerns. “One of the things that’s interesting about technology is that the improvement in resolution and sound modelling and responsiveness is outpacing our own physiological development,” Sacca said. “You can watch some early videos … where you are on top of a skyscraper, and your body will not let you step forward. Your body is convinced that that is the side of the skyscraper. That’s not even a super immersive VR platform. So we have some crazy days ahead of us.”





I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex

Jeremy Bailenson

Until recently, most people thought of VR as a tool for gaming, but that changed when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2bn in 2014. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had big ideas for the Oculus Rift gaming headset that went far beyond games. “This is just the start,” Zuckerberg said. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court-side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting goggles in your home.” VR no longer dwelled on the fringes. “One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people,” said Zuckerberg.

In October 2015, the New York Times shipped a small cardboard VR viewer with its Sunday paper. Paired with a smartphone, the Google Cardboard viewer streamed VR content, including documentaries on North Korea, Syrian refugees, and a vigil following the Paris terror attacks. “Instead of sitting through 45 seconds on the news of someone walking around and explaining how terrible it is, you are actively becoming a participant in the story that you are viewing,” said Christian Stephen, a producer of one of the VR documentaries.

Despite the promise of VR, it also poses great risks. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford’s Virtual Reality Interaction Lab, worries that the Oculus Rift will damage how people interact with the world. “Am I terrified of the world where anyone can create really horrible experiences? Yes, it does worry me. I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex. How does that change the way humans interact, function as a society?”

When it matures, VR will allow us to spend time with anyone in any location doing whatever we like for as long as we like. That sort of boundless pleasure sounds wonderful, but it has the capacity to devalue face-to-face interactions. Why live in the real world with real, flawed people when you can live in a perfect world that feels just as real? Wielded by game designers, it might prove to be a vehicle for the latest in a series of escalating behavioural addictions.


Some experiences are designed to be addictive for the sake of ensnaring hapless consumers, but others happen to be addictive though they are primarily designed to be fun or engaging. The line that separates these is very thin; to a large extent the difference rests on the intention of the designer.

When Nintendo’s superstar game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created Super Mario Bros, his primary aim was to make a game that he himself enjoyed playing. “That’s the point,” he said, “not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love. It’s the very core feeling we should have in making games.”

When you compare Super Mario Bros – regularly voted by game designers as one of the greatest games ever – to others on the market, it is easy to recognise the difference in intention.

Adam Saltsman, who produced an acclaimed indie game called Canabalt in 2009, has written extensively about the ethics of game design. “Many of the predatory games of the past five years use what’s known as an energy system,” Saltsman said. “You’re allowed to play the game for five minutes, and then you artificially run out of stuff to do. The game will send you an email in, say, four hours when you can start playing again.” I told Saltsman that the system sounded pretty good to me – it forces gamers to take breaks and encourages kids to do their homework between gaming sessions. But that’s where the predatory part comes in.


Super Mario Run was primarily designed by its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, to be a game he enjoyed playing







Super Mario Run was primarily designed by its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, to be a game he enjoyed playing Photograph: PR

According to Saltsman: “Game designers began to realise that players would pay $1 to shorten the wait time, or to increase the amount of energy their avatar would have once the four-hour rest period had passed.” I came across this predatory device when playing a game called Trivia Crack. If you give the wrong answer several times, you run out of lives, and a dialogue screen gives you a choice: wait for an hour for more lives, or pay 99 cents to continue immediately. Many games hide these down-the-line charges. They’re free, at first, but later you are forced to pay in-game fees to continue.

If you are minutes or even hours deep into the game, the last thing you want to do is admit defeat. You have so much to lose, and your aversion to that sense of loss compels you to feed the machine just one more time, over and over again. You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy.


A game in which you always win is boring. It sounds appealing but it gets old fast. To some extent we all need losses and difficulties and challenges, because without them the thrill of success weakens gradually with each new victory. The hardship of the challenge is far more compelling than knowing you are going to succeed. This sense of hardship is an ingredient in many addictive experiences, including one of the most addictive games of all time: Tetris.

In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov was working at a computer lab at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow. Many of the lab’s scientists worked on side projects, and Pajitnov began working on a video game. Pajitnov worked on Tetris for much longer than he planned because he couldn’t stop playing the game. Eventually Pajitnov allowed his friends at the Academy of Science to play the game. “Everyone who touched the game couldn’t stop playing either.”

His best friend, Vladimir Pokhilko, a former psychologist, remembered taking the game to his lab at the Moscow Medical Institute. “Everybody stopped working. So I deleted it from every computer. Everyone went back to work, until a new version appeared in the lab.”


Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris

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Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Tetris spread from the Academy of Science to the rest of Moscow, and then on to the rest of Russia and eastern Europe. Two years later, in 1986, the game reached the west, but its big break came in 1991, when Nintendo signed a deal with Pajitnov. Every Game Boy would come with a free game cartridge that contained a redesigned version of Tetris.

That year I saved up and ultimately bought a Game Boy, which is how I came to play Tetris for the first time. It wasn’t as glitzy as some of my other favourites, but I played for hours at a time. Nintendo was smart to include the game with their new portable console, because it was easy to learn and very difficult to abandon. I assumed that I would grow tired of Tetris, but sometimes I still play the game today, more than 25 years later. It has longevity because it grows with you. It’s easy at first, but as your skills improve, the game gets more difficult. The pieces fall from the top of the screen more quickly, and you have less time to react than you did when you were a novice.

This escalation of difficulty is a critical hook that keeps the game engaging long after you have mastered its basic moves. Twenty-five years ago, a psychiatrist named Richard Haier showed that this progression is pleasurable because your brain becomes more efficient as you improve. Haier decided to watch as people mastered a video game, though he knew little about the cutting-edge world of gaming. “In 1991 no one had heard of Tetris,” he said in an interview a few years later. “I went to the computer store to see what they had and the guy said, ‘Here try this. It’s just come in.’ Tetris was the perfect game, it was simple to learn, you had to practise to get good, and there was a good learning curve.”

Haier bought some copies of Tetris for his lab and watched as his experimental subjects played the game. He did find neurological changes with experience – parts of the brain thickened and brain activity declined, suggesting experts’ brains worked more efficiently – but more relevant here, he found that his subjects relished playing the game. They signed up to play for 45 minutes a day, five days a week, for up to eight weeks. They came for the experiment (and the cash payment that came with participating), but stayed for the game.





Many behavioural addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation

One satisfying feature of the game is the sense that you are building something – your efforts produce a pleasing tower of coloured bricks. You have the chaos coming as random pieces, and your job is to put them in order. The game allows you the brief thrill of seeing your completed lines flash before they disappear, leaving only your mistakes. So you begin again, and try to complete another line as the game speeds up and your fingers are forced to dance across the controls more quickly.

Mikhail Kulagin, Pajitnov’s friend and a fellow programmer, remembers feeling a drive to fix his mistakes. “Tetris is a game with a very strong negative motivation. You never see what you have done very well, and your mistakes are seen on the screen. You always want to correct them.”

The sense of creating something that requires labour and effort and expertise is a major force behind addictive acts that might otherwise lose their sheen over time. It also highlights an insidious difference between substance addiction and behavioural addiction: where substance addictions are nakedly destructive, many behavioural addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation. The illusion of progress will sustain you as you achieve high scores or acquire more followers or improve your skills, and so, if you want to stop, you’ll struggle ever harder against the drive to grow.

“Some designers are very much against infinite format games, like Tetris,” said Foddy, “because they’re an abuse of a weakness in people’s motivational structures – they won’t be able to stop.”

Humans find the sweet spot sandwiched between “too easy” and “too difficult” irresistible. It’s the land of just-challenging-enough computer games, financial targets, work ambitions, social media objectives and fitness goals. It is in this sweet spot – where the need to stop crumbles before obsessive goal-setting – that addictive experiences live.

ot long ago, I stepped into a lift on the 18th floor of a tall building in New York City. A young woman inside the lift was looking down at the top of her toddler’s head with embarrassment as he looked at me and grinned. When I turned to push the ground-floor button, I saw that every button had already been pushed. Kids love pushing buttons, but they only push every button when the buttons light up. From a young age, humans are driven to learn, and learning involves getting as much feedback as possible from the immediate environment. The toddler who shared my elevator was grinning because feedback – in the form of lights or sounds or any change in the state of the world – is pleasurable.







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But this quest for feedback doesn’t end with childhood. In 2012, an ad agency in Belgium produced an outdoor campaign for a TV channel that quickly went viral. The campaign’s producers placed a big red button on a pedestal in a quaint square in a sleepy town in Flanders. A big arrow hung above the button with a simple instruction: Push to add drama. You can see the glint in each person’s eye as he or she approaches the button – the same glint that came just before the toddler in my elevator raked his tiny hand across the panel of buttons.



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Psychologists have long tried to understand how animals respond to different forms of feedback. In 1971, a psychologist named Michael Zeiler sat in his lab across from three hungry white carneaux pigeons. At this stage, the research programme focused on rats and pigeons, but it had lofty aims. Could the behaviour of lower-order animals teach governments how to encourage charity and discourage crime? Could entrepreneurs inspire overworked shift workers to find new meaning in their jobs? Could parents learn how to shape perfect children?

Before Zeiler could change the world, he had to work out the best way to deliver rewards. One option was to reward every desirable behaviour. Another was to reward those same desirable behaviours on an unpredictable schedule, creating some of the mystery that encourages people to buy lottery tickets. The pigeons had been raised in the lab, so they knew the drill. Each one waddled up to a small button and pecked persistently, hoping that the button would release a tray of Purina pigeon pellets. During some trials, Zeiler would programme the button so it delivered food every time the pigeons pecked; during others, he programmed the button so it delivered food only some of the time. Sometimes the pigeons would peck in vain, the button would turn red, and they would receive nothing.


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When I first learned about Zeiler’s work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. But that’s not what happened at all. The results weren’t even close: the pigeons pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasn’t guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.

Decades after Zeiler published his results, in 2012, a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. The site already had 200 million users at the time – a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a “like button”.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link or status update. A post with zero “likes” wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed. Facebook was the first major social networking force to introduce the like button, but others now have similar functions. You can like and repost tweets on Twitter, pictures on Instagram, posts on Google+, columns on LinkedIn, and videos on YouTube.

The act of liking became the subject of etiquette debates. What did it mean to refrain from liking a friend’s post? If you liked every third post, was that an implicit condemnation of the other posts? Liking became a form of basic social support – the online equivalent of laughing at a friend’s joke in public.

Web developer Rameet Chawla developed an app as a marketing exercise, but also a social experiment, to uncover the effect of the like button. When he launched it, Chawla posted this introduction on its homepage: “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. I’m talking about likes. They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.”


Chawla’s app, called Lovematically, was designed to automatically like every picture that rolled through its users’ newsfeeds. It wasn’t even necessary to impress them any more; any old post was good enough to inspire a like. Apart from enjoying the warm glow that comes from spreading good cheer, Chawla – for the first three months, the app’s only user – also found that people reciprocated. They liked more of his photos, and he attracted an average of 30 new followers a day, a total of almost 3,000 followers during the trial period. On Valentine’s Day 2014, Chawla allowed 5,000 Instagram users to download a beta version of the app. After only two hours, Instagram shut down Lovematically for violating the social network’s terms of use.

“I knew way before launching it that it would get shut down by Instagram,” Chawla said. “Using drug terminology, you know, Instagram is the dealer and I’m the new guy in the market giving away the drug for free.”

Chawla was surprised, though, that it happened so quickly. He’d hoped for at least a week of use, but Instagram pounced immediately.


When I moved to the United States for postgraduate studies in 2004, online entertainment was limited. These were the days before Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube – and Facebook was limited to students at Harvard. One evening, I stumbled on a game called Sign of the Zodiac (Zodiac for short) that demanded very little mental energy.

Zodiac was a simple online slot machine, much like the actual slot machines in casinos: you decided how much to wager, lazily clicked a button over and over again, and watched as the machine spat out wins and losses. At first, I played to relieve the stress of long days filled with too much thinking, but the brief “ding” that followed each small win, and the longer melody that followed each major win, hooked me fast. Eventually screenshots of the game would intrude on my day. I’d picture five pink scorpions lining up for the game’s highest jackpot, followed by the jackpot melody that I can still conjure today. I had a minor behavioural addiction, and these were the sensory hangovers of the random, unpredictable feedback that followed each win.

My Zodiac addiction wasn’t unusual. For 13 years, Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, studied gamblers and the machines that hook them. She collected descriptions of slot machines from gambling experts and current and former addicts, which included the following: “Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling … electronic morphine ... the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man … Slots are the premier addiction delivery device.”

These are sensationalised descriptions, but they capture how easily people become hooked on slot-machine gambling. I can relate, because I became addicted to a slots game that wasn’t even doling out real money. The reinforcing sound of a win after the silence of several losses was enough for me.

In the US, banks are not allowed to handle online gambling winnings, which makes online gambling practically illegal. Very few companies are willing to fight the system, and the ones that do are quickly defeated. That sounds like a good thing, but free and legal games such as Sign of the Zodiac can also be dangerous. At casinos, the deck is stacked heavily against the player; on average the house has to win. But the house doesn’t have to win in a game without money.

As David Goldhill, the chief executive officer of the Game Show Network, which also produces many online games, told me: “Because we’re not restricted by having to pay real winnings, we can pay out $120 for every $100 played. No land-based casino could do that for more than a week without going out of business.” As a result, the game can continue forever because the player never runs out of chips. I played Sign of the Zodiac for four years and rarely had to start a new game. I won roughly 95% of the time. The game only ended when I had to eat or sleep or attend class in the morning. And sometimes it didn’t even end then.

Casinos win most of the time, but they have a clever way of convincing gamblers that the outcomes are reversed. Early slot machines were incredibly simple devices: the player pulled the machine’s arm to spin its three mechanical reels. If the centre of the reels displayed two or more of the same symbol when they stopped spinning, the player won a certain number of coins or credits. Today, slot machines allow gamblers to play multiple lines. Every time you play, you’re more likely to win on at least one line, and the machine will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes. If you play 15 lines, and you win on two of the lines, you make a net loss, and yet you enjoy the positive feedback that follows a win – a type of win that Schüll and other gambling experts call a “loss disguised as a win”.

Losses disguised as wins only matter because players don’t classify them as losses – they classify them as wins. This is what makes modern slot machines – and modern casinos – so dangerous. Like the little boy who hit every button in my lift, adults never really grow out of the thrill of attractive lights and sounds. If our brains convince us that we’re winning even when we’re actually losing, it becomes almost impossible to muster the self-control to stop playing.


‘Every time you play a slot machine it will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes’







‘Every time you play a slot machine it will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes’ Photograph: imageBROKER/Rex/Shutterstock


The success of slot machines is measured by “time on device”. Since most players lose more money the longer they play, time on device is a useful proxy for profitability. Video-game designers use a similar measure, which captures how engaging and enjoyable their games are. The difference between casinos and video games is that many game designers are more concerned with making their games fun than with making buckets of money. Bennett Foddy, who teaches game design at New York University’s Game Center, has created a number of successful free-to-play games, but each was a labour of love rather than a money-making vehicle.





At its peak in 2013, Candy Crush Saga generated more than $600,000 in revenue per day

“Video games are governed by microscopic rules,” Foddy says. “When your mouse cursor moves over a particular box, text will pop up, or a sound will play. Designers use this sort of micro-feedback to keep players more engaged and more hooked in.”

A game must obey these microscopic rules, because gamers are likely to stop playing a game that doesn’t deliver a steady dose of small rewards that make sense given the game’s rules. Those rewards can be as subtle as a “ding” sound or a white flash whenever a character moves over a particular square. “Those bits of micro-feedback need to follow the act almost immediately, because if there’s a tight pairing in time between when I act and when something happens, then I’ll think I was causing it.”

The game Candy Crush Saga is a prime example. At its peak in 2013, the game generated more than $600,000 in revenue per day. To date, its developer, King, has earned around $2.5 billion from the game. Somewhere between half a billion and a billion people have downloaded Candy Crush Saga on their smartphones or through Facebook. Most of those players are women, which is unusual for a blockbuster.

It’s hard to understand the game’s colossal success when you see how straightforward it is. Players aim to create lines of three or more of the same candy by swiping candies left, right, up, and down. Candies are “crushed” – they disappear – when you form these matching lines, and the candies above them drop down to take their place. The game ends when the screen fills with candies that cannot be matched. Foddy told me that it wasn’t the rules that made the game a success – it was juice. Juice refers to the game’s surface feedback. It isn’t essential to the game, but it’s essential to the game’s success. Without juice, the game loses its charm.

“Novice game designers often forget to add juice,” Foddy said. “If a character in your game runs through the grass, the grass should bend as he runs through it. It tells you that the grass is real and that the character and grass are in the same world.” When you form a line in Candy Crush Saga, a reinforcing sound plays, the score associated with that line flashes brightly, and sometimes you hear words of praise intoned by a hidden, deep-voiced narrator.

Juice amplifies feedback, but it’s also designed to unite the real world and the gaming world. The most powerful vehicle for juice must surely be virtual reality (VR) technology, which is still in its infancy. VR places the user in an immersive environment, which the user navigates as she might the real world. Advanced VR also introduces multisensory feedback, including touch, hearing and smell.

In a podcast last year, the author and sports columnist Bill Simmons spoke to billionaire investor Chris Sacca, an early Google employee and Twitter investor, about his experience with VR. “I’m afraid for my kids, a little bit,” Simmons said. “I do wonder if this VR world you dive into is almost superior to the actual world you’re in. Instead of having human interactions, I can just go into this VR world and do VR things and that’s gonna be my life.”

Sacca shared Simmons’ concerns. “One of the things that’s interesting about technology is that the improvement in resolution and sound modelling and responsiveness is outpacing our own physiological development,” Sacca said. “You can watch some early videos … where you are on top of a skyscraper, and your body will not let you step forward. Your body is convinced that that is the side of the skyscraper. That’s not even a super immersive VR platform. So we have some crazy days ahead of us.”





I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex

Jeremy Bailenson

Until recently, most people thought of VR as a tool for gaming, but that changed when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2bn in 2014. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had big ideas for the Oculus Rift gaming headset that went far beyond games. “This is just the start,” Zuckerberg said. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court-side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting goggles in your home.” VR no longer dwelled on the fringes. “One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people,” said Zuckerberg.

In October 2015, the New York Times shipped a small cardboard VR viewer with its Sunday paper. Paired with a smartphone, the Google Cardboard viewer streamed VR content, including documentaries on North Korea, Syrian refugees, and a vigil following the Paris terror attacks. “Instead of sitting through 45 seconds on the news of someone walking around and explaining how terrible it is, you are actively becoming a participant in the story that you are viewing,” said Christian Stephen, a producer of one of the VR documentaries.

Despite the promise of VR, it also poses great risks. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford’s Virtual Reality Interaction Lab, worries that the Oculus Rift will damage how people interact with the world. “Am I terrified of the world where anyone can create really horrible experiences? Yes, it does worry me. I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex. How does that change the way humans interact, function as a society?”

When it matures, VR will allow us to spend time with anyone in any location doing whatever we like for as long as we like. That sort of boundless pleasure sounds wonderful, but it has the capacity to devalue face-to-face interactions. Why live in the real world with real, flawed people when you can live in a perfect world that feels just as real? Wielded by game designers, it might prove to be a vehicle for the latest in a series of escalating behavioural addictions.


Some experiences are designed to be addictive for the sake of ensnaring hapless consumers, but others happen to be addictive though they are primarily designed to be fun or engaging. The line that separates these is very thin; to a large extent the difference rests on the intention of the designer.

When Nintendo’s superstar game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created Super Mario Bros, his primary aim was to make a game that he himself enjoyed playing. “That’s the point,” he said, “not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love. It’s the very core feeling we should have in making games.”

When you compare Super Mario Bros – regularly voted by game designers as one of the greatest games ever – to others on the market, it is easy to recognise the difference in intention.

Adam Saltsman, who produced an acclaimed indie game called Canabalt in 2009, has written extensively about the ethics of game design. “Many of the predatory games of the past five years use what’s known as an energy system,” Saltsman said. “You’re allowed to play the game for five minutes, and then you artificially run out of stuff to do. The game will send you an email in, say, four hours when you can start playing again.” I told Saltsman that the system sounded pretty good to me – it forces gamers to take breaks and encourages kids to do their homework between gaming sessions. But that’s where the predatory part comes in.


Super Mario Run was primarily designed by its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, to be a game he enjoyed playing







Super Mario Run was primarily designed by its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, to be a game he enjoyed playing Photograph: PR

According to Saltsman: “Game designers began to realise that players would pay $1 to shorten the wait time, or to increase the amount of energy their avatar would have once the four-hour rest period had passed.” I came across this predatory device when playing a game called Trivia Crack. If you give the wrong answer several times, you run out of lives, and a dialogue screen gives you a choice: wait for an hour for more lives, or pay 99 cents to continue immediately. Many games hide these down-the-line charges. They’re free, at first, but later you are forced to pay in-game fees to continue.

If you are minutes or even hours deep into the game, the last thing you want to do is admit defeat. You have so much to lose, and your aversion to that sense of loss compels you to feed the machine just one more time, over and over again. You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy.


A game in which you always win is boring. It sounds appealing but it gets old fast. To some extent we all need losses and difficulties and challenges, because without them the thrill of success weakens gradually with each new victory. The hardship of the challenge is far more compelling than knowing you are going to succeed. This sense of hardship is an ingredient in many addictive experiences, including one of the most addictive games of all time: Tetris.

In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov was working at a computer lab at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow. Many of the lab’s scientists worked on side projects, and Pajitnov began working on a video game. Pajitnov worked on Tetris for much longer than he planned because he couldn’t stop playing the game. Eventually Pajitnov allowed his friends at the Academy of Science to play the game. “Everyone who touched the game couldn’t stop playing either.”

His best friend, Vladimir Pokhilko, a former psychologist, remembered taking the game to his lab at the Moscow Medical Institute. “Everybody stopped working. So I deleted it from every computer. Everyone went back to work, until a new version appeared in the lab.”


Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris

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Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Tetris spread from the Academy of Science to the rest of Moscow, and then on to the rest of Russia and eastern Europe. Two years later, in 1986, the game reached the west, but its big break came in 1991, when Nintendo signed a deal with Pajitnov. Every Game Boy would come with a free game cartridge that contained a redesigned version of Tetris.

That year I saved up and ultimately bought a Game Boy, which is how I came to play Tetris for the first time. It wasn’t as glitzy as some of my other favourites, but I played for hours at a time. Nintendo was smart to include the game with their new portable console, because it was easy to learn and very difficult to abandon. I assumed that I would grow tired of Tetris, but sometimes I still play the game today, more than 25 years later. It has longevity because it grows with you. It’s easy at first, but as your skills improve, the game gets more difficult. The pieces fall from the top of the screen more quickly, and you have less time to react than you did when you were a novice.

This escalation of difficulty is a critical hook that keeps the game engaging long after you have mastered its basic moves. Twenty-five years ago, a psychiatrist named Richard Haier showed that this progression is pleasurable because your brain becomes more efficient as you improve. Haier decided to watch as people mastered a video game, though he knew little about the cutting-edge world of gaming. “In 1991 no one had heard of Tetris,” he said in an interview a few years later. “I went to the computer store to see what they had and the guy said, ‘Here try this. It’s just come in.’ Tetris was the perfect game, it was simple to learn, you had to practise to get good, and there was a good learning curve.”

Haier bought some copies of Tetris for his lab and watched as his experimental subjects played the game. He did find neurological changes with experience – parts of the brain thickened and brain activity declined, suggesting experts’ brains worked more efficiently – but more relevant here, he found that his subjects relished playing the game. They signed up to play for 45 minutes a day, five days a week, for up to eight weeks. They came for the experiment (and the cash payment that came with participating), but stayed for the game.





Many behavioural addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation

One satisfying feature of the game is the sense that you are building something – your efforts produce a pleasing tower of coloured bricks. You have the chaos coming as random pieces, and your job is to put them in order. The game allows you the brief thrill of seeing your completed lines flash before they disappear, leaving only your mistakes. So you begin again, and try to complete another line as the game speeds up and your fingers are forced to dance across the controls more quickly.

Mikhail Kulagin, Pajitnov’s friend and a fellow programmer, remembers feeling a drive to fix his mistakes. “Tetris is a game with a very strong negative motivation. You never see what you have done very well, and your mistakes are seen on the screen. You always want to correct them.”

The sense of creating something that requires labour and effort and expertise is a major force behind addictive acts that might otherwise lose their sheen over time. It also highlights an insidious difference between substance addiction and behavioural addiction: where substance addictions are nakedly destructive, many behavioural addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation. The illusion of progress will sustain you as you achieve high scores or acquire more followers or improve your skills, and so, if you want to stop, you’ll struggle ever harder against the drive to grow.

“Some designers are very much against infinite format games, like Tetris,” said Foddy, “because they’re an abuse of a weakness in people’s motivational structures – they won’t be able to stop.”

Humans find the sweet spot sandwiched between “too easy” and “too difficult” irresistible. It’s the land of just-challenging-enough computer games, financial targets, work ambitions, social media objectives and fitness goals. It is in this sweet spot – where the need to stop crumbles before obsessive goal-setting – that addictive experiences live.

ot long ago, I stepped into a lift on the 18th floor of a tall building in New York City. A young woman inside the lift was looking down at the top of her toddler’s head with embarrassment as he looked at me and grinned. When I turned to push the ground-floor button, I saw that every button had already been pushed. Kids love pushing buttons, but they only push every button when the buttons light up. From a young age, humans are driven to learn, and learning involves getting as much feedback as possible from the immediate environment. The toddler who shared my elevator was grinning because feedback – in the form of lights or sounds or any change in the state of the world – is pleasurable.







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But this quest for feedback doesn’t end with childhood. In 2012, an ad agency in Belgium produced an outdoor campaign for a TV channel that quickly went viral. The campaign’s producers placed a big red button on a pedestal in a quaint square in a sleepy town in Flanders. A big arrow hung above the button with a simple instruction: Push to add drama. You can see the glint in each person’s eye as he or she approaches the button – the same glint that came just before the toddler in my elevator raked his tiny hand across the panel of buttons.



ADVERTISING



Psychologists have long tried to understand how animals respond to different forms of feedback. In 1971, a psychologist named Michael Zeiler sat in his lab across from three hungry white carneaux pigeons. At this stage, the research programme focused on rats and pigeons, but it had lofty aims. Could the behaviour of lower-order animals teach governments how to encourage charity and discourage crime? Could entrepreneurs inspire overworked shift workers to find new meaning in their jobs? Could parents learn how to shape perfect children?

Before Zeiler could change the world, he had to work out the best way to deliver rewards. One option was to reward every desirable behaviour. Another was to reward those same desirable behaviours on an unpredictable schedule, creating some of the mystery that encourages people to buy lottery tickets. The pigeons had been raised in the lab, so they knew the drill. Each one waddled up to a small button and pecked persistently, hoping that the button would release a tray of Purina pigeon pellets. During some trials, Zeiler would programme the button so it delivered food every time the pigeons pecked; during others, he programmed the button so it delivered food only some of the time. Sometimes the pigeons would peck in vain, the button would turn red, and they would receive nothing.


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When I first learned about Zeiler’s work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. But that’s not what happened at all. The results weren’t even close: the pigeons pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasn’t guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.

Decades after Zeiler published his results, in 2012, a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. The site already had 200 million users at the time – a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a “like button”.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends’ lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeiler’s pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link or status update. A post with zero “likes” wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed. Like pigeons, we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed. Facebook was the first major social networking force to introduce the like button, but others now have similar functions. You can like and repost tweets on Twitter, pictures on Instagram, posts on Google+, columns on LinkedIn, and videos on YouTube.

The act of liking became the subject of etiquette debates. What did it mean to refrain from liking a friend’s post? If you liked every third post, was that an implicit condemnation of the other posts? Liking became a form of basic social support – the online equivalent of laughing at a friend’s joke in public.

Web developer Rameet Chawla developed an app as a marketing exercise, but also a social experiment, to uncover the effect of the like button. When he launched it, Chawla posted this introduction on its homepage: “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. I’m talking about likes. They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.”


Chawla’s app, called Lovematically, was designed to automatically like every picture that rolled through its users’ newsfeeds. It wasn’t even necessary to impress them any more; any old post was good enough to inspire a like. Apart from enjoying the warm glow that comes from spreading good cheer, Chawla – for the first three months, the app’s only user – also found that people reciprocated. They liked more of his photos, and he attracted an average of 30 new followers a day, a total of almost 3,000 followers during the trial period. On Valentine’s Day 2014, Chawla allowed 5,000 Instagram users to download a beta version of the app. After only two hours, Instagram shut down Lovematically for violating the social network’s terms of use.

“I knew way before launching it that it would get shut down by Instagram,” Chawla said. “Using drug terminology, you know, Instagram is the dealer and I’m the new guy in the market giving away the drug for free.”

Chawla was surprised, though, that it happened so quickly. He’d hoped for at least a week of use, but Instagram pounced immediately.


When I moved to the United States for postgraduate studies in 2004, online entertainment was limited. These were the days before Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube – and Facebook was limited to students at Harvard. One evening, I stumbled on a game called Sign of the Zodiac (Zodiac for short) that demanded very little mental energy.

Zodiac was a simple online slot machine, much like the actual slot machines in casinos: you decided how much to wager, lazily clicked a button over and over again, and watched as the machine spat out wins and losses. At first, I played to relieve the stress of long days filled with too much thinking, but the brief “ding” that followed each small win, and the longer melody that followed each major win, hooked me fast. Eventually screenshots of the game would intrude on my day. I’d picture five pink scorpions lining up for the game’s highest jackpot, followed by the jackpot melody that I can still conjure today. I had a minor behavioural addiction, and these were the sensory hangovers of the random, unpredictable feedback that followed each win.

My Zodiac addiction wasn’t unusual. For 13 years, Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, studied gamblers and the machines that hook them. She collected descriptions of slot machines from gambling experts and current and former addicts, which included the following: “Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling … electronic morphine ... the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man … Slots are the premier addiction delivery device.”

These are sensationalised descriptions, but they capture how easily people become hooked on slot-machine gambling. I can relate, because I became addicted to a slots game that wasn’t even doling out real money. The reinforcing sound of a win after the silence of several losses was enough for me.

In the US, banks are not allowed to handle online gambling winnings, which makes online gambling practically illegal. Very few companies are willing to fight the system, and the ones that do are quickly defeated. That sounds like a good thing, but free and legal games such as Sign of the Zodiac can also be dangerous. At casinos, the deck is stacked heavily against the player; on average the house has to win. But the house doesn’t have to win in a game without money.

As David Goldhill, the chief executive officer of the Game Show Network, which also produces many online games, told me: “Because we’re not restricted by having to pay real winnings, we can pay out $120 for every $100 played. No land-based casino could do that for more than a week without going out of business.” As a result, the game can continue forever because the player never runs out of chips. I played Sign of the Zodiac for four years and rarely had to start a new game. I won roughly 95% of the time. The game only ended when I had to eat or sleep or attend class in the morning. And sometimes it didn’t even end then.

Casinos win most of the time, but they have a clever way of convincing gamblers that the outcomes are reversed. Early slot machines were incredibly simple devices: the player pulled the machine’s arm to spin its three mechanical reels. If the centre of the reels displayed two or more of the same symbol when they stopped spinning, the player won a certain number of coins or credits. Today, slot machines allow gamblers

n the night of his 30th birthday, after a few drinks, Dean Karnazes decided that he would celebrate by running all the way from San Francisco down the coast to the town of Half Moon Bay, a distance of 30 miles. So began a career as an endurance runner. He has run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days in all 50 states, and taken part in such extreme competitions as a marathon to the South Pole and a 135-mile race through Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth. Karnazes once ran 350 miles in 81 hours and 44 minutes, without stopping to sleep. His account of his feats of distance running, Ultramarathon Man, is a bestseller. Karnazes’s superhuman exertions are sponsored by The North Face, the company that make the kit he wears in his coaching videos.

The North Face, a Bay Area-based outdoor clothing manufacturer, sells garments and gear for climbing, backpacking, running, and skiing. Its stores are decorated with huge photographs of people climbing icy peaks and running through meadows. Central to the brand’s ethos are the professional athletes it sponsors, people not widely known but celebrated in their fields – names such as Karnazes and Pete Athans, who has climbed Everest seven times. The North Face sells the idea of adventure – of pushing limits – whether running long distances, climbing an untried rockface, or sleeping outside at sub-zero temperatures. Its tagline is “never stop exploring”. (“We have actually been approached with partnerships about spacesuits to Mars and things like that,” one publicist told me recently.)





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This canny marketing of adventure has made The North Face the dominant player in a booming outdoor-wear market – a $4bn industry in the US alone. And its closest rival in the contest to sell the thrill of the wilderness to the masses may be a company whose origins and history are tightly intertwined with its own: Patagonia.

If The North Face aims to appeal to the overachieving weekend warrior, Patagonia is for the slightly more mellow soul who wants to soak up the fresh air and enjoy the view as he ascends a craggy mountain. The company’s ethos is encapsulated in Let My People Go Surfing, the memoir-cum-management classic about Patagonia, by the company’s founder Yvon Chouinard – reissued last year in a 10th-anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Naomi Klein. The book contains lavish colour pictures of people in genial communion with nature. To browse the book is to dive into a world of life-affirming outdoor feats followed by nights around the fire, swapping heroic tales.

Unlike other billion-dollar sports brands, neither company sells balls or bats. They do not cater to team sports. They are, above all, selling the allure of the great outdoors, offering their customers technically advanced gear for going off into the wilds with a friend or two. (Or, if you prefer, alone: the cover of the winter 2016 Patagonia catalogue features a man on a motorbike – carrying a pair of skis under one arm – smiling at a squirrel as it crosses the road.)

Both companies understand that the appeal of endurance sports has something to do with acquiring kit that boasts the most advanced technology. For genuine adventure, their marketing implies, you need top-quality gear. And top-quality gear designed to withstand the harshest conditions and last a lifetime does not come cheap. You can buy an Inferno sleeping bag from The North Face that will, for $729 (£593), keep you warm in temperatures as cold as -40C. For $529 (£430), you can get a neoprene-free, natural rubber, hooded wetsuit from Patagonia for use in water temperatures down to 0C.

Both companies also understand that the largest market for their products is not explorers stocking up for Arctic expeditions. The real money comes from selling products designed for hardcore outdoor adventure to urban customers who lead relatively unadventurous lives. For the most part, people wear North Face and Patagonia gear while doing everyday things: cycling, shopping, walking the dog. “You can take a backpack to school but you feel like you’re in Yosemite just because it says North Face,” Dean Karnazes told me one afternoon in San Francisco. “I think that aspirational element is really big.”

It’s a sales pitch that has yielded big profits. The North Face reported annual revenue of $2.3bn last year, with 200 stores around the world. Patagonia is smaller, but growing more rapidly. The company had sales of $800m in 2016, twice as much as in 2010, and has 29 standalone stores in the US, 23 in Japan, and others in locations such as Chamonix, the French ski resort.

While The North Face sells $5,500 (£4,480) two-metre tents and Patagonia sells $629 waders for fly fishing, many of the most popular products for both companies are everyday wear: waterproof anoraks, leggings, fleeces, and, most important of all, puffer jackets. “Everyone is trying to reinvent and reinterpret the black puffy jacket,” said Jeff Crook, the chief product officer at Mountain Equipment Co-Op, an outdoor department store that has 20 stores across Canada, “whether it spends most of its time on the mountain peak or at the bus stop.”





Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure

The flagship jackets for both companies are the product of decades of technological refinement to make them increasingly warm, durable, and light. The most advanced models today have been engineered to solve the problem of how to insulate the wearer against cold and wet while remaining “breathable” – so you don’t overheat while you’re scaling that cliff face. At Patagonia, there is the Nano-Air ($249; £180 in the UK), a quilted, but not very puffy, water resistant jacket that uses a trademarked synthetic insulation that the company described as “revolutionary” upon its release in 2014. The North Face Thermoball ($199; £150) has its own proprietary synthetic insulation, which uses clusters of fibre to trap heat in a manner that mimics down. Both jackets are fit for a mountaineering expedition, but are each more likely to be bought to keep warm while taking the kids to the park.

Neither company regards the other as a rival – at least not publicly. But aside from the fact they sell the same kind of stuff to the same kind of customers (urban, affluent), the two companies have quite a bit of shared history. Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure. Both men started out making their own specialist equipment; both went on to found companies selling outdoor wear; both felt distinctly uncomfortable doing office jobs, and still more uncomfortable running companies.

“I’ve been a businessman for almost 60 years,” Chouinard writes in the introduction to Let My People Go Surfing. “It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or lawyer.” And together, while promoting the glories of exploring the unspoiled wilderness, both men have been central to the mass popularisation of outdoor activities such as hiking and climbing, which may, in turn, make nature a little less unspoiled.

Selling professional-grade gear to people with no intention of using it professionally isn’t exactly a new trick in marketing, as the makers of SUVs, digital cameras and headphones can tell you. Most people who buy the Nike trainers advertised by Mo Farah don’t use them to run long distances.

But North Face and Patagonia are both wrestling with a more consequential paradox, one that is central to contemporary consumerism: we want to feel morally good about the things we buy. And both companies have been phenomenally successful because they have crafted an image that is about more than just being ethical and environmentally friendly, but about nature, adventure, exploration – ideas more grandiose than simply selling you a jacket, taking your money and trying not to harm the earth too much along the way. But the paradox is that by presenting themselves this way, they are selling a lot more jackets. In other words, both companies are selling stuff in part by looking like they’re not trying too hard to sell stuff, which helps them sell more stuff – and fills the world with more and more stuff.

You might call this the authenticity problem. And for all their similarities, the two companies are taking radically different approaches to solving it.


Doug Tompkins and Yvon Choiunard were the kind of outcast adolescents who found a home in the great outdoors. Both men became passionate about climbing and surfing in the American west in the middle of the last century. Back in the 1950s and 60s, climbing was “an unusual sport with just a small group of renegades who were, you know, misfits”, said Rick Ridgeway, an accomplished mountaineer and adventurer. (Rolling Stone magazine once called him “The Real Indiana Jones.”) An old friend of both Tompkins and Choiunard, he is now vice president for public engagement at Patagonia.

Both The North Face and Patagonia have their roots in exploring the sort of remote places about which guidebooks had not been written. In those days, getting back to uncorrupted nature and reading Thoreau by the campfire slotted in well with the nascent counterculture. “We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society,” Chouinard wrote in Let My People Go Surfing.

Tompkins opened the first The North Face retail store selling mountaineering equipment in the North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco in 1966. The Grateful Dead played at the opening, and there was a fashion show featuring Joan Baez and her sister, the late singer and activist Mimi Fariña.

In Southern California, Chouinard, who was among the pioneers of what has since become known as the “golden age of Yosemite climbing”, had begun making his own equipment in the late 1950s. At first, he created and forged reusable steel pitons that were hammered into rock faces and then removed. Then, to help preserve climbing routes from disfigurement, Chouinard changed to aluminium chocks that could be wedged in by hand and did not leave a trace behind. The ambition at the time was to do as little damage as possible – as the Sierra climber Doug Robinson put it: “Organic climbing for the natural man.”

The two men met in the mid-60s when Tompkins began to distribute Chouinard’s equipment through The North Face. Early in their friendship, a white-water kayaking trip together in California ended with Chouinard getting 15 stitches in his face. And in 1968 the two drove a Ford Econoline van from Ventura, California, to the remote region of Chile and Argentina named Patagonia.

That same year, Tompkins sold his stake in The North Face for $50,000, and with his then wife, Susie, founded the San Francisco-based casualwear brand Esprit, whose hip version of sportswear became synonymous with 1980s style. After reading Bill Devall’s environmental call to arms Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered in the 1980s, Tompkins decided to leave the apparel business and devote himself full time to saving the environment. By the time Esprit was sold in 1990, its annual sales were estimated to be $1bn.


The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966.







The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966. Photograph: Suki HIll / The North Face

Chouinard had also branched out from mountaineering equipment. He had begun to import climbing wear, for sale, and in 1973, founded a new company named Patagonia. One of his earliest employees was Kris McDivitt, a downhill ski-racer. She became general manager and then CEO of Patagonia, before she met Doug Tompkins, who was then divorced.They married in 1993, a union of sorts between the two companies. Together the couple eventually bought 2.2m acres in Patagonia to conserve and live on full-time. They planned to protect this tract of wilderness, using the fortune he made from fuelling people’s ambitions to explore the outdoors.

* * *




If Tompkins’s response to his dawning realisation that the apparel industry was damaging the environment was to sell his business and take direct action to save the Earth, then Chouinard, by contrast, decided to keep his company in private hands and run it in a way that might minimise environmental damage – a nearly impossible task that seems to weigh very heavily on him. “Evil always wins if we do nothing,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing.

The challenge of taking the moral high ground while still making and selling things is something that Rick Ridgeway also thinks about a great deal. “Our mission is to build the best product, causing no unnecessary harm, then that second part of our mission is essentially saying that we’ve got to do less bad,” he said. “We’re going to make our product with the smallest footprint possible, but it is a footprint.”

For both men – who would not disagree with the radical environmentalist Edward Abbey’s famous remark that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” – running an ethical business is an almost impossible challenge, if not a contradiction. Populating the world with more stuff that will eventually get thrown away is bad for the planet; the popularising of outdoor culture of all sorts is bad for specific places of natural beauty, which risk being overrun with people; and finally – and most difficult – the entire ethos of growth and profit and consumption is unsustainable for humanity and the health of the planet.

Jill Dumain, the director of environment strategy, who has been at Patagonia for more than 27 years, can easily list all the ways the company is trying to do the right thing, among them the decision, in the 1990s, to use only organic cotton, and in 2013 to switch to torture-free goose down. (The North Face made the same move in 2014.) It has tried to replace as many of its synthetic materials as possible with recycled ones, although finding recycled zippers and buttons has been a struggle. Socially, it is committed to fair trade in its supply chain, in the mills and sewing factories it works with. This has led to the company splitting up with suppliers who were not willing or able to make the changes it demanded. These are the sorts of problems that Patagonia has chosen to explore to an almost obsessive degree. The idea of businesses being “transparent” is wholly overused but, in Patagonia’s case, it is fitting.

Over time, Chouinard and Ridgeway matured into their roles as aging renegades: they appear as delightfully cranky old friends in a 2010 documentary, 180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless, which follows a young writer and photographer as he attempts to retrace their now-legendary 1968 trip from California to Chile.

Their adventures continued into December of 2015, when Chouinard, Ridgeway, Tompkins, and three other friends went on a seemingly gentle five-day kayaking trip to southern Chile. Ridgeway, who is 67, and Tompkins, 72, shared a kayak and it capsized in heavy waves in 4C water. The six men were rescued via patrol boat and helicopter but Tompkins suffered from severe hypothermia. He died in a hospital that night.

“Doug had a visceral dislike for authority and always relished breaking the rules,” Chouinard wrote. It was a heartfelt tribute to his old friend. In his book, Chouinard comes off as a grumpy, seasoned old-timer, constantly bemoaning the lack of credibility in everyone, everywhere. “Yvon calls himself the biggest pessimist in the world,” says Dumain.


Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face.







Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face. Photograph: Reuters

Chouinard and his wife Malinda divide their time between Ventura and their long-time home in Jackson Hole, a mountain resort town in Wyoming now known as a playground for the super-rich – Harrison Ford, Sandra Bullock and Dick Cheney all have homes there.

Patagonia employees talk about Chouinard with the devotion usually reserved for cult leaders, but with a tone that suggests that they also view him as a somewhat mercurial genius. “He spends a lot of time outdoors like he always has,” says Rose Marcario, Patagonia’s CEO, “a lot of time fishing, or teaching kids how to fish.” When I called, he was always off somewhere; no one seemed to know quite where.

By keeping Patagonia as a privately owned business, Chouinard has been able to run it in a way that stays true to his values. (Patagonia is organised as a for-profit company, known as a B-Corp, with certification for its social and environmental commitment.) “When the company becomes the fatted calf, it’s sold for a profit, and its resources and holdings are often ravaged and broken apart, leading to the disruption of family ties and the long-term health of local economies,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing. “When you get away from the idea that a company is a product to be sold to the highest bidder in the shortest amount of time, all future decisions in the company are affected.”

Patagonia’s competitors, The North Face included, are mostly public companies driven by shareholders. “The mission and the values of Patagonia have never been really about that,” says Marcario. “They’ve been about how much influence we can have on preserving and conserving the wild places that we love and play in, and how much influence we can have as a business to help change the model.”

But, while Tompkins left business altogether to save the wilderness, Chouinard seems like a man who will never stop being conflicted about what running a successful business entails. “Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible,” he has written. “It will never make a totally sustainable non-damaging product. But it is committed to trying.”


Patagonia’s headquarters are in Ventura, a small beach town in Southern California in between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. The buildings occupy a 5.5-acre campus and are painted in a signature buttery ochre colour used in most of the Patagonia retail stores around the world. There’s a large playground for the onsite creche – an employee benefit so rare in the US that Patagonia published a book last summer about its child-friendly philosophy. The company prides itself in hiring relatively few people but looking after them all.

There is something about being on the Patagonia campus that feels like being in a Scandinavian country – albeit one with banana plants, blooming agaves and jacaranda trees. There are solar panels, piles of surfboards for employees to use, and a car with a licence plate that reads BUMKIN. Offices have bean bags and stability balls to sit on, and the canteen serves organic kale blackberry salad. Then there’s the shed that originally housed Chouinard’s blacksmithing workshop, where he made climbing gear. It now feels a bit like a museum piece, frozen in the 1970s, but apparently Chouinard still tinkers around in it from time to time.

The campus is the setting for many ostentatious efforts to do good. “One day I was walking down the steps and there were pieces of paper all over the sidewalks, and they all had arrows [on them] and said, ‘Careful. Watch out. Butterfly chrysalis,’” Dean Carter, the vice president of human resources, told me.

If this conspicuous altruism is grating to some people, they do not work at Patagonia. Still, the company says that it does not only recruit environmentally conscious do-gooders. “If we picked people who fit a specific mould, it could feel really culty,” Carter said. “But we’re just looking for threads; we’re not looking for the entire quilt. We’re looking for threads of caring for the environment, threads of caring about the outdoors, and threads of caring about families, collaborating, working.”

In a not-necessarily-cultish way, a lot of Patagonia employees go on to marry other Patagonia employees, and family members often work there too. Carter’s own daughter is a receptionist.


Yvon Chouinard in his workshop at the Patagonia headquarters in Ventura, California.

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Yvon Chouinard in his workshop at the Patagonia headquarters in Ventura, California. Photograph: Victoria Sayer Pearson/AP

Companies wishing to improve their public image drop by to see if a little ethical stardust will rub off on them. Coca-Cola flew in a team from South Africa. There was even a visit from Chick-Fil-A, the US fast food chain famous for taking a public stance against same-sex marriage in 2012. I registered my surprise. “Exactly! And I have a partner. So they asked me if they could come. I was kind of like, ‘Are you sure?’” Carter says. “And obviously we don’t share their values. But they have their very specific culture that they’re living. And they were really sweet and kind.”

When Neil Blumenthal, co-founder of the fashionable eyewear startup Warby Parker, came to visit, he was impressed by how much work went into research and development – he mentioned the way Patagonia tests its raincoats with waters of various alkalinity to mimic rain in different parts of the world. But what really struck him, he said, was the venue for his meeting with two Patagonia executives: “Instead of taking the meeting in a conference room, we took a walk to the beach. For me it was pretty special; for them it was quite ordinary.”

Ridgeway – whose job as vice president of public engagement is to represent the company, whether at conferences or universities, or to executives who come to the Ventura headquarters – described the process of meeting visitors: “They go on a tour, we walk around and talk about the values and how we live the values. Usually we get some local organically grown food and we answer questions and share a story,” Ridgeway told me. “And then we are curious what their story is.”

Ridgeway can sometimes sound a little weary at having to explain to outsiders a way of life that comes quite naturally to him. “We don’t want to hold ourselves up in some arrogant exclusivity,” Ridgeway said, but then described the kind of customer that Patagonia does not “necessarily want to invite under our umbrella”. Namely, people who want to climb Mount Everest for bragging rights – the sort of affluent adventurers, drawn to climbing in part by Patagonia, whose impact Chouinard now regrets so much. “Someone who has paid $100,000 for a guided climb where the sherpas put the route in and risked their lives fixing the lines and carried all your stuff up for you and positioned your oxygen balls so you could go up and come back and say you climbed Everest. That doesn’t work for us,” Ridgeway says. “And we don’t mind saying it publicly.”

In its pursuit of authenticity, Patagonia tries to avoid malls, and only takes over spaces that mean something to the community. (One of its four Manhattan stores is located on the Bowery, next to the former location of the punk club CBGB, which is now a John Varvatos boutique.) It prides itself on pushing up against the limits of how ethical a company can be while actually still selling things: quality goods, ethical labour and manufacturing, no debt, even a tax strategy, according to Chouinard’s book, “to pay our fair share and not a penny more”.

The company is hyper-aware of these contradictions, perhaps to the point of tying itself in knots. In 2011, on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in the US, Patagonia ran an ad featuring a photo of a plush blue fleece, and copy that read DON’T BUY THIS JACKET. The advert invited customers to make a commitment to reduce what they buy, repair their gear and recycle the stuff they no longer need. (Patagonia’s campus in Reno, Nevada houses the largest garment repair facility in North America.) But it had the opposite effect: Patagonia’s Black Friday sales increased by 30% over the previous year. The anti-sales message, as they might have expected, made consumers feel better about buying more.


Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket advert.

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Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket advert. Photograph: PR

The company’s attempts to expand into new markets have a similar blend of moral commitment and financial savvy. In 2013, it launched a venture fund to invest in environmentally and socially responsible for-profit startups. In 2012, the company launched a food line named Patagonia Provisions, which includes buffalo jerky, smoked wild Sockeye salmon and, beginning last October, a beer made with a grain called kernza, which can be grown year-round. The target market is “concerned moms that want to make sure they’re giving their kids organic, non-GMO food”, Rose Marcario told me. The new food division, she added, has won the company “a whole new set of customers”.


At the headquarters of The North Face in Alameda – just across the bay from San Francisco – there is a similar preoccupation with being green and avoiding waste. During a visit last summer, I had a lunch of sustainably raised salmon with Todd Spaletto, who became president of the company in 2011. The building where we dined was insulated with recycled blue jeans, and there were composting bins, solar panels and free charging stations for electric cars. One building housed a vast area dedicated to repairing clothes under the company’s lifetime warranty. As we ate, a team out on the lawn was testing out the set-up of a large, complicated-looking hexagonal tent.

A visitor to The North Face campus encounters the same sporty feel as at Patagonia HQ – but instead of Patagonia’s crunchy “soul surfer” vibe, here there is an edge of elite athleticism, whether in the form of employees doing bootcamp workouts and agility drills in the well-equipped gym, or a casual mention that Dean Karnazes was there just the other day, leading a group run along the water.

“One of my first weeks on the job, I was talking to somebody and they were like, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’” Spaletto recalled, smiling. “I was like, ‘I’m pretty excited, I’m running a half-marathon.’ And they were like” – and here he adopted a tone reserved for motivating small children – “‘That’s great, you gotta start somewhere!’”

Lately The North Face has been focusing more and more on a younger, casual customer whose main interest in hiking is the part where they get to drink beer around a campfire. “Why does the youthful millennial consumer go outdoors?” Spaletto asked. “They value one thing above all else. It’s this whole idea of these genuine experiential moments that you share with your friends.”

These youthful consumers may even decide they can afford to skip the hike and go straight to the beer. But as The North Face positions itself as a fashion brand as much as an outdoor wear company, a new dilemma arises. The casual customer is drawn both to style and to the authenticity of owning real technical gear – but if the gear itself announces its technical utility too loudly, it ceases to be fashionable.

“The outdoor industry has prided itself on showing the technology on the outside – seams sealed, zippers taped. That is very much core to this industry, everybody does it,” said Sumie Scott, the senior product director for “mountain culture” at The North Face. “But the more youthful consumer wants hidden technology. So that’s the challenge, how do you get them to know that technology exists?”

“What The North Face tries to push is this high, high performance extremity,” said Cathy Begien, who worked in visual merchandising at The North Face a decade ago, and has since gone on to work at Prada, Opening Ceremony, and Warby Parker. “They would say, ‘Cathy use Everest imagery or rock climbing.’ But I’m in a mall and people are pushing strollers around at 8am. I don’t think they care about whether an alpinist would want this, or an ultra-marathoner,” Begien recalled. “Holiday season was the only time I didn’t have to talk about mountain climbing or water rafting and could just show a bunch of jackets in a way the typical mall consumer can understand: this one is gonna keep you warm, this one is gonna keep you warmer, this one is gonna keep you warmest.”

The high cost of North Face gear creates high expectations: “You get a fairly affluent customer who expects meticulous service. You have to behave as though you’re working at a Vuitton or a Gucci,” said Caitlin Kelly, a journalist who took a job at a North Face outlet in suburban New York after losing her reporting job during the 2008 recession, and wrote a book, titled Malled, about the experience. “It was a long, narrow store. And when you walked in, half the store was fashion, half was ‘Let’s climb Everest’. It was massively confusing to the shopper.”

The North Face wants to do style and adventure. It has collaborated on slippers and puffer jackets with Supreme, the skateboarding brand with a cult following. (Drake wore a jacket from the collection in the video for his 2011 single The Motto.) The trend among makers of serious technical gear is for designs that don’t look like you are about to climb to Camp 4 on Everest – while at the same time, couture designers are increasingly showing items inspired by authentic outdoor gear. Patrik Ervell, Steven Alan and Louis Vuitton have all designed fleece jackets that appear to be a riff on Patagonia’s Retro-X; puffer jackets have started to appear on the covers of fashion magazines, thanks in part to Balenciaga’s $3,000 parkas.

The desire to broadcast a sense of adventure while still looking good may have something to do with the biggest trend in athletic gear in recent years: the rise of “athleisure” – clothes that suggest, rather than insist on, performance, designed to transition from workout to sofa. Leggings – whether made by The Gap or Alexander Wang – are the most popular form of sporting loungewear (or is it lounging sportswear), having replaced denim as the preferred casual wear for women. The UK sportswear market will surpass £8bn by 2020, fuelled by the rise of athleisure. In addition to gear for high-altitude camping and open-water diving, both The North Face and Patagonia sell leggings and sweatpants and T-shirts and all manner of gear best suited for hanging out.





North Face has the misfortune of being east-coast prep-school girls wearing black puffers and Uggs

Matt Langer

But for The North Face, exercising feels like an urban moral imperative, much as recycling does at Patagonia – a duty to care for oneself in tandem with caring about nature. While The North Face nominally shares the same ethos as Patagonia in terms of protecting the planet, its status as a publicly traded company means it has to maximise profits, which goes with the company’s type-A branding – you are not going to see any North Face slow-growth manifestos or “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ads. In fact, after The North Face announced in October that its third-quarter revenue had dropped 1%, Spaletto, my summer lunch companion, quietly departed the company.

If the risk for Patagonia is to be seen just like any other company – one that cares as much about profits as the environment – then the comparable risk for The North Face is to be associated with suburban parents and college students whose greatest trek is across the quad, rather than trailrunners, mountain climbers and the occasional well-dressed rapper. It has to remain authentic enough to represent authenticity for the casual customer, without being so authentic that those people stop buying.


“North Face has the misfortune of being east-coast prep-school girls wearing black puffers and Uggs,” says Matt Langer – a cyclist, New Mexico resident and Patagonia customer. He’s a friend of a friend whose Instagram looks like a real-life recreation of the Patagonia catalogue, complete with fly-fishing, long-distance mountain biking, an adorable dog and waterfalls. Patagonia’s marketing is spot on, he says, a bit sheepishly. “I am a bearded white guy drinking beer around the campfire.”

For the committed outdoorsman – who styles himself a rugged individualist, untouched by the whims of fashion – there’s an ambivalence at being so accurately cast. That stereotype, says Josh Contois, who I met on a group hiking trip in California last year, “is to be a dirtbag and live frugally and also wear a $250 jacket”. (Outside Magazine once called Chouinard “King of the Dirtbags”.) Both Contois and Langer wear Patagonia in a way that would make Chouinard smile, even though much of their actual equipment comes from niche brands. For the real dirtbag, who now regards The North Face somewhat like McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, even Patagonia has mostly sold out to the urban yuppie.

The true adventurer instead buys even more expensive, precious, and specialised gear – from tiny companies owned and operated by fellow mountaineers in outdoor meccas such as Boulder, Colorado or Bend, Oregon.

“Let’s be honest, Patagonia appeals to – I don’t want to sound like a smartass – but people driving Range Rovers who shop at Whole Foods,” said Doug Heinrich, an executive at the Utah-based Black Diamond Equipment – Chouinard’s original climbing equipment company, which was renamed after he sold it to an employee in the 1980s. “That doesn’t mean they don’t appeal to core climbers, but we’re going to appeal to that hardcore climber more than Patagonia would.”





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On the other end of the spectrum, there is another crop of companies who appeal to the super-rich (or design fetishists) by trying to out-fancy Patagonia and The North Face on both technical sophistication and price. The small Canadian brand Arc’teryx produces a high-end line called Veilance, which promises “minimalist style with total performance”, and looks as if Prada made high-tech outdoor gear, with prices to match. Canada Goose, whose “Arctic luxury apparel” is worn by scientists at the South Pole, offers a “Kensington” Parka priced at £850.

There is something undeniably alluring about the lengthy descriptions of the technical merits of all this cutting-edge gear: the insulation that traps air for reduced heat loss and increased warmth, the underarm vents, the wrist accessory pocket, the reminder that your jacket is coming with a lifetime warranty, even if it isn’t destined to leave the borough of Manhattan. That, after all, was always the bedrock of high fashion – people justified the prices of a cashmere sweater or a leather jacket because what they bought was well made, beautifully crafted, and lasted for ever.

This may be what appeals to such customers as the man who recently came into the San Francisco North Face store and bought a Himalayan suit, which is filled with goose down and costs $1,000.

The sales copy describes the item thus: “Technical, insulated full-body suit for climbing 8,000-metre peaks, the Himalayan Suit is a necessity for athletes aiming to reach the top of the world.” It looks like a yellow and black sleeping bag with arms and legs and, according to the catalogue, includes “critical features based on Conrad Anker’s feedback and proven on Mount Everest, where the athlete team successfully reached summit”. The staff at The North Face store asked the customer where he was planning on going with his Himalayan suit. Nowhere, he said. He was just buying it because it was cool.
n the night of his 30th birthday, after a few drinks, Dean Karnazes decided that he would celebrate by running all the way from San Francisco down the coast to the town of Half Moon Bay, a distance of 30 miles. So began a career as an endurance runner. He has run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days in all 50 states, and taken part in such extreme competitions as a marathon to the South Pole and a 135-mile race through Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth. Karnazes once ran 350 miles in 81 hours and 44 minutes, without stopping to sleep. His account of his feats of distance running, Ultramarathon Man, is a bestseller. Karnazes’s superhuman exertions are sponsored by The North Face, the company that make the kit he wears in his coaching videos.

The North Face, a Bay Area-based outdoor clothing manufacturer, sells garments and gear for climbing, backpacking, running, and skiing. Its stores are decorated with huge photographs of people climbing icy peaks and running through meadows. Central to the brand’s ethos are the professional athletes it sponsors, people not widely known but celebrated in their fields – names such as Karnazes and Pete Athans, who has climbed Everest seven times. The North Face sells the idea of adventure – of pushing limits – whether running long distances, climbing an untried rockface, or sleeping outside at sub-zero temperatures. Its tagline is “never stop exploring”. (“We have actually been approached with partnerships about spacesuits to Mars and things like that,” one publicist told me recently.)





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This canny marketing of adventure has made The North Face the dominant player in a booming outdoor-wear market – a $4bn industry in the US alone. And its closest rival in the contest to sell the thrill of the wilderness to the masses may be a company whose origins and history are tightly intertwined with its own: Patagonia.

If The North Face aims to appeal to the overachieving weekend warrior, Patagonia is for the slightly more mellow soul who wants to soak up the fresh air and enjoy the view as he ascends a craggy mountain. The company’s ethos is encapsulated in Let My People Go Surfing, the memoir-cum-management classic about Patagonia, by the company’s founder Yvon Chouinard – reissued last year in a 10th-anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Naomi Klein. The book contains lavish colour pictures of people in genial communion with nature. To browse the book is to dive into a world of life-affirming outdoor feats followed by nights around the fire, swapping heroic tales.

Unlike other billion-dollar sports brands, neither company sells balls or bats. They do not cater to team sports. They are, above all, selling the allure of the great outdoors, offering their customers technically advanced gear for going off into the wilds with a friend or two. (Or, if you prefer, alone: the cover of the winter 2016 Patagonia catalogue features a man on a motorbike – carrying a pair of skis under one arm – smiling at a squirrel as it crosses the road.)

Both companies understand that the appeal of endurance sports has something to do with acquiring kit that boasts the most advanced technology. For genuine adventure, their marketing implies, you need top-quality gear. And top-quality gear designed to withstand the harshest conditions and last a lifetime does not come cheap. You can buy an Inferno sleeping bag from The North Face that will, for $729 (£593), keep you warm in temperatures as cold as -40C. For $529 (£430), you can get a neoprene-free, natural rubber, hooded wetsuit from Patagonia for use in water temperatures down to 0C.

Both companies also understand that the largest market for their products is not explorers stocking up for Arctic expeditions. The real money comes from selling products designed for hardcore outdoor adventure to urban customers who lead relatively unadventurous lives. For the most part, people wear North Face and Patagonia gear while doing everyday things: cycling, shopping, walking the dog. “You can take a backpack to school but you feel like you’re in Yosemite just because it says North Face,” Dean Karnazes told me one afternoon in San Francisco. “I think that aspirational element is really big.”

It’s a sales pitch that has yielded big profits. The North Face reported annual revenue of $2.3bn last year, with 200 stores around the world. Patagonia is smaller, but growing more rapidly. The company had sales of $800m in 2016, twice as much as in 2010, and has 29 standalone stores in the US, 23 in Japan, and others in locations such as Chamonix, the French ski resort.

While The North Face sells $5,500 (£4,480) two-metre tents and Patagonia sells $629 waders for fly fishing, many of the most popular products for both companies are everyday wear: waterproof anoraks, leggings, fleeces, and, most important of all, puffer jackets. “Everyone is trying to reinvent and reinterpret the black puffy jacket,” said Jeff Crook, the chief product officer at Mountain Equipment Co-Op, an outdoor department store that has 20 stores across Canada, “whether it spends most of its time on the mountain peak or at the bus stop.”





Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure

The flagship jackets for both companies are the product of decades of technological refinement to make them increasingly warm, durable, and light. The most advanced models today have been engineered to solve the problem of how to insulate the wearer against cold and wet while remaining “breathable” – so you don’t overheat while you’re scaling that cliff face. At Patagonia, there is the Nano-Air ($249; £180 in the UK), a quilted, but not very puffy, water resistant jacket that uses a trademarked synthetic insulation that the company described as “revolutionary” upon its release in 2014. The North Face Thermoball ($199; £150) has its own proprietary synthetic insulation, which uses clusters of fibre to trap heat in a manner that mimics down. Both jackets are fit for a mountaineering expedition, but are each more likely to be bought to keep warm while taking the kids to the park.

Neither company regards the other as a rival – at least not publicly. But aside from the fact they sell the same kind of stuff to the same kind of customers (urban, affluent), the two companies have quite a bit of shared history. Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard were lifelong friends and brothers in adventure. Both men started out making their own specialist equipment; both went on to found companies selling outdoor wear; both felt distinctly uncomfortable doing office jobs, and still more uncomfortable running companies.

“I’ve been a businessman for almost 60 years,” Chouinard writes in the introduction to Let My People Go Surfing. “It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or lawyer.” And together, while promoting the glories of exploring the unspoiled wilderness, both men have been central to the mass popularisation of outdoor activities such as hiking and climbing, which may, in turn, make nature a little less unspoiled.

Selling professional-grade gear to people with no intention of using it professionally isn’t exactly a new trick in marketing, as the makers of SUVs, digital cameras and headphones can tell you. Most people who buy the Nike trainers advertised by Mo Farah don’t use them to run long distances.

But North Face and Patagonia are both wrestling with a more consequential paradox, one that is central to contemporary consumerism: we want to feel morally good about the things we buy. And both companies have been phenomenally successful because they have crafted an image that is about more than just being ethical and environmentally friendly, but about nature, adventure, exploration – ideas more grandiose than simply selling you a jacket, taking your money and trying not to harm the earth too much along the way. But the paradox is that by presenting themselves this way, they are selling a lot more jackets. In other words, both companies are selling stuff in part by looking like they’re not trying too hard to sell stuff, which helps them sell more stuff – and fills the world with more and more stuff.

You might call this the authenticity problem. And for all their similarities, the two companies are taking radically different approaches to solving it.


Doug Tompkins and Yvon Choiunard were the kind of outcast adolescents who found a home in the great outdoors. Both men became passionate about climbing and surfing in the American west in the middle of the last century. Back in the 1950s and 60s, climbing was “an unusual sport with just a small group of renegades who were, you know, misfits”, said Rick Ridgeway, an accomplished mountaineer and adventurer. (Rolling Stone magazine once called him “The Real Indiana Jones.”) An old friend of both Tompkins and Choiunard, he is now vice president for public engagement at Patagonia.

Both The North Face and Patagonia have their roots in exploring the sort of remote places about which guidebooks had not been written. In those days, getting back to uncorrupted nature and reading Thoreau by the campfire slotted in well with the nascent counterculture. “We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society,” Chouinard wrote in Let My People Go Surfing.

Tompkins opened the first The North Face retail store selling mountaineering equipment in the North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco in 1966. The Grateful Dead played at the opening, and there was a fashion show featuring Joan Baez and her sister, the late singer and activist Mimi Fariña.

In Southern California, Chouinard, who was among the pioneers of what has since become known as the “golden age of Yosemite climbing”, had begun making his own equipment in the late 1950s. At first, he created and forged reusable steel pitons that were hammered into rock faces and then removed. Then, to help preserve climbing routes from disfigurement, Chouinard changed to aluminium chocks that could be wedged in by hand and did not leave a trace behind. The ambition at the time was to do as little damage as possible – as the Sierra climber Doug Robinson put it: “Organic climbing for the natural man.”

The two men met in the mid-60s when Tompkins began to distribute Chouinard’s equipment through The North Face. Early in their friendship, a white-water kayaking trip together in California ended with Chouinard getting 15 stitches in his face. And in 1968 the two drove a Ford Econoline van from Ventura, California, to the remote region of Chile and Argentina named Patagonia.

That same year, Tompkins sold his stake in The North Face for $50,000, and with his then wife, Susie, founded the San Francisco-based casualwear brand Esprit, whose hip version of sportswear became synonymous with 1980s style. After reading Bill Devall’s environmental call to arms Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered in the 1980s, Tompkins decided to leave the apparel business and devote himself full time to saving the environment. By the time Esprit was sold in 1990, its annual sales were estimated to be $1bn.


The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966.







The opening of the first North Face shop in San Francisco, 1966. Photograph: Suki HIll / The North Face

Chouinard had also branched out from mountaineering equipment. He had begun to import climbing wear, for sale, and in 1973, founded a new company named Patagonia. One of his earliest employees was Kris McDivitt, a downhill ski-racer. She became general manager and then CEO of Patagonia, before she met Doug Tompkins, who was then divorced.They married in 1993, a union of sorts between the two companies. Together the couple eventually bought 2.2m acres in Patagonia to conserve and live on full-time. They planned to protect this tract of wilderness, using the fortune he made from fuelling people’s ambitions to explore the outdoors.

* * *




If Tompkins’s response to his dawning realisation that the apparel industry was damaging the environment was to sell his business and take direct action to save the Earth, then Chouinard, by contrast, decided to keep his company in private hands and run it in a way that might minimise environmental damage – a nearly impossible task that seems to weigh very heavily on him. “Evil always wins if we do nothing,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing.

The challenge of taking the moral high ground while still making and selling things is something that Rick Ridgeway also thinks about a great deal. “Our mission is to build the best product, causing no unnecessary harm, then that second part of our mission is essentially saying that we’ve got to do less bad,” he said. “We’re going to make our product with the smallest footprint possible, but it is a footprint.”

For both men – who would not disagree with the radical environmentalist Edward Abbey’s famous remark that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” – running an ethical business is an almost impossible challenge, if not a contradiction. Populating the world with more stuff that will eventually get thrown away is bad for the planet; the popularising of outdoor culture of all sorts is bad for specific places of natural beauty, which risk being overrun with people; and finally – and most difficult – the entire ethos of growth and profit and consumption is unsustainable for humanity and the health of the planet.

Jill Dumain, the director of environment strategy, who has been at Patagonia for more than 27 years, can easily list all the ways the company is trying to do the right thing, among them the decision, in the 1990s, to use only organic cotton, and in 2013 to switch to torture-free goose down. (The North Face made the same move in 2014.) It has tried to replace as many of its synthetic materials as possible with recycled ones, although finding recycled zippers and buttons has been a struggle. Socially, it is committed to fair trade in its supply chain, in the mills and sewing factories it works with. This has led to the company splitting up with suppliers who were not willing or able to make the changes it demanded. These are the sorts of problems that Patagonia has chosen to explore to an almost obsessive degree. The idea of businesses being “transparent” is wholly overused but, in Patagonia’s case, it is fitting.

Over time, Chouinard and Ridgeway matured into their roles as aging renegades: they appear as delightfully cranky old friends in a 2010 documentary, 180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless, which follows a young writer and photographer as he attempts to retrace their now-legendary 1968 trip from California to Chile.

Their adventures continued into December of 2015, when Chouinard, Ridgeway, Tompkins, and three other friends went on a seemingly gentle five-day kayaking trip to southern Chile. Ridgeway, who is 67, and Tompkins, 72, shared a kayak and it capsized in heavy waves in 4C water. The six men were rescued via patrol boat and helicopter but Tompkins suffered from severe hypothermia. He died in a hospital that night.

“Doug had a visceral dislike for authority and always relished breaking the rules,” Chouinard wrote. It was a heartfelt tribute to his old friend. In his book, Chouinard comes off as a grumpy, seasoned old-timer, constantly bemoaning the lack of credibility in everyone, everywhere. “Yvon calls himself the biggest pessimist in the world,” says Dumain.


Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face.







Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face. Photograph: Reuters

Chouinard and his wife Malinda divide their time between Ventura and their long-time home in Jackson Hole, a mountain resort town in Wyoming now known as a playground for the super-rich – Harrison Ford, Sandra Bullock and Dick Cheney all have homes there.

Patagonia employees talk about Chouinard with the devotion usually reserved for cult leaders, but with a tone that suggests that they also view him as a somewhat mercurial genius. “He spends a lot of time outdoors like he always has,” says Rose Marcario, Patagonia’s CEO, “a lot of time fishing, or teaching kids how to fish.” When I called, he was always off somewhere; no one seemed to know quite where.

By keeping Patagonia as a privately owned business, Chouinard has been able to run it in a way that stays true to his values. (Patagonia is organised as a for-profit company, known as a B-Corp, with certification for its social and environmental commitment.) “When the company becomes the fatted calf, it’s sold for a profit, and its resources and holdings are often ravaged and broken apart, leading to the disruption of family ties and the long-term health of local economies,” he writes in Let My People Go Surfing. “When you get away from the idea that a company is a product to be sold to the highest bidder in the shortest amount of time, all future decisions in the company are affected.”

Patagonia’s competitors, The North Face included, are mostly public companies driven by shareholders. “The mission and the values of Patagonia have never been really about that,” says Marcario. “They’ve been about how much influence we can have on preserving and conserving the wild places that we love and play in, and how much influence we can have as a business to help change the model.”

But, while Tompkins left business altogether to save the wilderness, Chouinard seems like a man who will never stop being conflicted about what running a successful business entails. “Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible,” he has written. “It will never make a totally sustainable non-damaging product. But it is committed to trying.”


Patagonia’s headquarters are in Ventura, a small beach town in Southern California in between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. The buildings occupy a 5.5-acre campus and are painted in a signature buttery ochre colour used in most of the Patagonia retail stores around the world. There’s a large playground for the onsite creche – an employee benefit so rare in the US that Patagonia published a book last summer about its child-friendly philosophy. The company prides itself in hiring relatively few people but looking after them all.

There is something about being on the Patagonia campus that feels like being in a Scandinavian country – albeit one with banana plants, blooming agaves and jacaranda trees. There are solar panels, piles of surfboards for employees to use, and a car with a licence plate that reads BUMKIN. Offices have bean bags and stability balls to sit on, and the canteen serves organic kale blackberry salad. Then there’s the shed that originally housed Chouinard’s blacksmithing workshop, where he made climbing gear. It now feels a bit like a museum piece, frozen in the 1970s, but apparently Chouinard still tinkers around in it from time to time.

The campus is the setting for many ostentatious efforts to do good. “One day I was walking down the steps and there were pieces of paper all over the sidewalks, and they all had arrows [on them] and said, ‘Careful. Watch out. Butterfly chrysalis,’” Dean Carter, the vice president of human resources, told me.

If this conspicuous altruism is grating to some people, they do not work at Patagonia. Still, the company says that it does not only recruit environmentally conscious do-gooders. “If we picked people who fit a specific mould, it could feel really culty,” Carter said. “But we’re just looking for threads; we’re not looking for the entire quilt. We’re looking for threads of caring for the environment, threads of caring about the outdoors, and threads of caring about families, collaborating, working.”

In a not-necessarily-cultish way, a lot of Patagonia employees go on to marry other Patagonia employees, and family members often work there too. Carter’s own daughter is a receptionist.


Yvon Chouinard in his workshop at the Patagonia headquarters in Ventura, California.

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Yvon Chouinard in his workshop at the Patagonia headquarters in Ventura, California. Photograph: Victoria Sayer Pearson/AP

Companies wishing to improve their public image drop by to see if a little ethical stardust will rub off on them. Coca-Cola flew in a team from South Africa. There was even a visit from Chick-Fil-A, the US fast food chain famous for taking a public stance against same-sex marriage in 2012. I registered my surprise. “Exactly! And I have a partner. So they asked me if they could come. I was kind of like, ‘Are you sure?’” Carter says. “And obviously we don’t share their values. But they have their very specific culture that they’re living. And they were really sweet and kind.”

When Neil Blumenthal, co-founder of the fashionable eyewear startup Warby Parker, came to visit, he was impressed by how much work went into research and development – he mentioned the way Patagonia tests its raincoats with waters of various alkalinity to mimic rain in different parts of the world. But what really struck him, he said, was the venue for his meeting with two Patagonia executives: “Instead of taking the meeting in a conference room, we took a walk to the beach. For me it was pretty special; for them it was quite ordinary.”

Ridgeway – whose job as vice president of public engagement is to represent the company, whether at conferences or universities, or to executives who come to the Ventura headquarters – described the process of meeting visitors: “They go on a tour, we walk around and talk about the values and how we live the values. Usually we get some local organically grown food and we answer questions and share a story,” Ridgeway told me. “And then we are curious what their story is.”

Ridgeway can sometimes sound a little weary at having to explain to outsiders a way of life that comes quite naturally to him. “We don’t want to hold ourselves up in some arrogant exclusivity,” Ridgeway said, but then described the kind of customer that Patagonia does not “necessarily want to invite under our umbrella”. Namely, people who want to climb Mount Everest for bragging rights – the sort of affluent adventurers, drawn to climbing in part by Patagonia, whose impact Chouinard now regrets so much. “Someone who has paid $100,000 for a guided climb where the sherpas put the route in and risked their lives fixing the lines and carried all your stuff up for you and positioned your oxygen balls so you could go up and come back and say you climbed Everest. That doesn’t work for us,” Ridgeway says. “And we don’t mind saying it publicly.”

In its pursuit of authenticity, Patagonia tries to avoid malls, and only takes over spaces that mean something to the community. (One of its four Manhattan stores is located on the Bowery, next to the former location of the punk club CBGB, which is now a John Varvatos boutique.) It prides itself on pushing up against the limits of how ethical a company can be while actually still selling things: quality goods, ethical labour and manufacturing, no debt, even a tax strategy, according to Chouinard’s book, “to pay our fair share and not a penny more”.

The company is hyper-aware of these contradictions, perhaps to the point of tying itself in knots. In 2011, on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in the US, Patagonia ran an ad featuring a photo of a plush blue fleece, and copy that read DON’T BUY THIS JACKET. The advert invited customers to make a commitment to reduce what they buy, repair their gear and recycle the stuff they no longer need. (Patagonia’s campus in Reno, Nevada houses the largest garment repair facility in North America.) But it had the opposite effect: Patagonia’s Black Friday sales increased by 30% over the previous year. The anti-sales message, as they might have expected, made consumers feel better about buying more.


Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket advert.

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Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket advert. Photograph: PR

The company’s attempts to expand into new markets have a similar blend of moral commitment and financial savvy. In 2013, it launched a venture fund to invest in environmentally and socially responsible for-profit startups. In 2012, the company launched a food line named Patagonia Provisions, which includes buffalo jerky, smoked wild Sockeye salmon and, beginning last October, a beer made with a grain called kernza, which can be grown year-round. The target market is “concerned moms that want to make sure they’re giving their kids organic, non-GMO food”, Rose Marcario told me. The new food division, she added, has won the company “a whole new set of customers”.


At the headquarters of The North Face in Alameda – just across the bay from San Francisco – there is a similar preoccupation with being green and avoiding waste. During a visit last summer, I had a lunch of sustainably raised salmon with Todd Spaletto, who became president of the company in 2011. The building where we dined was insulated with recycled blue jeans, and there were composting bins, solar panels and free charging stations for electric cars. One building housed a vast area dedicated to repairing clothes under the company’s lifetime warranty. As we ate, a team out on the lawn was testing out the set-up of a large, complicated-looking hexagonal tent.

A visitor to The North Face campus encounters the same sporty feel as at Patagonia HQ – but instead of Patagonia’s crunchy “soul surfer” vibe, here there is an edge of elite athleticism, whether in the form of employees doing bootcamp workouts and agility drills in the well-equipped gym, or a casual mention that Dean Karnazes was there just the other day, leading a group run along the water.

“One of my first weeks on the job, I was talking to somebody and they were like, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’” Spaletto recalled, smiling. “I was like, ‘I’m pretty excited, I’m running a half-marathon.’ And they were like” – and here he adopted a tone reserved for motivating small

arly one morning in January, under the veil of darkness, a team of undercover police from China quietly entered Hong Kong’s Four Seasons hotel and made their way into a luxurious residential suite. After sweeping aside the billionaire occupant’s private contingent of female bodyguards, they shrouded the man’s head in a white sheet and bundled him off in a wheelchair.

Xiao Jianhua was one of China’s richest businessmen. He had built his fortune over the past two decades through deals involving the cream of China’s political elite, reportedly including close relatives of the president, Xi Jinping. Because of China’s opaque political culture, one can only speculate about the reasons for Xiao’s abduction, but it seems that he had taken careful steps to protect himself. Not only was he residing and conducting his business outside of China, his country of birth, he had a diplomatic passport from Antigua and Barbuda and had adopted Canadian citizenship, perhaps thinking that this might offer him some extra degree of legal or diplomatic protection.





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Hong Kong fields its own police, border control and immigration services, each theoretically separate from China’s own vast security apparatus. But when authorities in Beijing decided to come and get Xiao, none of that mattered. Since then, Hong Kong authorities have not dared to publicly protest Xiao’s arrest, nor has China offered any explanation.

The incident was yet another blow to the idea that Hong Kong has control over its own affairs. Just a year earlier, five publishers and booksellers had been secretly whisked away to China for interrogation. From unknown places of detention, where most of them remain, some were forced to make crude televised confessions. Like Xiao’s abduction, this incident remains shrouded in secrecy, but many believe that the five men were targeted for selling lurid books about rivalries and corruption at the highest level of Chinese politics. Such books were particularly popular with visitors from the mainland, who could never find such uncensored material back home. One of the publisher’s books purported to reveal details of President Xi’s secret love life.

For many Hong Kong residents, the abductions were reminders of the sheer flimsiness of the agreement negotiated between Britain and Beijing when China regained sovereignty of the city in 1997. Indeed, Xiao’s abduction had been preceded by an even bigger blow to the promise of self-rule in Hong Kong. In November, a pair of young, telegenic candidates, who had just won election to the city’s Legislative Council, were denied their seats. LegCo, as it is widely known in Hong Kong, is a semi-democratic, 70-member body that makes laws, approves budgets and can hold the city’s governor to account. No one disputed that the two candidates, who represented a new pro-independence political group named Youngspiration, had prevailed at the polls. The pretext offered to reject them was that they had refused to specifically pledge allegiance to China during their oath-taking ceremonies, instead using the phrase “the Hong Kong nation”. (Establishment politicians also complained that they had referred to China with the derogatory term “Shina”, a word once favoured by Japanese imperialists.)





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Hong Kong politicians defy China as they are sworn in

Hong Kong’s staunchly pro-Beijing chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, first sought a court injunction to prevent the Youngspiration candidates from taking their seats. This was a worrying move – but then Leung did something unprecedented and, for many locals, far more disturbing. Eliminating any discretion Hong Kong’s independent courts might have had in the matter, Leung put the issue before Beijing, inviting a leading committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress to rule on the dispute. The pair were duly disqualified from office.

Since the handover, Beijing had rarely intervened in Hong Kong politics so bluntly, and anger over this turn of events quickly spread, especially among younger people. The mood remains tense. On the day after I arrived in Hong Kong in January, a delegation of pro-democracy activists flew to Taiwan, led by the city’s most prominent opposition leader, 20-year-old Joshua Wong. At the Hong Kong airport, just before departure, and then in Taiwan, crowds of pro-China demonstrators jostled Wong’s delegation and showered them with threats and insults. Many commentators described the demonstrators as rent-a-mobs pulled together by organised crime groups acting on behalf of Beijing. The mobs were there to send the message that no one from Hong Kong who preaches separation from China is beyond Beijing’s reach.

If that was indeed the intention, the message seems to have been received. But that is not all that was delivered. I have been visiting Hong Kong since the late 1990s, and after more than a week of scheduled interviews and spontaneous encounters with people of many different walks of life and political persuasions, what I found was an unmistakable, shared sense of foreboding among the people of the city. In formal interviews and over meals in crowded, neighbourhood restaurants, the fear people expressed was that their home – one of Asia’s freest and most cosmopolitan cities – is locked on a collision course with the authoritarian system that governs China.

The freedoms and democratic culture that make Hong Kong so special might not survive. As one prominent lawyer put it to me: “If there is a solution to Hong Kong’s predicament, surely no one has imagined it yet.”


For years, Hong Kong residents have looked forward to 2017, the 20th anniversary of the British departure, as a milestone in their political evolution. According to promises made by Beijing, this was meant to be a moment when they would take a critical step toward direct universal suffrage, under the city’s mini-constitution.

Instead, when the city’s next elections are held on 26 March, rather than ushering in a more democratic era for Hong Kong, they will be conducted under the old terms, leading many people to fear a return of the protests and confrontation that have marked the last three years.

Relations between Hong Kong and the mainland haven’t always been like this. At the time of the handover in 1997, the anxiety that many of Hong Kong’s 6.5 million residents felt about the future under the Chinese Communist party was offset, in part, by a strong surge of pride. It is true that thousands of locals emigrated, or sought second passports as a hedge against the uncertainty of this new era. But many others believed that as people on the mainland grew wealthier, political liberalisation would follow. Rather than Hong Kong being remade as China, China would come to look ever more like Hong Kong. For people of this persuasion, there had never been a better occasion to reaffirm one’s Chineseness.

It helped, of course, that the most vital things had not been left to chance. Britain’s final act of decolonisation, which had been negotiated for decades, appeared to cede control over the city not so much to the Chinese state as to the people of Hong Kong themselves. Under an arrangement with Beijing that became known as “one country, two systems”, Hong Kong would be allowed to govern itself for 50 years with minimal Chinese interference. (Even then, however, there were local critics who bemoaned what they saw as a design flaw, or original sin, even: the people of Hong Kong were given no role in negotiating the new terms.)

Hong Kong was so valuable to Beijing’s state planners that optimists convinced themselves the Chinese Communist party would not risk tampering with it in any fundamental way. The city had been the first source of capitalist investment for China – booster fuel during its initial economic takeoff in the early 1980s. Through the 1990s and into the next decade, Hong Kong remained an all-important source of investment, as well as a conduit through which China hungrily absorbed western technology and management techniques. Western-style institutions, such as the city’s impartial courts, transparent financial markets and free press, moreover, made Hong Kong a halfway house for China’s own nascent global companies. It was the ideal place to set up international operations, giving them the extra credibility they needed to win over skittish foreign investors.

One other factor helped reassure Hong Kongers who felt anxious about their future. To many observers, “one country, two systems” seemed partly designed to appeal to the 23 million people of Taiwan, a self-governed democracy off the coast of the Chinese mainland. Bringing Taiwan into the fold of a unified China had been a sacred goal for the Communist party ever since 1949, when Mao defeated China’s Nationalist government, which fled to the island. Now, political commentators throughout the region speculated that if Hong Kong was seen to be prospering as a liberal society under Chinese sovereignty, then perhaps the people of Taiwan might also be gradually won over to the idea of uniting with the mainland under a similar arrangement.

During its early years of implementation, many international observers gave “one country, two systems” good odds to succeed. For some, it even looked like a true “shuang ying” (win-win), one of the most cherished stock phrases of Chinese diplomacy. When one factored in Taiwan, it looked like it could even become a win-win-win: something that all three societies might eventually come to embrace.


man on waterfront in Hong Kong







‘It feels like everything is stacked against you’ … many young people in Hong Kong are pessimistic about the future. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Today, though, in the 20th year after the handover, this Sino-British arrangement is charitably described as limping along on life support. Many believe it is in danger of collapsing altogether, even as a pretence. As China has grown richer and more powerful, it has also become less patient and less willing to sacrifice control. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the idea of “one country, two systems” has been riven by the sudden upsurge of enthusiasm for autonomy. Beijing has found itself confronted by increasingly disaffected and radicalised youths, who are as unwilling to compromise over democracy and civil liberties as China is itself.

For its part, Britain – Hong Kong’s old colonial master – has been reluctant to publicly criticise Beijing, as it eagerly courts Chinese business and investment. Chris Patten, the Conservative peer and last colonial governor of the city, recently said: “I feel very strongly that we let down the parents of this generation of democracy activists. I think it would be a tragedy if we let down these kids as well.”


There is no single narrative to explain how Hong Kong’s situation has become so troubled. Yet one cannot understand the city’s present state of permanent crisis without reckoning with a simple fact: the mainland is no longer dependent on Hong Kong. In reality, the reverse may be true. The impact of this fact is not solely economic or political; it is also psychological, transforming the way mainlanders and Hong Kongers conceive of themselves.

Today, China’s economy is more than 11 times larger than it was at the time of the handover. Over that same time span, Hong Kong’s economy has been stagnant by comparison, becoming ever more dependent on China. Upward mobility has stalled, and many young people are pessimistic about the future. Nearly everyone under the age of 40 interviewed for this article still lived with their parents and saw no hope of that changing soon. “There’s not much economic growth outside of a small minority that works in banking and finance,” said Alan Wong, a 30-year-old who worked in his father’s manufacturing company. “The math behind home ownership is just impossible, and it feels like everything is stacked against you.”

In 1997, the average per-capita income in Hong Kong was 35 times that of China, and in the early years after the handover, the trickle of Chinese who were granted permits to visit returned home with envy-inducing tales of high-end shopping malls and an affluent, effortlessly cosmopolitan population. A sense of what has changed is captured vividly in the 2008 novel Beijing Coma, by the exiled Chinese author Ma Jian. It recounts a doomed love affair between a young Hong Kong woman and a man from the mainland, both medical students in southern China. Coming back from trips to Hong Kong, she first brings him Marlboros and then music cassettes, only to realise he has no tape player, and finally a camera, which he later sells for the equivalent of a year’s rent. Her parents object to her being with him, ostensibly because of the great gap in wealth. The man describes seeing her off at the train station on the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. “The Hong Kong tourists entering the hall were well dressed, with neat hair and tidy suitcases,” he writes. “They didn’t seem to belong to the same planet as the dishevelled hordes of mainland tourists who were trudging wearily around the hall in their bare feet, with plastic bags over their shoulders.”





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Today, the contrast between the mainland and Hong Kong is no longer so stark. Hong Kong has become a stop on the tourist circuit for millions of mainland Chinese, whose currency is now worth more than the once-coveted Hong Kong dollar. Their swelling numbers have become a source of resentment by natives of Hong Kong. Rich mainlanders, including many in the Chinese political elite, snap up luxury housing and are blamed for helping making real estate unaffordable for locals.

Visitors from China’s mainland have repeatedly been the target of angry protests by Hong Kong natives who have sometimes denounced them with the kind of epithets more familiar in societies deeply divided by race – words such as “pestilence”, “vermin” and “hordes”. Many Hong Kong natives frown at the supposedly coarse behaviour of members of the newly minted Chinese middle class, who they accuse of spitting in public, jay-walking and letting infants relieve themselves in the street. But for these visiting Chinese, Hong Kong is no longer so much a place to marvel over as it is a confirmation of their own society’s arrival. More and more, in fact, it looks like the places they’ve come from.

“They have very complicated attitudes to Hong Kong people – a complex,” said a man in his late 20s who works in corporate relations for a small manufacturer, explaining his support for tighter restrictions on tourism from the mainland. “They say that Hong Kong people are really just Chinese people, and nothing special. Hong Kong people in the 70s and 80s invested a lot of money in places like Shenzhen, and behaved like tycoons. They say you bought prostitutes there. Now we are rich, and it is the Hong Kong people’s turn to be our slaves. When Chinese people come to Hong Kong now, they like to act like they are operating in their colony. They don’t care what you think and are very free, because they have the Chinese government behind them, and the Chinese government controls everything.”

More than any economic statistics, it is this kind of psychological role-reversal that has unsettled people most. And that feeling is exacerbated by the assertive, even swaggering, manner of Xi Jinping. During his four years in power, Xi has established himself as the country’s most powerful leader in decades. Under his presidency, China’s own fledgling civil society has been under relentless attack. Lawyers working on human rights issues have been prosecuted and universities have been ordered to toe a rigid ideological line. In this climate, Hong Kong’s democracy movement has been depicted as a tool of the west, whose ultimate purpose is to subvert China and undermine its stability by encouraging liberalism on the mainland.

Xi has been almost as assertive on the international stage, particularly in Asia, where he has built up China’s navy, undertaken a provocative programme of island construction in the South China Sea, and launched ambitious trans-continental infrastructure projects.


Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, pictured in 2012.







Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, pictured in 2012. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP

Bold foreign policy moves such as these help sustain the Chinese president’s popularity at home, but in Hong Kong, as in Taiwan, they have mostly driven fear, not pride. “Nobody expected China to rise so fast in 10 years, or for the decline of other powers to be so great. And the surprise is even stronger with America under Trump,” says Lam Wai-man, an expert on the city’s political culture at the Open University of Hong Kong. “We are quite optimistic about China’s economic future, but not about its political future.”

Many in Hong Kong saw the swearing in of Leung, the city’s deeply unpopular chief executive, in 2012, as a calculated rebuff to liberal groups in the city. The carefully orchestrated ceremony, which was almost certainly approved in Beijing, was conducted entirely in Mandarin, the official language of China, but one that few Hong Kongers speak well. (Cantonese is the native language, and a key component of local identity.) During his swearing-in, Leung did not even utter the words “Hong Kong”, fuelling widespread derision and leading one man to later petition for his impeachment.


At the end of 2015, a groundbreaking Hong Kong film imagined the city’s future in 2025. Ten Years – a collection of five dystopian stories, each by a different director. The movie’s opening story, Extras, was by far the darkest. It shows establishment political parties promoting an ideology of mindless materialism and obedience to halls full of middle-aged and older Hong Kong natives. But Beijing’s exhortations to keep quiet, work hard and be happy with your lot are not reaching younger people. Beijing, it seems, is losing its grip on the city.

The solution, cooked up by a sinister-looking envoy from the mainland, is to engineer a crisis so that China can justify an outright takeover of the city. “The more panic, the better,” Beijing’s envoy says. Two petty criminals are recruited to shoot a couple of municipal councillors. The short ends with a black screen, across which a news bulletin scrolls. It congratulates the police for their response to a terrorist attack fostered by “hostile foreign powers”, announces that the suspects were killed on the spot, and then declares that, to preserve order in the city, a “National Security Act” will take effect immediately.

What made Extras so powerful was its shock value in imagining the sinister means Beijing might use to regain total control of Hong Kong. Barely a year later, though, suspicions like these have become widespread. Many among the city’s youthful, pro-democracy groups, for example, told me that there are paid stooges operating in their midst, waiting for the order to create the incident that will be used as a pretext to impose more direct control over the city.

What delivered the city to its present state of permanent crisis is partly a tale of good intentions gone awry – Britain’s, Hong Kong’s, even Beijing’s – in granting the city a 50-year period of transition. But it is also, increasingly, a tale of the inflexibility and heavy-handed tactics that arise when a stodgy and fundamentally insecure political system finds itself confronted with stark generational change and demands for true democracy.

Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing can best be understood in terms of quickening cycles. Those who hold the progressive torch in the city’s politics become steadily discredited for the least sign of accommodation toward Beijing. They are then replaced by younger, more radical successors, whose own failure to achieve any breakthrough breeds impatience toward them in turn, leading to greater radicalisation still. The cause of this impatience is, above all, a yearning for the true autonomy that seemed to be promised during the handover. This frustration has led some to argue for outright independence – an idea never even implied in the bargain struck between Beijing and London.





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The first and longest cycle in this story involved the slow rise, from the 1970s onwards, of a group of liberal activists who combined pro-democracy activism, Chinese patriotism and anti-corruption crusading. Many of them won office when Britain introduced elements of representative democracy to the colony in the 1980s, and once the terms of the handover were decided, they spoke with optimism about the city’s future. They were lawyers, academics, community leaders and other professionals who hoped to quietly prove the city’s worth to Beijing, not just as an economic centre but as a kind of laboratory of civic virtue. By working patiently within the system, they believed they could achieve universal suffrage for the city’s residents and gradually deepen Hong Kong’s autonomy from China.

In the early years after the 1997 handover, many among this loose coalition, which became known as the Pan-Democrats, began to profess the additional belief that through their example, and through the good works of Hong Kong residents who invest in mainland companies, the city might gradually encourage China to accept more liberal ways. For the true believers among the Pan-Democrats, this became an article of faith connected to their very identity as Chinese. Slowly catalysing progressive change on the mainland was their duty as members of Greater China. This was the opposite of the separatism that Beijing so fears. It was patriotism.

But over time, the Pan-Democrats began to be seen as too accommodating towards Beijing. In 2009, with little prior consultation, Hong Kong authorities announced a scheme to link the city to the high-speed rail network that was being built on the mainland. The Pan-Democrats opposed the project, but lacked the votes to stop it in the Legislative Council. A protest movement quickly sprung up. The opposition voices did not just include people from affected communities, but many others who saw the infrastructure scheme as a way for China to silently swallow up their city. In retrospect, many people cite the anti-rail protests as a turning point in Hong Kong’s political culture, when the Pan-Democrats began to be seen as ineffectual, and protest as the only way of protecting local rights. (Hitherto the most famous protests in Hong Kong were driven by Chinese nationalist sentiments. These included a 1967 anti-British riot that was supported by Beijing.)

The next big turn of the screw occurred in 2010, when Beijing attempted to introduce new, highly nationalistic history textbooks. The textbook reform, which was stodgily branded “the Moral and National Education campaign”, was a sign of the Communist party’s fear of the rapid emergence of a heightened sense of local identity in Hong Kong – something it feared would feed separatism, just as it had in Taiwan. But this ill-judged reform quickly backfired.

“The textbooks said that you have to cry when the flag is raised to show your love for the country,” says Ng Sin Hang, a solemn, curly-haired 21-year-old, who was in his early teens when he joined the first protests against the textbooks. “Like a lot of people, I thought national education would brainwash Hong Kong people. You can’t force an emotion on someone, but the textbook said, no matter what, you must love your country regardless of what it has done.”

The movement against the nationalist textbooks quickly grew. On 29 July 2012, around 100,000 demonstrators gathered outside of the Hong Kong government headquarters. They were led by Joshua Wong, then a frail-looking 17-year-old with thick-framed glasses and a soup-bowl haircut who was emerging as the most important opposition figure in the city; he was the leader of a since-disbanded group that took the name Scholarism because of its roots in curriculum-reform protests. “You have to see every battle as possibly the final battle,” Wong would later say, giving definition to his insurgent’s creed. The protests eventually forced Beijing to back down.


Joshua Wong (centre) leading pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in October 2014.







Joshua Wong (centre) leading pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in October 2014. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

As stunning as it was, Scholarism’s defeat of the Moral and National Education textbooks also stands out as the final success for anti-establishment political movements in Hong Kong. China’s leaders, fearing a repeat of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests of 1989, are especially wary of student-led movements and have signalled their determination not to let them drive change in Hong Kong. Since 2012, it has adopted a much firmer stance and begun issuing increasingly shrill warnings that any calls for Hong Kong independence amount to treason. Nor has Beijing allowed the Pan-Democrats to register any kind of meaningful successes lately, despite their commitment to working within the system.

With no escape valves available, two things have happened. More and more Hong Kongers, particularly young people, have joined in anti-government actions. At the same time, these young protesters have rejected the Pan-Democrats as hopelessly tainted members of the establishment. Critics of the Pan-Democrats often lump them together with pro‑Beijing politicians, calling them, in English, “old seafood”. This is a sly play on words: the English word “seafood” sounds similar to the Cantonese word for “asshole”.

“The Pan-Democrats feel they are Chinese, that Hong Kong is part of China, and they think we can achieve fully democratic government in Hong Kong, but that we can still be Chinese people or be under the rule of China,” says Lewis Lau, a prominent, 26-year-old pro-democracy blogger and author, who calls present-day Hong Kong a colony of China. “They are encouraging us to walk in the wrong direction. The Pan-Democrats hate the idea of independence, because they fear that would make Beijing angry, and [if Beijing is angry] they won’t give us democracy. But in our view, Beijing will never give us democracy.”

The emergence of thinkers such as Lau reflects the rapid radicalisation of public opinion among people under 40, with larger and larger segments of this demographic expressing reservations about the very idea of being Chinese at all. This sharp turn of public opinion was borne out in elections last September, when more than 20% of voters supported candidates who called for greater self-determination or outright independence in the Legislative Council. As recently as four or five years ago, electoral support for this camp was insignificant.





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“I am a Hong Kong person, and Hong Kong should have its own sovereignty, its own government, its own border,” says Lau. “When we travel abroad we have to write [on immigration forms] that our nationality is Chinese. Every time I see that I feel strange, because I feel that I am not Chinese. I live here. I’ve spent my life here, and I don’t really feel like things from China are familiar. I feel alienated. Nothing I see in China chimes with me.”

Lau is one of the most eloquent exponents of a movement that has come to be known as Localism. But over time this movement has become highly fragmented. Some advocate outright independence, while others simply call for greater autonomy and enhanced protections for Hong Kong culture, including more curbs on visitors from the mainland and measures to safeguard Cantonese against the encroachment of Mandarin. One faction, led by a prominent professor of Chinese studies, Chin Wan-kan – whose contract at the university where he worked was not renewed last year for what many believe were political reasons – positions Hong Kong as a truer embodiment of China than even China itself. Other groups, smaller still, have even argued that Hong Kong should return to some form of British oversight.


Hong Kong’s youthful insurgents crossed their biggest threshold in September 2014 with the most extraordinary series of protests the city has ever seen, as massive crowds filled the streets of the business district for 79 days. This came after a push by Pan-Democrats and others had failed to win reforms of the city’s electoral system. The demonstrations, branded Occupy Central with Love and Peace, became famous not only for their turnouts of tens of thousands of people day after day, but for the way participants carried yellow umbrellas, initially for protection against the teargas and baton charges of the police (hence an alternative nickname, the Umbrella Movement).

The most prominent leader of Occupy Central was the same Joshua Wong who had previously galvanised the protests against the new history curriculum. Early on, the protests inspired many in the city, including more than a few older residents, to believe that people power might finally enable Hong Kong to triumph in its struggle for undiluted democracy.


The Occupy Central protest in Hong Kong in October 2014.







The Occupy Central protest in Hong Kong in October 2014, featuring the now-familiar yellow umbrellas. Photograph: Alex Hofford/EPA

But in the end, the protests failed to achieve any political reforms. Suddenly Wong and other organisers found themselves characterised by many of their fellow activists as politically naive romantics, as deluded in their belief in the power of Gandhi-style tactics as the Pan Democrats had been in their faith in patience and process.

“Back then, when the protests against patriotic education were successful, it was seen as a model of what could be – of David rising up against Goliath,” says Alan Lai, a 30-year-old who has helped organise a number of popular protests. “After Occupy Hong Kong failed to change anything, though, a lot of people were very dismissive, saying these were nothing but a bunch of hippies who thought something as mild as resistance like this could change Beijing’s mind.”

In response, some protestors grew more radical. In 2016, during the city’s traditional Chinese New Year celebrations, some young demonstrators gathered to confront the police and threw bricks and other objects at them. “I stood by and watched, but didn’t do anything myself,” says one young activist who calls himself Johnny. “I wanted to see things for myself, to be a witness. It may not be the time yet, but violence cannot be ruled out.”

Others feel a creeping sense of apathy setting in, which is almost certainly what Beijing hopes for. “We are experiencing something like what the post-Tiananmen generation experienced in China,” a young activist named Xeron Chen told me. “You can have a good life, but if you care about democracy all the time, you get really depressed, because all the information you can get brings the conclusion that there is nothing you can do. In the political arena, the most horrible thing is not the police with guns, but all the people losing hope.”





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Chen, who had been a member of Scholarism until it disbanded, complained that more recent movements, such as Youngspiration, seemed to have few practical ideas about political change. For his part, Chen is committed to preaching democracy to other residents at the ultra-local, neighbourhood level, attempting to win hearts and minds through everyday, one-on-one conversations. “Calling for change without any real ideas is nothing but demagoguery,” he said.

Other young activists, however, speak of political reform in Hong Kong as a generational struggle, and one that will not fade. “We have to love Hong Kong,” said one of them, who goes by the name Greg. “This is our homeland. We must defend it, and this is why we choose not to live somewhere else. We must stand up for it, for our rights. If we don’t, the mainland government will take these things away from us, one by one.

“It will take time – maybe 30, 60 or 100 years to get what we want. But it is meaningful to fight for these things, for our Hong Kong.”

Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

This story was amended on 22 March 2017. A previous version misattributed a quote to Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong. It was actually said by Patten’s former deputy Anson Chan. The quote has been replaced.


arly one morning in January, under the veil of darkness, a team of undercover police from China quietly entered Hong Kong’s Four Seasons hotel and made their way into a luxurious residential suite. After sweeping aside the billionaire occupant’s private contingent of female bodyguards, they shrouded the man’s head in a white sheet and bundled him off in a wheelchair.

Xiao Jianhua was one of China’s richest businessmen. He had built his fortune over the past two decades through deals involving the cream of China’s political elite, reportedly including close relatives of the president, Xi Jinping. Because of China’s opaque political culture, one can only speculate about the reasons for Xiao’s abduction, but it seems that he had taken careful steps to protect himself. Not only was he residing and conducting his business outside of China, his country of birth, he had a diplomatic passport from Antigua and Barbuda and had adopted Canadian citizenship, perhaps thinking that this might offer him some extra degree of legal or diplomatic protection.





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Hong Kong fields its own police, border control and immigration services, each theoretically separate from China’s own vast security apparatus. But when authorities in Beijing decided to come and get Xiao, none of that mattered. Since then, Hong Kong authorities have not dared to publicly protest Xiao’s arrest, nor has China offered any explanation.

The incident was yet another blow to the idea that Hong Kong has control over its own affairs. Just a year earlier, five publishers and booksellers had been secretly whisked away to China for interrogation. From unknown places of detention, where most of them remain, some were forced to make crude televised confessions. Like Xiao’s abduction, this incident remains shrouded in secrecy, but many believe that the five men were targeted for selling lurid books about rivalries and corruption at the highest level of Chinese politics. Such books were particularly popular with visitors from the mainland, who could never find such uncensored material back home. One of the publisher’s books purported to reveal details of President Xi’s secret love life.

For many Hong Kong residents, the abductions were reminders of the sheer flimsiness of the agreement negotiated between Britain and Beijing when China regained sovereignty of the city in 1997. Indeed, Xiao’s abduction had been preceded by an even bigger blow to the promise of self-rule in Hong Kong. In November, a pair of young, telegenic candidates, who had just won election to the city’s Legislative Council, were denied their seats. LegCo, as it is widely known in Hong Kong, is a semi-democratic, 70-member body that makes laws, approves budgets and can hold the city’s governor to account. No one disputed that the two candidates, who represented a new pro-independence political group named Youngspiration, had prevailed at the polls. The pretext offered to reject them was that they had refused to specifically pledge allegiance to China during their oath-taking ceremonies, instead using the phrase “the Hong Kong nation”. (Establishment politicians also complained that they had referred to China with the derogatory term “Shina”, a word once favoured by Japanese imperialists.)





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Hong Kong politicians defy China as they are sworn in

Hong Kong’s staunchly pro-Beijing chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, first sought a court injunction to prevent the Youngspiration candidates from taking their seats. This was a worrying move – but then Leung did something unprecedented and, for many locals, far more disturbing. Eliminating any discretion Hong Kong’s independent courts might have had in the matter, Leung put the issue before Beijing, inviting a leading committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress to rule on the dispute. The pair were duly disqualified from office.

Since the handover, Beijing had rarely intervened in Hong Kong politics so bluntly, and anger over this turn of events quickly spread, especially among younger people. The mood remains tense. On the day after I arrived in Hong Kong in January, a delegation of pro-democracy activists flew to Taiwan, led by the city’s most prominent opposition leader, 20-year-old Joshua Wong. At the Hong Kong airport, just before departure, and then in Taiwan, crowds of pro-China demonstrators jostled Wong’s delegation and showered them with threats and insults. Many commentators described the demonstrators as rent-a-mobs pulled together by organised crime groups acting on behalf of Beijing. The mobs were there to send the message that no one from Hong Kong who preaches separation from China is beyond Beijing’s reach.

If that was indeed the intention, the message seems to have been received. But that is not all that was delivered. I have been visiting Hong Kong since the late 1990s, and after more than a week of scheduled interviews and spontaneous encounters with people of many different walks of life and political persuasions, what I found was an unmistakable, shared sense of foreboding among the people of the city. In formal interviews and over meals in crowded, neighbourhood restaurants, the fear people expressed was that their home – one of Asia’s freest and most cosmopolitan cities – is locked on a collision course with the authoritarian system that governs China.

The freedoms and democratic culture that make Hong Kong so special might not survive. As one prominent lawyer put it to me: “If there is a solution to Hong Kong’s predicament, surely no one has imagined it yet.”


For years, Hong Kong residents have looked forward to 2017, the 20th anniversary of the British departure, as a milestone in their political evolution. According to promises made by Beijing, this was meant to be a moment when they would take a critical step toward direct universal suffrage, under the city’s mini-constitution.

Instead, when the city’s next elections are held on 26 March, rather than ushering in a more democratic era for Hong Kong, they will be conducted under the old terms, leading many people to fear a return of the protests and confrontation that have marked the last three years.

Relations between Hong Kong and the mainland haven’t always been like this. At the time of the handover in 1997, the anxiety that many of Hong Kong’s 6.5 million residents felt about the future under the Chinese Communist party was offset, in part, by a strong surge of pride. It is true that thousands of locals emigrated, or sought second passports as a hedge against the uncertainty of this new era. But many others believed that as people on the mainland grew wealthier, political liberalisation would follow. Rather than Hong Kong being remade as China, China would come to look ever more like Hong Kong. For people of this persuasion, there had never been a better occasion to reaffirm one’s Chineseness.

It helped, of course, that the most vital things had not been left to chance. Britain’s final act of decolonisation, which had been negotiated for decades, appeared to cede control over the city not so much to the Chinese state as to the people of Hong Kong themselves. Under an arrangement with Beijing that became known as “one country, two systems”, Hong Kong would be allowed to govern itself for 50 years with minimal Chinese interference. (Even then, however, there were local critics who bemoaned what they saw as a design flaw, or original sin, even: the people of Hong Kong were given no role in negotiating the new terms.)

Hong Kong was so valuable to Beijing’s state planners that optimists convinced themselves the Chinese Communist party would not risk tampering with it in any fundamental way. The city had been the first source of capitalist investment for China – booster fuel during its initial economic takeoff in the early 1980s. Through the 1990s and into the next decade, Hong Kong remained an all-important source of investment, as well as a conduit through which China hungrily absorbed western technology and management techniques. Western-style institutions, such as the city’s impartial courts, transparent financial markets and free press, moreover, made Hong Kong a halfway house for China’s own nascent global companies. It was the ideal place to set up international operations, giving them the extra credibility they needed to win over skittish foreign investors.

One other factor helped reassure Hong Kongers who felt anxious about their future. To many observers, “one country, two systems” seemed partly designed to appeal to the 23 million people of Taiwan, a self-governed democracy off the coast of the Chinese mainland. Bringing Taiwan into the fold of a unified China had been a sacred goal for the Communist party ever since 1949, when Mao defeated China’s Nationalist government, which fled to the island. Now, political commentators throughout the region speculated that if Hong Kong was seen to be prospering as a liberal society under Chinese sovereignty, then perhaps the people of Taiwan might also be gradually won over to the idea of uniting with the mainland under a similar arrangement.

During its early years of implementation, many international observers gave “one country, two systems” good odds to succeed. For some, it even looked like a true “shuang ying” (win-win), one of the most cherished stock phrases of Chinese diplomacy. When one factored in Taiwan, it looked like it could even become a win-win-win: something that all three societies might eventually come to embrace.


man on waterfront in Hong Kong







‘It feels like everything is stacked against you’ … many young people in Hong Kong are pessimistic about the future. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Today, though, in the 20th year after the handover, this Sino-British arrangement is charitably described as limping along on life support. Many believe it is in danger of collapsing altogether, even as a pretence. As China has grown richer and more powerful, it has also become less patient and less willing to sacrifice control. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the idea of “one country, two systems” has been riven by the sudden upsurge of enthusiasm for autonomy. Beijing has found itself confronted by increasingly disaffected and radicalised youths, who are as unwilling to compromise over democracy and civil liberties as China is itself.

For its part, Britain – Hong Kong’s old colonial master – has been reluctant to publicly criticise Beijing, as it eagerly courts Chinese business and investment. Chris Patten, the Conservative peer and last colonial governor of the city, recently said: “I feel very strongly that we let down the parents of this generation of democracy activists. I think it would be a tragedy if we let down these kids as well.”


There is no single narrative to explain how Hong Kong’s situation has become so troubled. Yet one cannot understand the city’s present state of permanent crisis without reckoning with a simple fact: the mainland is no longer dependent on Hong Kong. In reality, the reverse may be true. The impact of this fact is not solely economic or political; it is also psychological, transforming the way mainlanders and Hong Kongers conceive of themselves.

Today, China’s economy is more than 11 times larger than it was at the time of the handover. Over that same time span, Hong Kong’s economy has been stagnant by comparison, becoming ever more dependent on China. Upward mobility has stalled, and many young people are pessimistic about the future. Nearly everyone under the age of 40 interviewed for this article still lived with their parents and saw no hope of that changing soon. “There’s not much economic growth outside of a small minority that works in banking and finance,” said Alan Wong, a 30-year-old who worked in his father’s manufacturing company. “The math behind home ownership is just impossible, and it feels like everything is stacked against you.”

In 1997, the average per-capita income in Hong Kong was 35 times that of China, and in the early years after the handover, the trickle of Chinese who were granted permits to visit returned home with envy-inducing tales of high-end shopping malls and an affluent, effortlessly cosmopolitan population. A sense of what has changed is captured vividly in the 2008 novel Beijing Coma, by the exiled Chinese author Ma Jian. It recounts a doomed love affair between a young Hong Kong woman and a man from the mainland, both medical students in southern China. Coming back from trips to Hong Kong, she first brings him Marlboros and then music cassettes, only to realise he has no tape player, and finally a camera, which he later sells for the equivalent of a year’s rent. Her parents object to her being with him, ostensibly because of the great gap in wealth. The man describes seeing her off at the train station on the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. “The Hong Kong tourists entering the hall were well dressed, with neat hair and tidy suitcases,” he writes. “They didn’t seem to belong to the same planet as the dishevelled hordes of mainland tourists who were trudging wearily around the hall in their bare feet, with plastic bags over their shoulders.”





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Today, the contrast between the mainland and Hong Kong is no longer so stark. Hong Kong has become a stop on the tourist circuit for millions of mainland Chinese, whose currency is now worth more than the once-coveted Hong Kong dollar. Their swelling numbers have become a source of resentment by natives of Hong Kong. Rich mainlanders, including many in the Chinese political elite, snap up luxury housing and are blamed for helping making real estate unaffordable for locals.

Visitors from China’s mainland have repeatedly been the target of angry protests by Hong Kong natives who have sometimes denounced them with the kind of epithets more familiar in societies deeply divided by race – words such as “pestilence”, “vermin” and “hordes”. Many Hong Kong natives frown at the supposedly coarse behaviour of members of the newly minted Chinese middle class, who they accuse of spitting in public, jay-walking and letting infants relieve themselves in the street. But for these visiting Chinese, Hong Kong is no longer so much a place to marvel over as it is a confirmation of their own society’s arrival. More and more, in fact, it looks like the places they’ve come from.

“They have very complicated attitudes to Hong Kong people – a complex,” said a man in his late 20s who works in corporate relations for a small manufacturer, explaining his support for tighter restrictions on tourism from the mainland. “They say that Hong Kong people are really just Chinese people, and nothing special. Hong Kong people in the 70s and 80s invested a lot of money in places like Shenzhen, and behaved like tycoons. They say you bought prostitutes there. Now we are rich, and it is the Hong Kong people’s turn to be our slaves. When Chinese people come to Hong Kong now, they like to act like they are operating in their colony. They don’t care what you think and are very free, because they have the Chinese government behind them, and the Chinese government controls everything.”

More than any economic statistics, it is this kind of psychological role-reversal that has unsettled people most. And that feeling is exacerbated by the assertive, even swaggering, manner of Xi Jinping. During his four years in power, Xi has established himself as the country’s most powerful leader in decades. Under his presidency, China’s own fledgling civil society has been under relentless attack. Lawyers working on human rights issues have been prosecuted and universities have been ordered to toe a rigid ideological line. In this climate, Hong Kong’s democracy movement has been depicted as a tool of the west, whose ultimate purpose is to subvert China and undermine its stability by encouraging liberalism on the mainland.

Xi has been almost as assertive on the international stage, particularly in Asia, where he has built up China’s navy, undertaken a provocative programme of island construction in the South China Sea, and launched ambitious trans-continental infrastructure projects.


Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, pictured in 2012.







Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, pictured in 2012. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP

Bold foreign policy moves such as these help sustain the Chinese president’s popularity at home, but in Hong Kong, as in Taiwan, they have mostly driven fear, not pride. “Nobody expected China to rise so fast in 10 years, or for the decline of other powers to be so great. And the surprise is even stronger with America under Trump,” says Lam Wai-man, an expert on the city’s political culture at the Open University of Hong Kong. “We are quite optimistic about China’s economic future, but not about its political future.”

Many in Hong Kong saw the swearing in of Leung, the city’s deeply unpopular chief executive, in 2012, as a calculated rebuff to liberal groups in the city. The carefully orchestrated ceremony, which was almost certainly approved in Beijing, was conducted entirely in Mandarin, the official language of China, but one that few Hong Kongers speak well. (Cantonese is the native language, and a key component of local identity.) During his swearing-in, Leung did not even utter the words “Hong Kong”, fuelling widespread derision and leading one man to later petition for his impeachment.


At the end of 2015, a groundbreaking Hong Kong film imagined the city’s future in 2025. Ten Years – a collection of five dystopian stories, each by a different director. The movie’s opening story, Extras, was by far the darkest. It shows establishment political parties promoting an ideology of mindless materialism and obedience to halls full of middle-aged and older Hong Kong natives. But Beijing’s exhortations to keep quiet, work hard and be happy with your lot are not reaching younger people. Beijing, it seems, is losing its grip on the city.

The solution, cooked up by a sinister-looking envoy from the mainland, is to engineer a crisis so that China can justify an outright takeover of the city. “The more panic, the better,” Beijing’s envoy says. Two petty criminals are recruited to shoot a couple of municipal councillors. The short ends with a black screen, across which a news bulletin scrolls. It congratulates the police for their response to a terrorist attack fostered by “hostile foreign powers”, announces that the suspects were killed on the spot, and then declares that, to preserve order in the city, a “National Security Act” will take effect immediately.

What made Extras so powerful was its shock value in imagining the sinister means Beijing might use to regain total control of Hong Kong. Barely a year later, though, suspicions like these have become widespread. Many among the city’s youthful, pro-democracy groups, for example, told me that there are paid stooges operating in their midst, waiting for the order to create the incident that will be used as a pretext to impose more direct control over the city.

What delivered the city to its present state of permanent crisis is partly a tale of good intentions gone awry – Britain’s, Hong Kong’s, even Beijing’s – in granting the city a 50-year period of transition. But it is also, increasingly, a tale of the inflexibility and heavy-handed tactics that arise when a stodgy and fundamentally insecure political system finds itself confronted with stark generational change and demands for true democracy.

Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing can best be understood in terms of quickening cycles. Those who hold the progressive torch in the city’s politics become steadily discredited for the least sign of accommodation toward Beijing. They are then replaced by younger, more radical successors, whose own failure to achieve any breakthrough breeds impatience toward them in turn, leading to greater radicalisation still. The cause of this impatience is, above all, a yearning for the true autonomy that seemed to be promised during the handover. This frustration has led some to argue for outright independence – an idea never even implied in the bargain struck between Beijing and London.





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The first and longest cycle in this story involved the slow rise, from the 1970s onwards, of a group of liberal activists who combined pro-democracy activism, Chinese patriotism and anti-corruption crusading. Many of them won office when Britain introduced elements of representative democracy to the colony in the 1980s, and once the terms of the handover were decided, they spoke with optimism about the city’s future. They were lawyers, academics, community leaders and other professionals who hoped to quietly prove the city’s worth to Beijing, not just as an economic centre but as a kind of laboratory of civic virtue. By working patiently within the system, they believed they could achieve universal suffrage for the city’s residents and gradually deepen Hong Kong’s autonomy from China.

In the early years after the 1997 handover, many among this loose coalition, which became known as the Pan-Democrats, began to profess the additional belief that through their example, and through the good works of Hong Kong residents who invest in mainland companies, the city might gradually encourage China to accept more liberal ways. For the true believers among the Pan-Democrats, this became an article of faith connected to their very identity as Chinese. Slowly catalysing progressive change on the mainland was their duty as members of Greater China. This was the opposite of the separatism that Beijing so fears. It was patriotism.

But over time, the Pan-Democrats began to be seen as too accommodating towards Beijing. In 2009, with little prior consultation, Hong Kong authorities announced a scheme to link the city to the high-speed rail network that was being built on the mainland. The Pan-Democrats opposed the project, but lacked the votes to stop it in the Legislative Council. A protest movement quickly sprung up. The opposition voices did not just include people from affected communities, but many others who saw the infrastructure scheme as a way for China to silently swallow up their city. In retrospect, many people cite the anti-rail protests as a turning point in Hong Kong’s political culture, when the Pan-Democrats began to be seen as ineffectual, and protest as the only way of protecting local rights. (Hitherto the most famous protests in Hong Kong were driven by Chinese nationalist sentiments. These included a 1967 anti-British riot that was supported by Beijing.)

The next big turn of the screw occurred in 2010, when Beijing attempted to introduce new, highly nationalistic history textbooks. The textbook reform, which was stodgily branded “the Moral and National Education campaign”, was a sign of the Communist party’s fear of the rapid emergence of a heightened sense of local identity in Hong Kong – something it feared would feed separatism, just as it had in Taiwan. But this ill-judged reform quickly backfired.

“The textbooks said that you have to cry when the flag is raised to show your love for the country,” says Ng Sin Hang, a solemn, curly-haired 21-year-old, who was in his early teens when he joined the first protests against the textbooks. “Like a lot of people, I thought national education would brainwash Hong Kong people. You can’t force an emotion on someone, but the textbook said, no matter what, you must love your country regardless of what it has done.”

The movement against the nationalist textbooks quickly grew. On 29 July 2012, around 100,000 demonstrators gathered outside of the Hong Kong government headquarters. They were led by Joshua Wong, then a frail-looking 17-year-old with thick-framed glasses and a soup-bowl haircut who was emerging as the most important opposition figure in the city; he was the leader of a since-disbanded group that took the name Scholarism because of its roots in curriculum-reform protests. “You have to see every battle as possibly the final battle,” Wong would later say, giving definition to his insurgent’s creed. The protests eventually forced Beijing to back down.


Joshua Wong (centre) leading pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in October 2014.







Joshua Wong (centre) leading pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in October 2014. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

As stunning as it was, Scholarism’s defeat of the Moral and National Education textbooks also stands out as the final success for anti-establishment political movements in Hong Kong. China’s leaders, fearing a repeat of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests of 1989, are especially wary of student-led movements and have signalled their determination not to let them drive change in Hong Kong. Since 2012, it has adopted a much firmer stance and begun issuing increasingly shrill warnings that any calls for Hong Kong independence amount to treason. Nor has Beijing allowed the Pan-Democrats to register any kind of meaningful successes lately, despite their commitment to working within the system.

With no escape valves available, two things have happened. More and more Hong Kongers, particularly young people, have joined in anti-government actions. At the same time, these young protesters have rejected the Pan-Democrats as hopelessly tainted members of the establishment. Critics of the Pan-Democrats often lump them together with pro‑Beijing politicians, calling them, in English, “old seafood”. This is a sly play on words: the English word “seafood” sounds similar to the Cantonese word for “asshole”.

“The Pan-Democrats feel they are Chinese, that Hong Kong is part of China, and they think we can achieve fully democratic government in Hong Kong, but that we can still be Chinese people or be under the rule of China,” says Lewis Lau, a prominent, 26-year-old pro-democracy blogger and author, who calls present-day Hong Kong a colony of China. “They are encouraging us to walk in the wrong direction. The Pan-Democrats hate the idea of independence, because they fear that would make Beijing angry, and [if Beijing is angry] they won’t give us democracy. But in our view, Beijing will never give us democracy.”

The emergence of thinkers such as Lau reflects the rapid radicalisation of public opinion among people under 40, with larger and larger segments of this demographic expressing reservations about the very idea of being Chinese at all. This sharp turn of public opinion was borne out in elections last September, when more than 20% of voters supported candidates who called for greater self-determination or outright independence in the Legislative Council. As recently as four or five years ago, electoral support for this camp was insignificant.





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“I am a Hong Kong person, and Hong Kong should have its own sovereignty, its own government, its own border,” says Lau. “When we travel abroad we have to write [on immigration forms] that our nationality is Chinese. Every time I see that I feel strange, because I feel that I am not Chinese. I live here. I’ve spent my life here, and I don’t really feel like things from China are familiar. I feel alienated. Nothing I see in China chimes with me.”

Lau is one of the most eloquent exponents of a movement that has come to be known as Localism. But over time this movement has become highly fragmented. Some advocate outright independence, while others simply call for greater autonomy and enhanced protections for Hong Kong culture, including more curbs on visitors from the mainland and measures to safeguard Cantonese against the encroachment of Mandarin. One faction, led by a prominent professor of Chinese studies, Chin Wan-kan – whose contract at the university where he worked was not renewed last year for what many believe were political reasons – positions Hong Kong as a truer embodiment of China than even China itself. Other groups, smaller still, have even argued that Hong Kong should return to some form of British oversight.


Hong Kong’s youthful insurgents crossed their biggest threshold in September 2014 with the most extraordinary series of protests the city has ever seen, as massive crowds filled the streets of the business district for 79 days. This came after a push by Pan-Democrats

arly one morning in January, under the veil of darkness, a team of undercover police from China quietly entered Hong Kong’s Four Seasons hotel and made their way into a luxurious residential suite. After sweeping aside the billionaire occupant’s private contingent of female bodyguards, they shrouded the man’s head in a white sheet and bundled him off in a wheelchair.

Xiao Jianhua was one of China’s richest businessmen. He had built his fortune over the past two decades through deals involving the cream of China’s political elite, reportedly including close relatives of the president, Xi Jinping. Because of China’s opaque political culture, one can only speculate about the reasons for Xiao’s abduction, but it seems that he had taken careful steps to protect himself. Not only was he residing and conducting his business outside of China, his country of birth, he had a diplomatic passport from Antigua and Barbuda and had adopted Canadian citizenship, perhaps thinking that this might offer him some extra degree of legal or diplomatic protection.





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Hong Kong fields its own police, border control and immigration services, each theoretically separate from China’s own vast security apparatus. But when authorities in Beijing decided to come and get Xiao, none of that mattered. Since then, Hong Kong authorities have not dared to publicly protest Xiao’s arrest, nor has China offered any explanation.

The incident was yet another blow to the idea that Hong Kong has control over its own affairs. Just a year earlier, five publishers and booksellers had been secretly whisked away to China for interrogation. From unknown places of detention, where most of them remain, some were forced to make crude televised confessions. Like Xiao’s abduction, this incident remains shrouded in secrecy, but many believe that the five men were targeted for selling lurid books about rivalries and corruption at the highest level of Chinese politics. Such books were particularly popular with visitors from the mainland, who could never find such uncensored material back home. One of the publisher’s books purported to reveal details of President Xi’s secret love life.

For many Hong Kong residents, the abductions were reminders of the sheer flimsiness of the agreement negotiated between Britain and Beijing when China regained sovereignty of the city in 1997. Indeed, Xiao’s abduction had been preceded by an even bigger blow to the promise of self-rule in Hong Kong. In November, a pair of young, telegenic candidates, who had just won election to the city’s Legislative Council, were denied their seats. LegCo, as it is widely known in Hong Kong, is a semi-democratic, 70-member body that makes laws, approves budgets and can hold the city’s governor to account. No one disputed that the two candidates, who represented a new pro-independence political group named Youngspiration, had prevailed at the polls. The pretext offered to reject them was that they had refused to specifically pledge allegiance to China during their oath-taking ceremonies, instead using the phrase “the Hong Kong nation”. (Establishment politicians also complained that they had referred to China with the derogatory term “Shina”, a word once favoured by Japanese imperialists.)





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Hong Kong politicians defy China as they are sworn in

Hong Kong’s staunchly pro-Beijing chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, first sought a court injunction to prevent the Youngspiration candidates from taking their seats. This was a worrying move – but then Leung did something unprecedented and, for many locals, far more disturbing. Eliminating any discretion Hong Kong’s independent courts might have had in the matter, Leung put the issue before Beijing, inviting a leading committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress to rule on the dispute. The pair were duly disqualified from office.

Since the handover, Beijing had rarely intervened in Hong Kong politics so bluntly, and anger over this turn of events quickly spread, especially among younger people. The mood remains tense. On the day after I arrived in Hong Kong in January, a delegation of pro-democracy activists flew to Taiwan, led by the city’s most prominent opposition leader, 20-year-old Joshua Wong. At the Hong Kong airport, just before departure, and then in Taiwan, crowds of pro-China demonstrators jostled Wong’s delegation and showered them with threats and insults. Many commentators described the demonstrators as rent-a-mobs pulled together by organised crime groups acting on behalf of Beijing. The mobs were there to send the message that no one from Hong Kong who preaches separation from China is beyond Beijing’s reach.

If that was indeed the intention, the message seems to have been received. But that is not all that was delivered. I have been visiting Hong Kong since the late 1990s, and after more than a week of scheduled interviews and spontaneous encounters with people of many different walks of life and political persuasions, what I found was an unmistakable, shared sense of foreboding among the people of the city. In formal interviews and over meals in crowded, neighbourhood restaurants, the fear people expressed was that their home – one of Asia’s freest and most cosmopolitan cities – is locked on a collision course with the authoritarian system that governs China.

The freedoms and democratic culture that make Hong Kong so special might not survive. As one prominent lawyer put it to me: “If there is a solution to Hong Kong’s predicament, surely no one has imagined it yet.”


For years, Hong Kong residents have looked forward to 2017, the 20th anniversary of the British departure, as a milestone in their political evolution. According to promises made by Beijing, this was meant to be a moment when they would take a critical step toward direct universal suffrage, under the city’s mini-constitution.

Instead, when the city’s next elections are held on 26 March, rather than ushering in a more democratic era for Hong Kong, they will be conducted under the old terms, leading many people to fear a return of the protests and confrontation that have marked the last three years.

Relations between Hong Kong and the mainland haven’t always been like this. At the time of the handover in 1997, the anxiety that many of Hong Kong’s 6.5 million residents felt about the future under the Chinese Communist party was offset, in part, by a strong surge of pride. It is true that thousands of locals emigrated, or sought second passports as a hedge against the uncertainty of this new era. But many others believed that as people on the mainland grew wealthier, political liberalisation would follow. Rather than Hong Kong being remade as China, China would come to look ever more like Hong Kong. For people of this persuasion, there had never been a better occasion to reaffirm one’s Chineseness.

It helped, of course, that the most vital things had not been left to chance. Britain’s final act of decolonisation, which had been negotiated for decades, appeared to cede control over the city not so much to the Chinese state as to the people of Hong Kong themselves. Under an arrangement with Beijing that became known as “one country, two systems”, Hong Kong would be allowed to govern itself for 50 years with minimal Chinese interference. (Even then, however, there were local critics who bemoaned what they saw as a design flaw, or original sin, even: the people of Hong Kong were given no role in negotiating the new terms.)

Hong Kong was so valuable to Beijing’s state planners that optimists convinced themselves the Chinese Communist party would not risk tampering with it in any fundamental way. The city had been the first source of capitalist investment for China – booster fuel during its initial economic takeoff in the early 1980s. Through the 1990s and into the next decade, Hong Kong remained an all-important source of investment, as well as a conduit through which China hungrily absorbed western technology and management techniques. Western-style institutions, such as the city’s impartial courts, transparent financial markets and free press, moreover, made Hong Kong a halfway house for China’s own nascent global companies. It was the ideal place to set up international operations, giving them the extra credibility they needed to win over skittish foreign investors.

One other factor helped reassure Hong Kongers who felt anxious about their future. To many observers, “one country, two systems” seemed partly designed to appeal to the 23 million people of Taiwan, a self-governed democracy off the coast of the Chinese mainland. Bringing Taiwan into the fold of a unified China had been a sacred goal for the Communist party ever since 1949, when Mao defeated China’s Nationalist government, which fled to the island. Now, political commentators throughout the region speculated that if Hong Kong was seen to be prospering as a liberal society under Chinese sovereignty, then perhaps the people of Taiwan might also be gradually won over to the idea of uniting with the mainland under a similar arrangement.

During its early years of implementation, many international observers gave “one country, two systems” good odds to succeed. For some, it even looked like a true “shuang ying” (win-win), one of the most cherished stock phrases of Chinese diplomacy. When one factored in Taiwan, it looked like it could even become a win-win-win: something that all three societies might eventually come to embrace.


man on waterfront in Hong Kong







‘It feels like everything is stacked against you’ … many young people in Hong Kong are pessimistic about the future. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Today, though, in the 20th year after the handover, this Sino-British arrangement is charitably described as limping along on life support. Many believe it is in danger of collapsing altogether, even as a pretence. As China has grown richer and more powerful, it has also become less patient and less willing to sacrifice control. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the idea of “one country, two systems” has been riven by the sudden upsurge of enthusiasm for autonomy. Beijing has found itself confronted by increasingly disaffected and radicalised youths, who are as unwilling to compromise over democracy and civil liberties as China is itself.

For its part, Britain – Hong Kong’s old colonial master – has been reluctant to publicly criticise Beijing, as it eagerly courts Chinese business and investment. Chris Patten, the Conservative peer and last colonial governor of the city, recently said: “I feel very strongly that we let down the parents of this generation of democracy activists. I think it would be a tragedy if we let down these kids as well.”


There is no single narrative to explain how Hong Kong’s situation has become so troubled. Yet one cannot understand the city’s present state of permanent crisis without reckoning with a simple fact: the mainland is no longer dependent on Hong Kong. In reality, the reverse may be true. The impact of this fact is not solely economic or political; it is also psychological, transforming the way mainlanders and Hong Kongers conceive of themselves.

Today, China’s economy is more than 11 times larger than it was at the time of the handover. Over that same time span, Hong Kong’s economy has been stagnant by comparison, becoming ever more dependent on China. Upward mobility has stalled, and many young people are pessimistic about the future. Nearly everyone under the age of 40 interviewed for this article still lived with their parents and saw no hope of that changing soon. “There’s not much economic growth outside of a small minority that works in banking and finance,” said Alan Wong, a 30-year-old who worked in his father’s manufacturing company. “The math behind home ownership is just impossible, and it feels like everything is stacked against you.”

In 1997, the average per-capita income in Hong Kong was 35 times that of China, and in the early years after the handover, the trickle of Chinese who were granted permits to visit returned home with envy-inducing tales of high-end shopping malls and an affluent, effortlessly cosmopolitan population. A sense of what has changed is captured vividly in the 2008 novel Beijing Coma, by the exiled Chinese author Ma Jian. It recounts a doomed love affair between a young Hong Kong woman and a man from the mainland, both medical students in southern China. Coming back from trips to Hong Kong, she first brings him Marlboros and then music cassettes, only to realise he has no tape player, and finally a camera, which he later sells for the equivalent of a year’s rent. Her parents object to her being with him, ostensibly because of the great gap in wealth. The man describes seeing her off at the train station on the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. “The Hong Kong tourists entering the hall were well dressed, with neat hair and tidy suitcases,” he writes. “They didn’t seem to belong to the same planet as the dishevelled hordes of mainland tourists who were trudging wearily around the hall in their bare feet, with plastic bags over their shoulders.”





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Today, the contrast between the mainland and Hong Kong is no longer so stark. Hong Kong has become a stop on the tourist circuit for millions of mainland Chinese, whose currency is now worth more than the once-coveted Hong Kong dollar. Their swelling numbers have become a source of resentment by natives of Hong Kong. Rich mainlanders, including many in the Chinese political elite, snap up luxury housing and are blamed for helping making real estate unaffordable for locals.

Visitors from China’s mainland have repeatedly been the target of angry protests by Hong Kong natives who have sometimes denounced them with the kind of epithets more familiar in societies deeply divided by race – words such as “pestilence”, “vermin” and “hordes”. Many Hong Kong natives frown at the supposedly coarse behaviour of members of the newly minted Chinese middle class, who they accuse of spitting in public, jay-walking and letting infants relieve themselves in the street. But for these visiting Chinese, Hong Kong is no longer so much a place to marvel over as it is a confirmation of their own society’s arrival. More and more, in fact, it looks like the places they’ve come from.

“They have very complicated attitudes to Hong Kong people – a complex,” said a man in his late 20s who works in corporate relations for a small manufacturer, explaining his support for tighter restrictions on tourism from the mainland. “They say that Hong Kong people are really just Chinese people, and nothing special. Hong Kong people in the 70s and 80s invested a lot of money in places like Shenzhen, and behaved like tycoons. They say you bought prostitutes there. Now we are rich, and it is the Hong Kong people’s turn to be our slaves. When Chinese people come to Hong Kong now, they like to act like they are operating in their colony. They don’t care what you think and are very free, because they have the Chinese government behind them, and the Chinese government controls everything.”

More than any economic statistics, it is this kind of psychological role-reversal that has unsettled people most. And that feeling is exacerbated by the assertive, even swaggering, manner of Xi Jinping. During his four years in power, Xi has established himself as the country’s most powerful leader in decades. Under his presidency, China’s own fledgling civil society has been under relentless attack. Lawyers working on human rights issues have been prosecuted and universities have been ordered to toe a rigid ideological line. In this climate, Hong Kong’s democracy movement has been depicted as a tool of the west, whose ultimate purpose is to subvert China and undermine its stability by encouraging liberalism on the mainland.

Xi has been almost as assertive on the international stage, particularly in Asia, where he has built up China’s navy, undertaken a provocative programme of island construction in the South China Sea, and launched ambitious trans-continental infrastructure projects.


Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, pictured in 2012.







Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, pictured in 2012. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP

Bold foreign policy moves such as these help sustain the Chinese president’s popularity at home, but in Hong Kong, as in Taiwan, they have mostly driven fear, not pride. “Nobody expected China to rise so fast in 10 years, or for the decline of other powers to be so great. And the surprise is even stronger with America under Trump,” says Lam Wai-man, an expert on the city’s political culture at the Open University of Hong Kong. “We are quite optimistic about China’s economic future, but not about its political future.”

Many in Hong Kong saw the swearing in of Leung, the city’s deeply unpopular chief executive, in 2012, as a calculated rebuff to liberal groups in the city. The carefully orchestrated ceremony, which was almost certainly approved in Beijing, was conducted entirely in Mandarin, the official language of China, but one that few Hong Kongers speak well. (Cantonese is the native language, and a key component of local identity.) During his swearing-in, Leung did not even utter the words “Hong Kong”, fuelling widespread derision and leading one man to later petition for his impeachment.


At the end of 2015, a groundbreaking Hong Kong film imagined the city’s future in 2025. Ten Years – a collection of five dystopian stories, each by a different director. The movie’s opening story, Extras, was by far the darkest. It shows establishment political parties promoting an ideology of mindless materialism and obedience to halls full of middle-aged and older Hong Kong natives. But Beijing’s exhortations to keep quiet, work hard and be happy with your lot are not reaching younger people. Beijing, it seems, is losing its grip on the city.

The solution, cooked up by a sinister-looking envoy from the mainland, is to engineer a crisis so that China can justify an outright takeover of the city. “The more panic, the better,” Beijing’s envoy says. Two petty criminals are recruited to shoot a couple of municipal councillors. The short ends with a black screen, across which a news bulletin scrolls. It congratulates the police for their response to a terrorist attack fostered by “hostile foreign powers”, announces that the suspects were killed on the spot, and then declares that, to preserve order in the city, a “National Security Act” will take effect immediately.

What made Extras so powerful was its shock value in imagining the sinister means Beijing might use to regain total control of Hong Kong. Barely a year later, though, suspicions like these have become widespread. Many among the city’s youthful, pro-democracy groups, for example, told me that there are paid stooges operating in their midst, waiting for the order to create the incident that will be used as a pretext to impose more direct control over the city.

What delivered the city to its present state of permanent crisis is partly a tale of good intentions gone awry – Britain’s, Hong Kong’s, even Beijing’s – in granting the city a 50-year period of transition. But it is also, increasingly, a tale of the inflexibility and heavy-handed tactics that arise when a stodgy and fundamentally insecure political system finds itself confronted with stark generational change and demands for true democracy.

Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing can best be understood in terms of quickening cycles. Those who hold the progressive torch in the city’s politics become steadily discredited for the least sign of accommodation toward Beijing. They are then replaced by younger, more radical successors, whose own failure to achieve any breakthrough breeds impatience toward them in turn, leading to greater radicalisation still. The cause of this impatience is, above all, a yearning for the true autonomy that seemed to be promised during the handover. This frustration has led some to argue for outright independence – an idea never even implied in the bargain struck between Beijing and London.





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The first and longest cycle in this story involved the slow rise, from the 1970s onwards, of a group of liberal activists who combined pro-democracy activism, Chinese patriotism and anti-corruption crusading. Many of them won office when Britain introduced elements of representative democracy to the colony in the 1980s, and once the terms of the handover were decided, they spoke with optimism about the city’s future. They were lawyers, academics, community leaders and other professionals who hoped to quietly prove the city’s worth to Beijing, not just as an economic centre but as a kind of laboratory of civic virtue. By working patiently within the system, they believed they could achieve universal suffrage for the city’s residents and gradually deepen Hong Kong’s autonomy from China.

In the early years after the 1997 handover, many among this loose coalition, which became known as the Pan-Democrats, began to profess the additional belief that through their example, and through the good works of Hong Kong residents who invest in mainland companies, the city might gradually encourage China to accept more liberal ways. For the true believers among the Pan-Democrats, this became an article of faith connected to their very identity as Chinese. Slowly catalysing progressive change on the mainland was their duty as members of Greater China. This was the opposite of the separatism that Beijing so fears. It was patriotism.

But over time, the Pan-Democrats began to be seen as too accommodating towards Beijing. In 2009, with little prior consultation, Hong Kong authorities announced a scheme to link the city to the high-speed rail network that was being built on the mainland. The Pan-Democrats opposed the project, but lacked the votes to stop it in the Legislative Council. A protest movement quickly sprung up. The opposition voices did not just include people from affected communities, but many others who saw the infrastructure scheme as a way for China to silently swallow up their city. In retrospect, many people cite the anti-rail protests as a turning point in Hong Kong’s political culture, when the Pan-Democrats began to be seen as ineffectual, and protest as the only way of protecting local rights. (Hitherto the most famous protests in Hong Kong were driven by Chinese nationalist sentiments. These included a 1967 anti-British riot that was supported by Beijing.)

The next big turn of the screw occurred in 2010, when Beijing attempted to introduce new, highly nationalistic history textbooks. The textbook reform, which was stodgily branded “the Moral and National Education campaign”, was a sign of the Communist party’s fear of the rapid emergence of a heightened sense of local identity in Hong Kong – something it feared would feed separatism, just as it had in Taiwan. But this ill-judged reform quickly backfired.

“The textbooks said that you have to cry when the flag is raised to show your love for the country,” says Ng Sin Hang, a solemn, curly-haired 21-year-old, who was in his early teens when he joined the first protests against the textbooks. “Like a lot of people, I thought national education would brainwash Hong Kong people. You can’t force an emotion on someone, but the textbook said, no matter what, you must love your country regardless of what it has done.”

The movement against the nationalist textbooks quickly grew. On 29 July 2012, around 100,000 demonstrators gathered outside of the Hong Kong government headquarters. They were led by Joshua Wong, then a frail-looking 17-year-old with thick-framed glasses and a soup-bowl haircut who was emerging as the most important opposition figure in the city; he was the leader of a since-disbanded group that took the name Scholarism because of its roots in curriculum-reform protests. “You have to see every battle as possibly the final battle,” Wong would later say, giving definition to his insurgent’s creed. The protests eventually forced Beijing to back down.


Joshua Wong (centre) leading pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in October 2014.







Joshua Wong (centre) leading pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in October 2014. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

As stunning as it was, Scholarism’s defeat of the Moral and National Education textbooks also stands out as the final success for anti-establishment political movements in Hong Kong. China’s leaders, fearing a repeat of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests of 1989, are especially wary of student-led movements and have signalled their determination not to let them drive change in Hong Kong. Since 2012, it has adopted a much firmer stance and begun issuing increasingly shrill warnings that any calls for Hong Kong independence amount to treason. Nor has Beijing allowed the Pan-Democrats to register any kind of meaningful successes lately, despite their commitment to working within the system.

With no escape valves available, two things have happened. More and more Hong Kongers, particularly young people, have joined in anti-government actions. At the same time, these young protesters have rejected the Pan-Democrats as hopelessly tainted members of the establishment. Critics of the Pan-Democrats often lump them together with pro‑Beijing politicians, calling them, in English, “old seafood”. This is a sly play on words: the English word “seafood” sounds similar to the Cantonese word for “asshole”.

“The Pan-Democrats feel they are Chinese, that Hong Kong is part of China, and they think we can achieve fully democratic government in Hong Kong, but that we can still be Chinese people or be under the rule of China,” says Lewis Lau, a prominent, 26-year-old pro-democracy blogger and author, who calls present-day Hong Kong a colony of China. “They are encouraging us to walk in the wrong direction. The Pan-Democrats hate the idea of independence, because they fear that would make Beijing angry, and [if Beijing is angry] they won’t give us democracy. But in our view, Beijing will never give us democracy.”

The emergence of thinkers such as Lau reflects the rapid radicalisation of public opinion among people under 40, with larger and larger segments of this demographic expressing reservations about the very idea of being Chinese at all. This sharp turn of public opinion was borne out in elections last September, when more than 20% of voters supported candidates who called for greater self-determination or outright independence in the Legislative Council. As recently as four or five years ago, electoral support for this camp was insignificant.





Hong Kong pro-democracy protests – in pictures




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“I am a Hong Kong person, and Hong Kong should have its own sovereignty, its own government, its own border,” says Lau. “When we travel abroad we have to write [on immigration forms] that our nationality is Chinese. Every time I see that I feel strange, because I feel that I am not Chinese. I live here. I’ve spent my life here, and I don’t really feel like things from China are familiar. I feel alienated. Nothing I see in China chimes with me.”

Lau is one of the most eloquent exponents of a movement that has come to be known as Localism. But over time this movement has become highly fragmented. Some advocate outright independence, while others simply call for greater autonomy and enhanced protections for Hong Kong culture, including more curbs on visitors from the mainland and measures to safeguard Cantonese against the encroachment of Mandarin. One faction, led by a prominent professor of Chinese studies, Chin Wan-kan – whose contract at the university where he worked was not renewed last year for what many believe were political reasons – positions Hong Kong as a truer embodiment of China than even China itself. Other groups, smaller still, have even argued that Hong Kong should return to some form of British oversight.


Hong Kong’s youthful insurgents crossed their biggest threshold in September 2014 with the most extraordinary series of protests the city has ever seen, as massive crowds filled the streets of the business district for 79 days. This came after a push by Pan-Democrats and others had failed to win reforms of the city’s electoral system. The demonstrations, branded Occupy Central with Love and Peace, became famous not only for their turnouts of tens of thousands of people day after day, but for the way participants carried yellow umbrellas, initially for protection against the teargas and baton charges of the police (hence an alternative nickname, the Umbrella Movement).

The most prominent leader of Occupy Central was the same Joshua Wong who had previously galvanised the protests against the new history curriculum. Early on, the protests inspired many in the city, including more than a few older residents, to believe that people power might finally enable Hong Kong to triumph in its struggle for undiluted democracy.


The Occupy Central protest in Hong Kong in October 2014.







The Occupy Central protest in Hong Kong in October 2014, featuring the now-familiar yellow umbrellas. Photograph: Alex Hofford/EPA

But in the end, the protests failed to achieve any political reforms. Suddenly Wong and other organisers found themselves characterised by many of their fellow activists as politically naive romantics, as deluded in their belief in the power of Gandhi-style tactics as the Pan Democrats had been in their faith in patience and process.

“Back then, when the protests against patriotic education were successful, it was seen as a model of what could be – of David rising up against Goliath,” says Alan Lai, a 30-year-old who has helped organise a number of popular protests. “After Occupy Hong Kong failed to change anything, though, a lot of people were very dismissive, saying these were nothing but a bunch of hippies who thought something as mild as resistance like this could change Beijing’s mind.”

In response, some protestors grew more radical. In 2016, during the city’s traditional Chinese New Year celebrations, some young demonstrators gathered to confront the police and threw bricks and other objects at them. “I stood by and watched, but didn’t do anything myself,” says one young activist who calls himself Johnny. “I wanted to see things for myself, to be a witness. It may not be the time yet, but violence cannot be ruled out.”

Others feel a creeping sense of apathy setting in, which is almost certainly what Beijing hopes for. “We are experiencing something like what the post-Tiananmen generation experienced in China,” a young activist named Xeron Chen told me. “You can have a good life, but if you care about democracy all the time, you get really depressed, because all the information you can get brings the conclusion that there is nothing you can do. In the political arena, the most horrible thing is not the police with guns, but all the people losing hope.”





A human rights activist, a secret prison and a tale from Xi Jinping's new China




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Chen, who had been a member of Scholarism until it disbanded, complained that more recent movements, such as Youngspiration, seemed to have few practical ideas about political change. For his part, Chen is committed to preaching democracy to other residents at the ultra-local, neighbourhood level, attempting to win hearts and minds through everyday, one-on-one conversations. “Calling for change without any real ideas is nothing but demagoguery,” he said.

Other young activists, however, speak of political reform in Hong Kong as a generational struggle, and one that will not fade. “We have to love Hong Kong,” said one of them, who goes by the name Greg. “This is our homeland. We must defend it, and this is why we choose not to live somewhere else. We must stand up for it, for our rights. If we don’t, the mainland government will take these things away from us, one by one.

“It will take time – maybe 30, 60 or 100 years to get what we want. But it is meaningful to fight for these things, for our Hong Kong.”

Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

This story was amended on 22 March 2017. A previous version misattributed a quote to Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong. It was actually said by Patten’s former deputy Anson Chan. The quote has been replaced.

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




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Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for those who paid into additional state pension schemes such as Serps or S2P) applies to those born before those dates.

Frank Field, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that the new figure of just over £8,000 a year is enough to guarantee all pensioners a decent standard of living: an “adequate minimum”, as he put it. Anything above that, he said, should be privately funded, without tax breaks or other government help.

“Once the minimum has been reached, it’s not the job of government to bribe people to save more,” he says. “To provide luxurious pension payments was never the aim of the state pension.”

Whether the new state pension can really be described as a “comfortable minimum” turns out to be a matter of opinion. Dr Ros Altmann, who was brought into government in April 2015 to work on pensions policy, is the UK government’s former older workers’ champion and a governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. When I relayed Field’s comments to her, she was left briefly speechless. Then she managed a “wow”. “Did he really say that? Would he be happy to live on just over £8,000 a year?” she asked, finally.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, is clear that the new state pension has not been set at a high-enough level to guarantee a dignified older age to those who have no other income. “How sufficient is the new state pension? That’s an easy one to answer: It’s not,” he said.

Field makes the assumption that people have enough additional private financial ballast to bolster their state pensions. But the reality is that many people have neither savings – nearly a third of all households would struggle to pay an unexpected £500 bill – nor sufficient private pension provision to bring their state pension entitlement up to a level to ensure a comfortable retirement by most people’s understanding of the term. In fact, savings are the great dividing line in retirement, and the scale of the so-called “pension gap” – the gap between what your pension pot will pay out and the amount you need to live comfortably in older age – is shocking.

Three in 10 Britons aged 55-64 do not have any pension savings at all. Almost half of those in their 30s and 40s are not saving adequately or at all. In part, that is because we underestimate the amount of money we need to save. According to research by Saga earlier this month, four in 10 of those aged over 40 have no idea of the cost of even a basic lifestyle in retirement. When it came to understanding the size of the total pension pot they would need to fund retirement, over 80% admitted they had no idea how big this would need to be.


Retirement is an ancient concept. It caused one of the worst military disasters ever faced by the Roman empire when, in AD14, the imperial power increased the retirement age and decreased the pensions of its legionaries, causing mutiny in Pannonia and Germany. The ringleaders were rounded up and disposed of, but the institution remains so highly prized that any threat to its continued existence is liable to cause mutiny. “Retirement has been stolen. You can pay in as much as you like. They will never pay back. Time for a grey revolution,” one reader emailed.

It was in 1881 that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, made a radical speech to the Reichstag, calling for government-run financial support for those aged over 70 who were “disabled from work by age and invalidity”.


Roger Hall inspects the oyster trestles in Porlock Bay

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Roger Hall in Porlock Bay, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

The scheme wasn’t the socialist ideal it is sometimes assumed to be: Bismarck was actually advocating a disability pension, not a retirement pension as we understand it today. Besides, the retirement age he recommended just about aligned with average life expectancy in Germany at that time. Bismarck did, however, have a further vision that was genuinely too radical for his era: he proposed a pension that could be drawn at any age, if the contributor was judged unfit for work. Those drawing it earlier would receive a lower amount.

This notion is surfacing again in various forms. The New Economics Foundation is arguing for a shorter working week, via a “slow retirement”, in which employees give up an hour of work per week every year from the age of 35. The idea is that older workers will release more of their work time to younger ones, which will allow a steady handover of retained wisdom. A universal basic income, whereby everyone receives a set sum from the state each year, regardless of how much they do or don’t work, might have a similar effect, enabling people to move to part-time work as they age.

Widespread poverty among the over-65s led to the 1946 National Insurance Act, which introduced the first contributory, flat-rate pension in the UK for women of 60 and men of 65. At first, pension rates were low and most pensioners did not have enough to get by. But by the late 1970s, the value of the state pension rose and an increasing number of people – mainly men – were able to benefit from occupational pension schemes. By 1967, more than 8 million employees working for private companies were entitled to a final-salary pension, along with 4 million state workers. In 1978, the Labour government introduced a fully fledged “earnings-linked” state top-up system for those without access to a company scheme.

With pension payments now at a rate that enabled older people to stop work without risking penury, older men (and to a lesser extent older women) began to enjoy a “third age”, which fell between the end of work and the start of old age. In 1970, the employment rate for men aged 60-64 was 81%; by 1985 it had fallen to 49.7%.

Access to a comfortable old age is a powerful political idea. John Macnicol, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of Neoliberalising Old Age, believes that when jobs were needed for younger men after the second world war, a “socially elegant mythology” was created in which retirement was a time for older workers to kick back and relax.

He believes that in the 1990s, however, the narrative was cynically changed and the image of pensioners was deliberately altered: from being poor, frail, dependent and deserving, to well off, hedonistic, politically powerful and selfish. The notion of “the prosperous pensioner was constructed in the face of evidence that showed exactly the opposite to be the case”, he said, “so that the right to retirement [could be] undermined: more coercive working practices, forcing older people to stay in employment, could be presented as providing new ‘opportunities’, removing barriers to working, bestowing greater inclusion and even achieving upward social mobility”.

This change in attitude towards pensioners helped the government bring in a hike in retirement age. In 1995, the Conservative government under John Major announced a steady increase from 60 to 65 in the state pension age for women, to come in between April 2010 and April 2020. Most agreed that equalising the state pension age was fair enough. What they objected to is that the government waited until 2009 – a year before the increases were set to begin – to start contacting those affected, leaving thousands of women without time to rearrange their finances or adjust their employment plans to fill the gaping hole in their income.

Then, in 2011 – when the state pension age for women had risen to 63 – the coalition government accelerated the timetable: the state pension age for women will now reach 65 in November 2018, at which point it will rise alongside men’s: to 66 by 2020 and to 67 by 2028.

When she retired from the ministry of work and pensions in 2016, Ros Altmann stated that she was “not convinced the government had adequately addressed the hardship facing women who have had their state pension age increased at short notice”.

After surviving cancer at 52, Jackie Harrison, now 62, looked over her savings and decided she could just about afford to take early retirement. “I had achieved 36 years of national insurance contributions,” she said. “I used to phone the Department for Work and Pensions every year to ensure that I had worked enough to get my full pension at 60.”

Then she was told her personal pension age was increasing from 60 to 63 years and six months. “I wasn’t eligible for any benefits because of my partner’s pension, but I could nevertheless still just about manage until the new state retirement age,” she said. But when she was 58, the goalposts moved again – this time to 66. “I’d been out of the workplace for so long that I didn’t have a hope of being able to get back into it,” she said. “But nor did it give me enough time to make other financial arrangements.”

Harrison made the agonising decision to raise money by selling her family home and moving to a different city, where she could live more cheaply. Her decisions had heavy implications for the rest of her family – and the state. When she moved, she left behind a vulnerable adult daughter and baby grandchild and octogenarian parents.

“This is not the retirement I had planned at all,” Harrison told me. “I had loads of savings once, but now I live in a constant state of worry due to financial pressures. It seems so unfair when I have worked all my life and planned for my retirement. I just don’t know how I am going to manage for another four years”. Women born in the 1950s are already living in their age of no retirement.


In 2006, it became legal for employers to force their workers to retire at the age of 65. A campaign led by Age Concern and Help the Aged was swift and effective in its argument that the new default retirement age law broke EU rules and gave employers too much leeway to justify direct discrimination on the grounds of age. On 1 October 2011, the law was overturned.

Since then, Britain’s workforce has greyed almost before our eyes: in the last 15 years, the number of working people aged 50-64 has increased by 60% to 8 million (far greater than the increase in the population of people over 50). The proportion of people aged 70-74 in employment, meanwhile, has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This trend will continue. By 2020, one-third of the workforce will be over 50.


Older workers at Steelite International

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A worker at Steelite International ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The proportional increase may be substantial, but it charts growth from a low level. In empirical terms, the impact is less positive: almost one-third of people in the UK aged 50-64 are not working. In fact, a greater number are becoming jobless than finding employment: almost 40% of employment and support allowance claimants are over 50, an indication that many older people are unable to easily find new and sustainable work.

This is unsustainable: by 2020, an estimated 12.5m jobs will become vacant as a result of older people leaving the workforce. Yet there will only be 7 million younger people to fill them. If we can no longer rely on immigration to fill the gaps, employers will have to shed their prejudices, workplaces will have to be adapted, and social services will have to step in to provide the care that ageing people can no longer give their grandchildren, ageing spouses or parents if they remain in the workforce.





Forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good



But forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good. Prof Debora Price, director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, told me: “There is evidence to suggest that opportunities for people to work beyond state pension age might well be making inequalities worse, since those able to work into later life tend to be men who are highly educated and have been in higher-paid jobs.”

One answer is to return to Bismarck’s original plan, whereby the state pension can be accessed early by anyone who chooses to collect a smaller pension sum at an age lower than the state retirement age, perhaps because of poor health or other commitments.

This option, however, was rejected last week by John Cridland, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry’s business lobby group, who was appointed by the government in March 2016 to help cut the UK’s £100bn a year pension costs by reviewing the state pension age.

Instead, Cridland has recommended that the state pension age should rise from 67 to 68 by 2039, seven years earlier than currently timetabled. This will push the state retirement age back for a year for anyone in their early 40s. Cridland has rejected calls for early access to the state pension for those in poor health, but has left the door open for additional means-tested support to be made available one year before state pension age for those unable to work owing to ill health or caring responsibilities.


In spite of their anxieties about money, one of the things I have been most struck by, in my many conversations with older readers, is the pleasure they take in life.

One grandmother told me: “Last week, I swept across a crowded pub to pick up a raffle prize … with my dress tucked into my knickers! A few years ago I would have been mortified. Not any more. Told ’em they were lucky it was cold and I had knickers on!”

Monica Hartwell, 69, is part of the team at the volunteer-run Regal theatre in Minehead, as well as the film society and the museum. “The joy of getting older is much greater self-confidence,” she told me. “It’s the loss of angst about what people think of you: the size of your bum or whether others are judging you correctly. It’s not an arrogance, but you know who you are when you’re older and all those roles you played to fit in when you were younger are irrelevant.”


Retirement

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Women in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, discuss retirement. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The data bears out these experiences: 65 to 79 is the happiest age group for adults, according to the Office for National Statistics. Recently, a report claimed that women in their 80s have more enjoyable sex than those up to 30 years younger. Other research has found that 75% of those aged 50 and over are less bothered about what people think of them and 61% enjoy life more than when they were younger.

So what is the secret to a successful retirement? Private companies run courses to help those on the verge of retirement plan for changes in income, time and relationships. I have spoken to those running such courses, as well as those who have retired. The consensus is that there are five pillars, all of which rest on the “money bit” – the basic level of financial security without which later life is hard. Once that foundation is in place, retirees can build up the second pillar: a social network to replace their former work community. The third pillar is having purpose and challenging one’s mind. Fourth is ongoing personal development – exploring, questioning and learning are an important part of what makes us human; this should never stop, I was told. The fifth and final pillar is having fun.


I tried explaining final-salary pensions to a 20-year-old recently. They looked at me quizzically, as though I was telling them that I had seen a unicorn. When that same 20-year-old, however, tries to explain the traditional concept of retirement to their own children, they might well be met with the same level of incomprehension.

For their children, life might well be more like the joke that Ali Seamer emailed to me during a recent Q&A I ran with readers as part of my investigation into what retirement means today: “I’m going to have to work up to 6pm on the day of my funeral just to be able to afford the coffin,” he said.

In examining the reality of this new age of no retirement, I have become aware of two pitfalls undermining constructive debate. The first is the prejudice that an ageing population will place a huge burden on society.

This is refuted by numerous studies: the volunteer charity WRVS has done the most work to quantify the economic role played by older generations. Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring and volunteer efforts of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.

The research suggests that this benefit to the economy will increase in coming years as increasing numbers of baby-boomers enter retirement. By 2030, it projects that the net contribution of older people will be worth some £75bn.

Older people’s contribution to society is not just economic. An ICM poll for the WRVS study found that 65% of older people say they regularly help out elderly neighbours; they are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.

The second pitfall is the conflict between generations that can be caused by the issue of retirement. The financial problems of the young have been blamed on baby boomers. But the truth is that the UK pension languishes far below that which is provided in most developed countries. And this contributory, taxed income – pensioners pay tax just like anyone else – is all that many old people have to live on.

Nearly 2 million of those aged 55-64 do not have any private pension savings and despite the commonly held belief that older people are all mortgage-free, fewer than 48% of those aged 55-64 own their own homes outright and nearly a quarter are still renting. It is true that some have benefitted greatly from rises in house prices, but the cost of lending was high – often 10% or more – during the 1970s and 1980s. One in 10 of those aged 65 and over still have a mortgage.

For all the recent talk of the average pensioner household being £20 a week better off than working households, the truth is that many are actually working to supplement their income. Still, to people just entering the workforce, the lives of today’s pensioners look impossibly privileged.

Rachael Ingram sums it up. At 19, working full-time and studying for an Open University degree, she is already putting 10% of her income aside for her pension. “I shouldn’t be worrying about saving for my pension at my age,” she told me. “I’m saving money that could go towards a deposit for my first house – I’m currently renting a flat in Liverpool – or out socialising. But I have no faith in government or the state pension. There will be no one to look after me when I’m old.”

Main photograph: Richard Baker/Getty Images

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




Read more

Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for those who paid into additional state pension schemes such as Serps or S2P) applies to those born before those dates.

Frank Field, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that the new figure of just over £8,000 a year is enough to guarantee all pensioners a decent standard of living: an “adequate minimum”, as he put it. Anything above that, he said, should be privately funded, without tax breaks or other government help.

“Once the minimum has been reached, it’s not the job of government to bribe people to save more,” he says. “To provide luxurious pension payments was never the aim of the state pension.”

Whether the new state pension can really be described as a “comfortable minimum” turns out to be a matter of opinion. Dr Ros Altmann, who was brought into government in April 2015 to work on pensions policy, is the UK government’s former older workers’ champion and a governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. When I relayed Field’s comments to her, she was left briefly speechless. Then she managed a “wow”. “Did he really say that? Would he be happy to live on just over £8,000 a year?” she asked, finally.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, is clear that the new state pension has not been set at a high-enough level to guarantee a dignified older age to those who have no other income. “How sufficient is the new state pension? That’s an easy one to answer: It’s not,” he said.

Field makes the assumption that people have enough additional private financial ballast to bolster their state pensions. But the reality is that many people have neither savings – nearly a third of all households would struggle to pay an unexpected £500 bill – nor sufficient private pension provision to bring their state pension entitlement up to a level to ensure a comfortable retirement by most people’s understanding of the term. In fact, savings are the great dividing line in retirement, and the scale of the so-called “pension gap” – the gap between what your pension pot will pay out and the amount you need to live comfortably in older age – is shocking.

Three in 10 Britons aged 55-64 do not have any pension savings at all. Almost half of those in their 30s and 40s are not saving adequately or at all. In part, that is because we underestimate the amount of money we need to save. According to research by Saga earlier this month, four in 10 of those aged over 40 have no idea of the cost of even a basic lifestyle in retirement. When it came to understanding the size of the total pension pot they would need to fund retirement, over 80% admitted they had no idea how big this would need to be.


Retirement is an ancient concept. It caused one of the worst military disasters ever faced by the Roman empire when, in AD14, the imperial power increased the retirement age and decreased the pensions of its legionaries, causing mutiny in Pannonia and Germany. The ringleaders were rounded up and disposed of, but the institution remains so highly prized that any threat to its continued existence is liable to cause mutiny. “Retirement has been stolen. You can pay in as much as you like. They will never pay back. Time for a grey revolution,” one reader emailed.

It was in 1881 that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, made a radical speech to the Reichstag, calling for government-run financial support for those aged over 70 who were “disabled from work by age and invalidity”.


Roger Hall inspects the oyster trestles in Porlock Bay

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Roger Hall in Porlock Bay, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

The scheme wasn’t the socialist ideal it is sometimes assumed to be: Bismarck was actually advocating a disability pension, not a retirement pension as we understand it today. Besides, the retirement age he recommended just about aligned with average life expectancy in Germany at that time. Bismarck did, however, have a further vision that was genuinely too radical for his era: he proposed a pension that could be drawn at any age, if the contributor was judged unfit for work. Those drawing it earlier would receive a lower amount.

This notion is surfacing again in various forms. The New Economics Foundation is arguing for a shorter working week, via a “slow retirement”, in which employees give up an hour of work per week every year from the age of 35. The idea is that older workers will release more of their work time to younger ones, which will allow a steady handover of retained wisdom. A universal basic income, whereby everyone receives a set sum from the state each year, regardless of how much they do or don’t work, might have a similar effect, enabling people to move to part-time work as they age.

Widespread poverty among the over-65s led to the 1946 National Insurance Act, which introduced the first contributory, flat-rate pension in the UK for women of 60 and men of 65. At first, pension rates were low and most pensioners did not have enough to get by. But by the late 1970s, the value of the state pension rose and an increasing number of people – mainly men – were able to benefit from occupational pension schemes. By 1967, more than 8 million employees working for private companies were entitled to a final-salary pension, along with 4 million state workers. In 1978, the Labour government introduced a fully fledged “earnings-linked” state top-up system for those without access to a company scheme.

With pension payments now at a rate that enabled older people to stop work without risking penury, older men (and to a lesser extent older women) began to enjoy a “third age”, which fell between the end of work and the start of old age. In 1970, the employment rate for men aged 60-64 was 81%; by 1985 it had fallen to 49.7%.

Access to a comfortable old age is a powerful political idea. John Macnicol, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of Neoliberalising Old Age, believes that when jobs were needed for younger men after the second world war, a “socially elegant mythology” was created in which retirement was a time for older workers to kick back and relax.

He believes that in the 1990s, however, the narrative was cynically changed and the image of pensioners was deliberately altered: from being poor, frail, dependent and deserving, to well off, hedonistic, politically powerful and selfish. The notion of “the prosperous pensioner was constructed in the face of evidence that showed exactly the opposite to be the case”, he said, “so that the right to retirement [could be] undermined: more coercive working practices, forcing older people to stay in employment, could be presented as providing new ‘opportunities’, removing barriers to working, bestowing greater inclusion and even achieving upward social mobility”.

This change in attitude towards pensioners helped the government bring in a hike in retirement age. In 1995, the Conservative government under John Major announced a steady increase from 60 to 65 in the state pension age for women, to come in between April 2010 and April 2020. Most agreed that equalising the state pension age was fair enough. What they objected to is that the government waited until 2009 – a year before the increases were set to begin – to start contacting those affected, leaving thousands of women without time to rearrange their finances or adjust their employment plans to fill the gaping hole in their income.

Then, in 2011 – when the state pension age for women had risen to 63 – the coalition government accelerated the timetable: the state pension age for women will now reach 65 in November 2018, at which point it will rise alongside men’s: to 66 by 2020 and to 67 by 2028.

When she retired from the ministry of work and pensions in 2016, Ros Altmann stated that she was “not convinced the government had adequately addressed the hardship facing women who have had their state pension age increased at short notice”.

After surviving cancer at 52, Jackie Harrison, now 62, looked over her savings and decided she could just about afford to take early retirement. “I had achieved 36 years of national insurance contributions,” she said. “I used to phone the Department for Work and Pensions every year to ensure that I had worked enough to get my full pension at 60.”

Then she was told her personal pension age was increasing from 60 to 63 years and six months. “I wasn’t eligible for any benefits because of my partner’s pension, but I could nevertheless still just about manage until the new state retirement age,” she said. But when she was 58, the goalposts moved again – this time to 66. “I’d been out of the workplace for so long that I didn’t have a hope of being able to get back into it,” she said. “But nor did it give me enough time to make other financial arrangements.”

Harrison made the agonising decision to raise money by selling her family home and moving to a different city, where she could live more cheaply. Her decisions had heavy implications for the rest of her family – and the state. When she moved, she left behind a vulnerable adult daughter and baby grandchild and octogenarian parents.

“This is not the retirement I had planned at all,” Harrison told me. “I had loads of savings once, but now I live in a constant state of worry due to financial pressures. It seems so unfair when I have worked all my life and planned for my retirement. I just don’t know how I am going to manage for another four years”. Women born in the 1950s are already living in their age of no retirement.


In 2006, it became legal for employers to force their workers to retire at the age of 65. A campaign led by Age Concern and Help the Aged was swift and effective in its argument that the new default retirement age law broke EU rules and gave employers too much leeway to justify direct discrimination on the grounds of age. On 1 October 2011, the law was overturned.

Since then, Britain’s workforce has greyed almost before our eyes: in the last 15 years, the number of working people aged 50-64 has increased by 60% to 8 million (far greater than the increase in the population of people over 50). The proportion of people aged 70-74 in employment, meanwhile, has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This trend will continue. By 2020, one-third of the workforce will be over 50.


Older workers at Steelite International

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A worker at Steelite International ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The proportional increase may be substantial, but it charts growth from a low level. In empirical terms, the impact is less positive: almost one-third of people in the UK aged 50-64 are not working. In fact, a greater number are becoming jobless than finding employment: almost 40% of employment and support allowance claimants are over 50, an indication that many older people are unable to easily find new and sustainable work.

This is unsustainable: by 2020, an estimated 12.5m jobs will become vacant as a result of older people leaving the workforce. Yet there will only be 7 million younger people to fill them. If we can no longer rely on immigration to fill the gaps, employers will have to shed their prejudices, workplaces will have to be adapted, and social services will have to step in to provide the care that ageing people can no longer give their grandchildren, ageing spouses or parents if they remain in the workforce.





Forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good



But forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good. Prof Debora Price, director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, told me: “There is evidence to suggest that opportunities for people to work beyond state pension age might well be making inequalities worse, since those able to work into later life tend to be men who are highly educated and have been in higher-paid jobs.”

One answer is to return to Bismarck’s original plan, whereby the state pension can be accessed early by anyone who chooses to collect a smaller pension sum at an age lower than the state retirement age, perhaps because of poor health or other commitments.

This option, however, was rejected last week by John Cridland, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry’s business lobby group, who was appointed by the government in March 2016 to help cut the UK’s £100bn a year pension costs by reviewing the state pension age.

Instead, Cridland has recommended that the state pension age should rise from 67 to 68 by 2039, seven years earlier than currently timetabled. This will push the state retirement age back for a year for anyone in their early 40s. Cridland has rejected calls for early access to the state pension for those in poor health, but has left the door open for additional means-tested support to be made available one year before state pension age for those unable to work owing to ill health or caring responsibilities.


In spite of their anxieties about money, one of the things I have been most struck by, in my many conversations with older readers, is the pleasure they take in life.

One grandmother told me: “Last week, I swept across a crowded pub to pick up a raffle prize … with my dress tucked into my knickers! A few years ago I would have been mortified. Not any more. Told ’em they were lucky it was cold and I had knickers on!”

Monica Hartwell, 69, is part of the team at the volunteer-run Regal theatre in Minehead, as well as the film society and the museum. “The joy of getting older is much greater self-confidence,” she told me. “It’s the loss of angst about what people think of you: the size of your bum or whether others are judging you correctly. It’s not an arrogance, but you know who you are when you’re older and all those roles you played to fit in when you were younger are irrelevant.”


Retirement

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Women in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, discuss retirement. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The data bears out these experiences: 65 to 79 is the happiest age group for adults, according to the Office for National Statistics. Recently, a report claimed that women in their 80s have more enjoyable sex than those up to 30 years younger. Other research has found that 75% of those aged 50 and over are less bothered about what people think of them and 61% enjoy life more than when they were younger.

So what is the secret to a successful retirement? Private companies run courses to help those on the verge of retirement plan for changes in income, time and relationships. I have spoken to those running such courses, as well as those who have retired. The consensus is that there are five pillars, all of which rest on the “money bit” – the basic level of financial security without which later life is hard. Once that foundation is in place, retirees can build up the second pillar: a social network to replace their former work community. The third pillar is having purpose and challenging one’s mind. Fourth is ongoing personal development – exploring, questioning and learning are an important part of what makes us human; this should never stop, I was told. The fifth and final pillar is having fun.


I tried explaining final-salary pensions to a 20-year-old recently. They looked at me quizzically, as though I was telling them that I had seen a unicorn. When that same 20-year-old, however, tries to explain the traditional concept of retirement to their own children, they might well be met with the same level of incomprehension.

For their children, life might well be more like the joke that Ali Seamer emailed to me during a recent Q&A I ran with readers as part of my investigation into what retirement means today: “I’m going to have to work up to 6pm on the day of my funeral just to be able to afford the coffin,” he said.

In examining the reality of this new age of no retirement, I have become aware of two pitfalls undermining constructive debate. The first is the prejudice that an ageing population will place a huge burden on society.

This is refuted by numerous studies: the volunteer charity WRVS has done the most work to quantify the economic role played by older generations. Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring and volunteer efforts of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.

The research suggests that this benefit to the economy will increase in coming years as increasing numbers of baby-boomers enter retirement. By 2030, it projects that the net contribution of older people will be worth some £75bn.

Older people’s contribution to society is not just economic. An ICM poll for the WRVS study found that 65% of older people say they regularly help out elderly neighbours; they are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.

The second pitfall is the conflict between generations that can be caused by the issue of retirement. The financial problems of the young have been blamed on baby boomers. But the truth is that the UK pension languishes far below that which is provided in most developed countries. And this contributory, taxed income – pensioners pay tax just like anyone else – is all that many old people have to live on.

Nearly 2 million of those aged 55-64 do not have any private pension savings and despite the commonly held belief that older people are all mortgage-free, fewer than 48% of those aged 55-64 own their own homes outright and nearly a quarter are still renting. It is true that some have benefitted greatly from rises in house prices, but the cost of lending was high – often 10% or more – during the 1970s and 1980s. One in 10 of those aged 65 and over still have a mortgage.

For all the recent talk of the average pensioner household being £20 a week better off than working households, the truth is that many are actually working to supplement their income. Still, to people just entering the workforce, the lives of today’s pensioners look impossibly privileged.

Rachael Ingram sums it up. At 19, working full-time and studying for an Open University degree, she is already putting 10% of her income aside for her pension. “I shouldn’t be worrying about saving for my pension at my age,” she told me. “I’m saving money that could go towards a deposit for my first house – I’m currently renting a flat in Liverpool – or out socialising. But I have no faith in government or the state pension. There will be no one to look after me when I’m old.”

Main photograph: Richard Baker/Getty Images

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double


We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




Read more

Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for t

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a lon

about saving for my pension at my age

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




Read more

Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for those who paid into additional state pension schemes such as Serps or S2P) applies to those born before those dates.

Frank Field, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that the new figure of just over £8,000 a year is enough to guarantee all pensioners a decent standard of living: an “adequate minimum”, as he put it. Anything above that, he said, should be privately funded, without tax breaks or other government help.

“Once the minimum has been reached, it’s not the job of government to bribe people to save more,” he says. “To provide luxurious pension payments was never the aim of the state pension.”

Whether the new state pension can really be described as a “comfortable minimum” turns out to be a matter of opinion. Dr Ros Altmann, who was brought into government in April 2015 to work on pensions policy, is the UK government’s former older workers’ champion and a governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. When I relayed Field’s comments to her, she was left briefly speechless. Then she managed a “wow”. “Did he really say that? Would he be happy to live on just over £8,000 a year?” she asked, finally.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, is clear that the new state pension has not been set at a high-enough level to guarantee a dignified older age to those who have no other income. “How sufficient is the new state pension? That’s an easy one to answer: It’s not,” he said.

Field makes the assumption that people have enough additional private financial ballast to bolster their state pensions. But the reality is that many people have neither savings – nearly a third of all households would struggle to pay an unexpected £500 bill – nor sufficient private pension provision to bring their state pension entitlement up to a level to ensure a comfortable retirement by most people’s understanding of the term. In fact, savings are the great dividing line in retirement, and the scale of the so-called “pension gap” – the gap between what your pension pot will pay out and the amount you need to live comfortably in older age – is shocking.

Three in 10 Britons aged 55-64 do not have any pension savings at all. Almost half of those in their 30s and 40s are not saving adequately or at all. In part, that is because we underestimate the amount of money we need to save. According to research by Saga earlier this month, four in 10 of those aged over 40 have no idea of the cost of even a basic lifestyle in retirement. When it came to understanding the size of the total pension pot they would need to fund retirement, over 80% admitted they had no idea how big this would need to be.


Retirement is an ancient concept. It caused one of the worst military disasters ever faced by the Roman empire when, in AD14, the imperial power increased the retirement age and decreased the pensions of its legionaries, causing mutiny in Pannonia and Germany. The ringleaders were rounded up and disposed of, but the institution remains so highly prized that any threat to its continued existence is liable to cause mutiny. “Retirement has been stolen. You can pay in as much as you like. They will never pay back. Time for a grey revolution,” one reader emailed.

It was in 1881 that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, made a radical speech to the Reichstag, calling for government-run financial support for those aged over 70 who were “disabled from work by age and invalidity”.


Roger Hall inspects the oyster trestles in Porlock Bay

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Roger Hall in Porlock Bay, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

The scheme wasn’t the socialist ideal it is sometimes assumed to be: Bismarck was actually advocating a disability pension, not a retirement pension as we understand it today. Besides, the retirement age he recommended just about aligned with average life expectancy in Germany at that time. Bismarck did, however, have a further vision that was genuinely too radical for his era: he proposed a pension that could be drawn at any age, if the contributor was judged unfit for work. Those drawing it earlier would receive a lower amount.

This notion is surfacing again in various forms. The New Economics Foundation is arguing for a shorter working week, via a “slow retirement”, in which employees give up an hour of work per week every year from the age of 35. The idea is that older workers will release more of their work time to younger ones, which will allow a steady handover of retained wisdom. A universal basic income, whereby everyone receives a set sum from the state each year, regardless of how much they do or don’t work, might have a similar effect, enabling people to move to part-time work as they age.

Widespread poverty among the over-65s led to the 1946 National Insurance Act, which introduced the first contributory, flat-rate pension in the UK for women of 60 and men of 65. At first, pension rates were low and most pensioners did not have enough to get by. But by the late 1970s, the value of the state pension rose and an increasing number of people – mainly men – were able to benefit from occupational pension schemes. By 1967, more than 8 million employees working for private companies were entitled to a final-salary pension, along with 4 million state workers. In 1978, the Labour government introduced a fully fledged “earnings-linked” state top-up system for those without access to a company scheme.

With pension payments now at a rate that enabled older people to stop work without risking penury, older men (and to a lesser extent older women) began to enjoy a “third age”, which fell between the end of work and the start of old age. In 1970, the employment rate for men aged 60-64 was 81%; by 1985 it had fallen to 49.7%.

Access to a comfortable old age is a powerful political idea. John Macnicol, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of Neoliberalising Old Age, believes that when jobs were needed for younger men after the second world war, a “socially elegant mythology” was created in which retirement was a time for older workers to kick back and relax.

He believes that in the 1990s, however, the narrative was cynically changed and the image of pensioners was deliberately altered: from being poor, frail, dependent and deserving, to well off, hedonistic, politically powerful and selfish. The notion of “the prosperous pensioner was constructed in the face of evidence that showed exactly the opposite to be the case”, he said, “so that the right to retirement [could be] undermined: more coercive working practices, forcing older people to stay in employment, could be presented as providing new ‘opportunities’, removing barriers to working, bestowing greater inclusion and even achieving upward social mobility”.

This change in attitude towards pensioners helped the government bring in a hike in retirement age. In 1995, the Conservative government under John Major announced a steady increase from 60 to 65 in the state pension age for women, to come in between April 2010 and April 2020. Most agreed that equalising the state pension age was fair enough. What they objected to is that the government waited until 2009 – a year before the increases were set to begin – to start contacting those affected, leaving thousands of women without time to rearrange their finances or adjust their employment plans to fill the gaping hole in their income.

Then, in 2011 – when the state pension age for women had risen to 63 – the coalition government accelerated the timetable: the state pension age for women will now reach 65 in November 2018, at which point it will rise alongside men’s: to 66 by 2020 and to 67 by 2028.

When she retired from the ministry of work and pensions in 2016, Ros Altmann stated that she was “not convinced the government had adequately addressed the hardship facing women who have had their state pension age increased at short notice”.

After surviving cancer at 52, Jackie Harrison, now 62, looked over her savings and decided she could just about afford to take early retirement. “I had achieved 36 years of national insurance contributions,” she said. “I used to phone the Department for Work and Pensions every year to ensure that I had worked enough to get my full pension at 60.”

Then she was told her personal pension age was increasing from 60 to 63 years and six months. “I wasn’t eligible for any benefits because of my partner’s pension, but I could nevertheless still just about manage until the new state retirement age,” she said. But when she was 58, the goalposts moved again – this time to 66. “I’d been out of the workplace for so long that I didn’t have a hope of being able to get back into it,” she said. “But nor did it give me enough time to make other financial arrangements.”

Harrison made the agonising decision to raise money by selling her family home and moving to a different city, where she could live more cheaply. Her decisions had heavy implications for the rest of her family – and the state. When she moved, she left behind a vulnerable adult daughter and baby grandchild and octogenarian parents.

“This is not the retirement I had planned at all,” Harrison told me. “I had loads of savings once, but now I live in a constant state of worry due to financial pressures. It seems so unfair when I have worked all my life and planned for my retirement. I just don’t know how I am going to manage for another four years”. Women born in the 1950s are already living in their age of no retirement.


In 2006, it became legal for employers to force their workers to retire at the age of 65. A campaign led by Age Concern and Help the Aged was swift and effective in its argument that the new default retirement age law broke EU rules and gave employers too much leeway to justify direct discrimination on the grounds of age. On 1 October 2011, the law was overturned.

Since then, Britain’s workforce has greyed almost before our eyes: in the last 15 years, the number of working people aged 50-64 has increased by 60% to 8 million (far greater than the increase in the population of people over 50). The proportion of people aged 70-74 in employment, meanwhile, has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This trend will continue. By 2020, one-third of the workforce will be over 50.


Older workers at Steelite International

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A worker at Steelite International ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The proportional increase may be substantial, but it charts growth from a low level. In empirical terms, the impact is less positive: almost one-third of people in the UK aged 50-64 are not working. In fact, a greater number are becoming jobless than finding employment: almost 40% of employment and support allowance claimants are over 50, an indication that many older people are unable to easily find new and sustainable work.

This is unsustainable: by 2020, an estimated 12.5m jobs will become vacant as a result of older people leaving the workforce. Yet there will only be 7 million younger people to fill them. If we can no longer rely on immigration to fill the gaps, employers will have to shed their prejudices, workplaces will have to be adapted, and social services will have to step in to provide the care that ageing people can no longer give their grandchildren, ageing spouses or parents if they remain in the workforce.





Forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good



But forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good. Prof Debora Price, director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, told me: “There is evidence to suggest that opportunities for people to work beyond state pension age might well be making inequalities worse, since those able to work into later life tend to be men who are highly educated and have been in higher-paid jobs.”

One answer is to return to Bismarck’s original plan, whereby the state pension can be accessed early by anyone who chooses to collect a smaller pension sum at an age lower than the state retirement age, perhaps because of poor health or other commitments.

This option, however, was rejected last week by John Cridland, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry’s business lobby group, who was appointed by the government in March 2016 to help cut the UK’s £100bn a year pension costs by reviewing the state pension age.

Instead, Cridland has recommended that the state pension age should rise from 67 to 68 by 2039, seven years earlier than currently timetabled. This will push the state retirement age back for a year for anyone in their early 40s. Cridland has rejected calls for early access to the state pension for those in poor health, but has left the door open for additional means-tested support to be made available one year before state pension age for those unable to work owing to ill health or caring responsibilities.


In spite of their anxieties about money, one of the things I have been most struck by, in my many conversations with older readers, is the pleasure they take in life.

One grandmother told me: “Last week, I swept across a crowded pub to pick up a raffle prize … with my dress tucked into my knickers! A few years ago I would have been mortified. Not any more. Told ’em they were lucky it was cold and I had knickers on!”

Monica Hartwell, 69, is part of the team at the volunteer-run Regal theatre in Minehead, as well as the film society and the museum. “The joy of getting older is much greater self-confidence,” she told me. “It’s the loss of angst about what people think of you: the size of your bum or whether others are judging you correctly. It’s not an arrogance, but you know who you are when you’re older and all those roles you played to fit in when you were younger are irrelevant.”


Retirement

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Women in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, discuss retirement. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The data bears out these experiences: 65 to 79 is the happiest age group for adults, according to the Office for National Statistics. Recently, a report claimed that women in their 80s have more enjoyable sex than those up to 30 years younger. Other research has found that 75% of those aged 50 and over are less bothered about what people think of them and 61% enjoy life more than when they were younger.

So what is the secret to a successful retirement? Private companies run courses to help those on the verge of retirement plan for changes in income, time and relationships. I have spoken to those running such courses, as well as those who have retired. The consensus is that there are five pillars, all of which rest on the “money bit” – the basic level of financial security without which later life is hard. Once that foundation is in place, retirees can build up the second pillar: a social network to replace their former work community. The third pillar is having purpose and challenging one’s mind. Fourth is ongoing personal development – exploring, questioning and learning are an important part of what makes us human; this should never stop, I was told. The fifth and final pillar is having fun.


I tried explaining final-salary pensions to a 20-year-old recently. They looked at me quizzically, as though I was telling them that I had seen a unicorn. When that same 20-year-old, however, tries to explain the traditional concept of retirement to their own children, they might well be met with the same level of incomprehension.

For their children, life might well be more like the joke that Ali Seamer emailed to me during a recent Q&A I ran with readers as part of my investigation into what retirement means today: “I’m going to have to work up to 6pm on the day of my funeral just to be able to afford the coffin,” he said.

In examining the reality of this new age of no retirement, I have become aware of two pitfalls undermining constructive debate. The first is the prejudice that an ageing population will place a huge burden on society.

This is refuted by numerous studies: the volunteer charity WRVS has done the most work to quantify the economic role played by older generations. Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring and volunteer efforts of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.

The research suggests that this benefit to the economy will increase in coming years as increasing numbers of baby-boomers enter retirement. By 2030, it projects that the net contribution of older people will be worth some £75bn.

Older people’s contribution to society is not just economic. An ICM poll for the WRVS study found that 65% of older people say they regularly help out elderly neighbours; they are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.

The second pitfall is the conflict between generations that can be caused by the issue of retirement. The financial problems of the young have been blamed on baby boomers. But the truth is that the UK pension languishes far below that which is provided in most developed countries. And this contributory, taxed income – pensioners pay tax just like anyone else – is all that many old people have to live on.

Nearly 2 million of those aged 55-64 do not have any private pension savings and despite the commonly held belief that older people are all mortgage-free, fewer than 48% of those aged 55-64 own their own homes outright and nearly a quarter are still renting. It is true that some have benefitted greatly from rises in house prices, but the cost of lending was high – often 10% or more – during the 1970s and 1980s. One in 10 of those aged 65 and over still have a mortgage.

For all the recent talk of the average pensioner household being £20 a week better off than working households, the truth is that many are actually working to supplement their income. Still, to people just entering the workforce, the lives of today’s pensioners look impossibly privileged.

Rachael Ingram sums it up. At 19, working full-time and studying for an Open University degree, she is already putting 10% of her income aside for her pension. “I shouldn’t be worrying about saving for my pension at my age,” she told me. “I’m saving money that could go towards a deposit for my first house – I’m currently renting a flat in Liverpool – or out socialising. But I have no faith in government or the state pension. There will be no one to look after me when I’m old.”

Main photograph: Richard Baker/Getty Images

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




Read more

Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for those who paid into additional state pension schemes such as Serps or S2P) applies to those born before those dates.

Frank Field, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that the new figure of just over £8,000 a year is enough to guarantee all pensioners a decent standard of living: an “adequate minimum”, as he put it. Anything above that, he said, should be privately funded, without tax breaks or other government help.

“Once the minimum has been reached, it’s not the job of government to bribe people to save more,” he says. “To provide luxurious pension payments was never the aim of the state pension.”

Whether the new state pension can really be described as a “comfortable minimum” turns out to be a matter of opinion. Dr Ros Altmann, who was brought into government in April 2015 to work on pensions policy, is the UK government’s former older workers’ champion and a governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. When I relayed Field’s comments to her, she was left briefly speechless. Then she managed a “wow”. “Did he really say that? Would he be happy to live on just over £8,000 a year?” she asked, finally.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, is clear that the new state pension has not been set at a high-enough level to guarantee a dignified older age to those who have no other income. “How sufficient is the new state pension? That’s an easy one to answer: It’s not,” he said.

Field makes the assumption that people have enough additional private financial ballast to bolster their state pensions. But the reality is that many people have neither savings – nearly a third of all households would struggle to pay an unexpected £500 bill – nor sufficient private pension provision to bring their state pension entitlement up to a level to ensure a comfortable retirement by most people’s understanding of the term. In fact, savings are the great dividing line in retirement, and the scale of the so-called “pension gap” – the gap between what your pension pot will pay out and the amount you need to live comfortably in older age – is shocking.

Three in 10 Britons aged 55-64 do not have any pension savings at all. Almost half of those in their 30s and 40s are not saving adequately or at all. In part, that is because we underestimate the amount of money we need to save. According to research by Saga earlier this month, four in 10 of those aged over 40 have no idea of the cost of even a basic lifestyle in retirement. When it came to understanding the size of the total pension pot they would need to fund retirement, over 80% admitted they had no idea how big this would need to be.


Retirement is an ancient concept. It caused one of the worst military disasters ever faced by the Roman empire when, in AD14, the imperial power increased the retirement age and decreased the pensions of its legionaries, causing mutiny in Pannonia and Germany. The ringleaders were rounded up and disposed of, but the institution remains so highly prized that any threat to its continued existence is liable to cause mutiny. “Retirement has been stolen. You can pay in as much as you like. They will never pay back. Time for a grey revolution,” one reader emailed.

It was in 1881 that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, made a radical speech to the Reichstag, calling for government-run financial support for those aged over 70 who were “disabled from work by age and invalidity”.


Roger Hall inspects the oyster trestles in Porlock Bay

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Roger Hall in Porlock Bay, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

The scheme wasn’t the socialist ideal it is sometimes assumed to be: Bismarck was actually advocating a disability pension, not a retirement pension as we understand it today. Besides, the retirement age he recommended just about aligned with average life expectancy in Germany at that time. Bismarck did, however, have a further vision that was genuinely too radical for his era: he proposed a pension that could be drawn at any age, if the contributor was judged unfit for work. Those drawing it earlier would receive a lower amount.

This notion is surfacing again in various forms. The New Economics Foundation is arguing for a shorter working week, via a “slow retirement”, in which employees give up an hour of work per week every year from the age of 35. The idea is that older workers will release more of their work time to younger ones, which will allow a steady handover of retained wisdom. A universal basic income, whereby everyone receives a set sum from the state each year, regardless of how much they do or don’t work, might have a similar effect, enabling people to move to part-time work as they age.

Widespread poverty among the over-65s led to the 1946 National Insurance Act, which introduced the first contributory, flat-rate pension in the UK for women of 60 and men of 65. At first, pension rates were low and most pensioners did not have enough to get by. But by the late 1970s, the value of the state pension rose and an increasing number of people – mainly men – were able to benefit from occupational pension schemes. By 1967, more than 8 million employees working for private companies were entitled to a final-salary pension, along with 4 million state workers. In 1978, the Labour government introduced a fully fledged “earnings-linked” state top-up system for those without access to a company scheme.

With pension payments now at a rate that enabled older people to stop work without risking penury, older men (and to a lesser extent older women) began to enjoy a “third age”, which fell between the end of work and the start of old age. In 1970, the employment rate for men aged 60-64 was 81%; by 1985 it had fallen to 49.7%.

Access to a comfortable old age is a powerful political idea. John Macnicol, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of Neoliberalising Old Age, believes that when jobs were needed for younger men after the second world war, a “socially elegant mythology” was created in which retirement was a time for older workers to kick back and relax.

He believes that in the 1990s, however, the narrative was cynically changed and the image of pensioners was deliberately altered: from being poor, frail, dependent and deserving, to well off, hedonistic, politically powerful and selfish. The notion of “the prosperous pensioner was constructed in the face of evidence that showed exactly the opposite to be the case”, he said, “so that the right to retirement [could be] undermined: more coercive working practices, forcing older people to stay in employment, could be presented as providing new ‘opportunities’, removing barriers to working, bestowing greater inclusion and even achieving upward social mobility”.

This change in attitude towards pensioners helped the government bring in a hike in retirement age. In 1995, the Conservative government under John Major announced a steady increase from 60 to 65 in the state pension age for women, to come in between April 2010 and April 2020. Most agreed that equalising the state pension age was fair enough. What they objected to is that the government waited until 2009 – a year before the increases were set to begin – to start contacting those affected, leaving thousands of women without time to rearrange their finances or adjust their employment plans to fill the gaping hole in their income.

Then, in 2011 – when the state pension age for women had risen to 63 – the coalition government accelerated the timetable: the state pension age for women will now reach 65 in November 2018, at which point it will rise alongside men’s: to 66 by 2020 and to 67 by 2028.

When she retired from the ministry of work and pensions in 2016, Ros Altmann stated that she was “not convinced the government had adequately addressed the hardship facing women who have had their state pension age increased at short notice”.

After surviving cancer at 52, Jackie Harrison, now 62, looked over her savings and decided she could just about afford to take early retirement. “I had achieved 36 years of national insurance contributions,” she said. “I used to phone the Department for Work and Pensions every year to ensure that I had worked enough to get my full pension at 60.”

Then she was told her personal pension age was increasing from 60 to 63 years and six months. “I wasn’t eligible for any benefits because of my partner’s pension, but I could nevertheless still just about manage until the new state retirement age,” she said. But when she was 58, the goalposts moved again – this time to 66. “I’d been out of the workplace for so long that I didn’t have a hope of being able to get back into it,” she said. “But nor did it give me enough time to make other financial arrangements.”

Harrison made the agonising decision to raise money by selling her family home and moving to a different city, where she could live more cheaply. Her decisions had heavy implications for the rest of her family – and the state. When she moved, she left behind a vulnerable adult daughter and baby grandchild and octogenarian parents.

“This is not the retirement I had planned at all,” Harrison told me. “I had loads of savings once, but now I live in a constant state of worry due to financial pressures. It seems so unfair when I have worked all my life and planned for my retirement. I just don’t know how I am going to manage for another four years”. Women born in the 1950s are already living in their age of no retirement.


In 2006, it became legal for employers to force their workers to retire at the age of 65. A campaign led by Age Concern and Help the Aged was swift and effective in its argument that the new default retirement age law broke EU rules and gave employers too much leeway to justify direct discrimination on the grounds of age. On 1 October 2011, the law was overturned.

Since then, Britain’s workforce has greyed almost before our eyes: in the last 15 years, the number of working people aged 50-64 has increased by 60% to 8 million (far greater than the increase in the population of people over 50). The proportion of people aged 70-74 in employment, meanwhile, has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This trend will continue. By 2020, one-third of the workforce will be over 50.


Older workers at Steelite International

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A worker at Steelite International ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The proportional increase may be substantial, but it charts growth from a low level. In empirical terms, the impact is less positive: almost one-third of people in the UK aged 50-64 are not working. In fact, a greater number are becoming jobless than finding employment: almost 40% of employment and support allowance claimants are over 50, an indication that many older people are unable to easily find new and sustainable work.

This is unsustainable: by 2020, an estimated 12.5m jobs will become vacant as a result of older people leaving the workforce. Yet there will only be 7 million younger people to fill them. If we can no longer rely on immigration to fill the gaps, employers will have to shed their prejudices, workplaces will have to be adapted, and social services will have to step in to provide the care that ageing people can no longer give their grandchildren, ageing spouses or parents if they remain in the workforce.





Forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good



But forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good. Prof Debora Price, director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, told me: “There is evidence to suggest that opportunities for people to work beyond state pension age might well be making inequalities worse, since those able to work into later life tend to be men who are highly educated and have been in higher-paid jobs.”

One answer is to return to Bismarck’s original plan, whereby the state pension can be accessed early by anyone who chooses to collect a smaller pension sum at an age lower than the state retirement age, perhaps because of poor health or other commitments.

This option, however, was rejected last week by John Cridland, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry’s business lobby group, who was appointed by the government in March 2016 to help cut the UK’s £100bn a year pension costs by reviewing the state pension age.

Instead, Cridland has recommended that the state pension age should rise from 67 to 68 by 2039, seven years earlier than currently timetabled. This will push the state retirement age back for a year for anyone in their early 40s. Cridland has rejected calls for early access to the state pension for those in poor health, but has left the door open for additional means-tested support to be made available one year before state pension age for those unable to work owing to ill health or caring responsibilities.


In spite of their anxieties about money, one of the things I have been most struck by, in my many conversations with older readers, is the pleasure they take in life.

One grandmother told me: “Last week, I swept across a crowded pub to pick up a raffle prize … with my dress tucked into my knickers! A few years ago I would have been mortified. Not any more. Told ’em they were lucky it was cold and I had knickers on!”

Monica Hartwell, 69, is part of the team at the volunteer-run Regal theatre in Minehead, as well as the film society and the museum. “The joy of getting older is much greater self-confidence,” she told me. “It’s the loss of angst about what people think of you: the size of your bum or whether others are judging you correctly. It’s not an arrogance, but you know who you are when you’re older and all those roles you played to fit in when you were younger are irrelevant.”


Retirement

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Women in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, discuss retirement. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The data bears out these experiences: 65 to 79 is the happiest age group for adults, according to the Office for National Statistics. Recently, a report claimed that women in their 80s have more enjoyable sex than those up to 30 years younger. Other research has found that 75% of those aged 50 and over are less bothered about what people think of them and 61% enjoy life more than when they were younger.

So what is the secret to a successful retirement? Private companies run courses to help those on the verge of retirement plan for changes in income, time and relationships. I have spoken to those running such courses, as well as those who have retired. The consensus is that there are five pillars, all of which rest on the “money bit” – the basic level of financial security without which later life is hard. Once that foundation is in place, retirees can build up the second pillar: a social network to replace their former work community. The third pillar is having purpose and challenging one’s mind. Fourth is ongoing personal development – exploring, questioning and learning are an important part of what makes us human; this should never stop, I was told. The fifth and final pillar is having fun.


I tried explaining final-salary pensions to a 20-year-old recently. They looked at me quizzically, as though I was telling them that I had seen a unicorn. When that same 20-year-old, however, tries to explain the traditional concept of retirement to their own children, they might well be met with the same level of incomprehension.

For their children, life might well be more like the joke that Ali Seamer emailed to me during a recent Q&A I ran with readers as part of my investigation into what retirement means today: “I’m going to have to work up to 6pm on the day of my funeral just to be able to afford the coffin,” he said.

In examining the reality of this new age of no retirement, I have become aware of two pitfalls undermining constructive debate. The first is the prejudice that an ageing population will place a huge burden on society.

This is refuted by numerous studies: the volunteer charity WRVS has done the most work to quantify the economic role played by older generations. Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring and volunteer efforts of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.

The research suggests that this benefit to the economy will increase in coming years as increasing numbers of baby-boomers enter retirement. By 2030, it projects that the net contribution of older people will be worth some £75bn.

Older people’s contribution to society is not just economic. An ICM poll for the WRVS study found that 65% of older people say they regularly help out elderly neighbours; they are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.

The second pitfall is the conflict between generations that can be caused by the issue of retirement. The financial problems of the young have been blamed on baby boomers. But the truth is that the UK pension languishes far below that which is provided in most developed countries. And this contributory, taxed income – pensioners pay tax just like anyone else – is all that many old people have to live on.

Nearly 2 million of those aged 55-64 do not have any private pension savings and despite the commonly held belief that older people are all mortgage-free, fewer than 48% of those aged 55-64 own their own homes outright and nearly a quarter are still renting. It is true that some have benefitted greatly from rises in house prices, but the cost of lending was high – often 10% or more – during the 1970s and 1980s. One in 10 of those aged 65 and over still have a mortgage.

For all the recent talk of the average pensioner household being £20 a week better off than working households, the truth is that many are actually working to supplement their income. Still, to people just entering the workforce, the lives of today’s pensioners look impossibly privileged.

Rachael Ingram sums it up. At 19, working full-time and studying for an Open University degree, she is already putting 10% of her income aside for her pension. “I shouldn’t be worrying about saving for my pension at my age,” she told me. “I’m saving money that could go towards a deposit for my first house – I’m currently renting a flat in Liverpool – or out socialising. But I have no faith in government or the state pension. There will be no one to look after me when I’m old.”

Main photograph: Richard Baker/Getty Images

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double


We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




Read more

Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for t

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




Read more

Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for those who paid into additional state pension schemes such as Serps or S2P) applies to those born before those dates.

Frank Field, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that the new figure of just over £8,000 a year is enough to guarantee all pensioners a decent standard of living: an “adequate minimum”, as he put it. Anything above that, he said, should be privately funded, without tax breaks or other government help.

“Once the minimum has been reached, it’s not the job of government to bribe people to save more,” he says. “To provide luxurious pension payments was never the aim of the state pension.”

Whether the new state pension can really be described as a “comfortable minimum” turns out to be a matter of opinion. Dr Ros Altmann, who was brought into government in April 2015 to work on pensions policy, is the UK government’s former older workers’ champion and a governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. When I relayed Field’s comments to her, she was left briefly speechless. Then she managed a “wow”. “Did he really say that? Would he be happy to live on just over £8,000 a year?” she asked, finally.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, is clear that the new state pension has not been set at a high-enough level to guarantee a dignified older age to those who have no other income. “How sufficient is the new state pension? That’s an easy one to answer: It’s not,” he said.

Field makes the assumption that people have enough additional private financial ballast to bolster their state pensions. But the reality is that many people have neither savings – nearly a third of all households would struggle to pay an unexpected £500 bill – nor sufficient private pension provision to bring their state pension entitlement up to a level to ensure a comfortable retirement by most people’s understanding of the term. In fact, savings are the great dividing line in retirement, and the scale of the so-called “pension gap” – the gap between what your pension pot will pay out and the amount you need to live comfortably in older age – is shocking.

Three in 10 Britons aged 55-64 do not have any pension savings at all. Almost half of those in their 30s and 40s are not saving adequately or at all. In part, that is because we underestimate the amount of money we need to save. According to research by Saga earlier this month, four in 10 of those aged over 40 have no idea of the cost of even a basic lifestyle in retirement. When it came to understanding the size of the total pension pot they would need to fund retirement, over 80% admitted they had no idea how big this would need to be.


Retirement is an ancient concept. It caused one of the worst military disasters ever faced by the Roman empire when, in AD14, the imperial power increased the retirement age and decreased the pensions of its legionaries, causing mutiny in Pannonia and Germany. The ringleaders were rounded up and disposed of, but the institution remains so highly prized that any threat to its continued existence is liable to cause mutiny. “Retirement has been stolen. You can pay in as much as you like. They will never pay back. Time for a grey revolution,” one reader emailed.

It was in 1881 that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, made a radical speech to the Reichstag, calling for government-run financial support for those aged over 70 who were “disabled from work by age and invalidity”.


Roger Hall inspects the oyster trestles in Porlock Bay

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Roger Hall in Porlock Bay, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

The scheme wasn’t the socialist ideal it is sometimes assumed to be: Bismarck was actually advocating a disability pension, not a retirement pension as we understand it today. Besides, the retirement age he recommended just about aligned with average life expectancy in Germany at that time. Bismarck did, however, have a further vision that was genuinely too radical for his era: he proposed a pension that could be drawn at any age, if the contributor was judged unfit for work. Those drawing it earlier would receive a lower amount.

This notion is surfacing again in various forms. The New Economics Foundation is arguing for a shorter working week, via a “slow retirement”, in which employees give up an hour of work per week every year from the age of 35. The idea is that older workers will release more of their work time to younger ones, which will allow a steady handover of retained wisdom. A universal basic income, whereby everyone receives a set sum from the state each year, regardless of how much they do or don’t work, might have a similar effect, enabling people to move to part-time work as they age.

Widespread poverty among the over-65s led to the 1946 National Insurance Act, which introduced the first contributory, flat-rate pension in the UK for women of 60 and men of 65. At first, pension rates were low and most pensioners did not have enough to get by. But by the late 1970s, the value of the state pension rose and an increasing number of people – mainly men – were able to benefit from occupational pension schemes. By 1967, more than 8 million employees working for private companies were entitled to a final-salary pension, along with 4 million state workers. In 1978, the Labour government introduced a fully fledged “earnings-linked” state top-up system for those without access to a company scheme.

With pension payments now at a rate that enabled older people to stop work without risking penury, older men (and to a lesser extent older women) began to enjoy a “third age”, which fell between the end of work and the start of old age. In 1970, the employment rate for men aged 60-64 was 81%; by 1985 it had fallen to 49.7%.

Access to a comfortable old age is a powerful political idea. John Macnicol, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of Neoliberalising Old Age, believes that when jobs were needed for younger men after the second world war, a “socially elegant mythology” was created in which retirement was a time for older workers to kick back and relax.

He believes that in the 1990s, however, the narrative was cynically changed and the image of pensioners was deliberately altered: from being poor, frail, dependent and deserving, to well off, hedonistic, politically powerful and selfish. The notion of “the prosperous pensioner was constructed in the face of evidence that showed exactly the opposite to be the case”, he said, “so that the right to retirement [could be] undermined: more coercive working practices, forcing older people to stay in employment, could be presented as providing new ‘opportunities’, removing barriers to working, bestowing greater inclusion and even achieving upward social mobility”.

This change in attitude towards pensioners helped the government bring in a hike in retirement age. In 1995, the Conservative government under John Major announced a steady increase from 60 to 65 in the state pension age for women, to come in between April 2010 and April 2020. Most agreed that equalising the state pension age was fair enough. What they objected to is that the government waited until 2009 – a year before the increases were set to begin – to start contacting those affected, leaving thousands of women without time to rearrange their finances or adjust their employment plans to fill the gaping hole in their income.

Then, in 2011 – when the state pension age for women had risen to 63 – the coalition government accelerated the timetable: the state pension age for women will now reach 65 in November 2018, at which point it will rise alongside men’s: to 66 by 2020 and to 67 by 2028.

When she retired from the ministry of work and pensions in 2016, Ros Altmann stated that she was “not convinced the government had adequately addressed the hardship facing women who have had their state pension age increased at short notice”.

After surviving cancer at 52, Jackie Harrison, now 62, looked over her savings and decided she could just about afford to take early retirement. “I had achieved 36 years of national insurance contributions,” she said. “I used to phone the Department for Work and Pensions every year to ensure that I had worked enough to get my full pension at 60.”

Then she was told her personal pension age was increasing from 60 to 63 years and six months. “I wasn’t eligible for any benefits because of my partner’s pension, but I could nevertheless still just about manage until the new state retirement age,” she said. But when she was 58, the goalposts moved again – this time to 66. “I’d been out of the workplace for so long that I didn’t have a hope of being able to get back into it,” she said. “But nor did it give me enough time to make other financial arrangements.”

Harrison made the agonising decision to raise money by selling her family home and moving to a different city, where she could live more cheaply. Her decisions had heavy implications for the rest of her family – and the state. When she moved, she left behind a vulnerable adult daughter and baby grandchild and octogenarian parents.

“This is not the retirement I had planned at all,” Harrison told me. “I had loads of savings once, but now I live in a constant state of worry due to financial pressures. It seems so unfair when I have worked all my life and planned for my retirement. I just don’t know how I am going to manage for another four years”. Women born in the 1950s are already living in their age of no retirement.


In 2006, it became legal for employers to force their workers to retire at the age of 65. A campaign led by Age Concern and Help the Aged was swift and effective in its argument that the new default retirement age law broke EU rules and gave employers too much leeway to justify direct discrimination on the grounds of age. On 1 October 2011, the law was overturned.

Since then, Britain’s workforce has greyed almost before our eyes: in the last 15 years, the number of working people aged 50-64 has increased by 60% to 8 million (far greater than the increase in the population of people over 50). The proportion of people aged 70-74 in employment, meanwhile, has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This trend will continue. By 2020, one-third of the workforce will be over 50.


Older workers at Steelite International

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A worker at Steelite International ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The proportional increase may be substantial, but it charts growth from a low level. In empirical terms, the impact is less positive: almost one-third of people in the UK aged 50-64 are not working. In fact, a greater number are becoming jobless than finding employment: almost 40% of employment and support allowance claimants are over 50, an indication that many older people are unable to easily find new and sustainable work.

This is unsustainable: by 2020, an estimated 12.5m jobs will become vacant as a result of older people leaving the workforce. Yet there will only be 7 million younger people to fill them. If we can no longer rely on immigration to fill the gaps, employers will have to shed their prejudices, workplaces will have to be adapted, and social services will have to step in to provide the care that ageing people can no longer give their grandchildren, ageing spouses or parents if they remain in the workforce.





Forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good



But forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good. Prof Debora Price, director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, told me: “There is evidence to suggest that opportunities for people to work beyond state pension age might well be making inequalities worse, since those able to work into later life tend to be men who are highly educated and have been in higher-paid jobs.”

One answer is to return to Bismarck’s original plan, whereby the state pension can be accessed early by anyone who chooses to collect a smaller pension sum at an age lower than the state retirement age, perhaps because of poor health or other commitments.

This option, however, was rejected last week by John Cridland, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry’s business lobby group, who was appointed by the government in March 2016 to help cut the UK’s £100bn a year pension costs by reviewing the state pension age.

Instead, Cridland has recommended that the state pension age should rise from 67 to 68 by 2039, seven years earlier than currently timetabled. This will push the state retirement age back for a year for anyone in their early 40s. Cridland has rejected calls for early access to the state pension for those in poor health, but has left the door open for additional means-tested support to be made available one year before state pension age for those unable to work owing to ill health or caring responsibilities.


In spite of their anxieties about money, one of the things I have been most struck by, in my many conversations with older readers, is the pleasure they take in life.

One grandmother told me: “Last week, I swept across a crowded pub to pick up a raffle prize … with my dress tucked into my knickers! A few years ago I would have been mortified. Not any more. Told ’em they were lucky it was cold and I had knickers on!”

Monica Hartwell, 69, is part of the team at the volunteer-run Regal theatre in Minehead, as well as the film society and the museum. “The joy of getting older is much greater self-confidence,” she told me. “It’s the loss of angst about what people think of you: the size of your bum or whether others are judging you correctly. It’s not an arrogance, but you know who you are when you’re older and all those roles you played to fit in when you were younger are irrelevant.”


Retirement

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Women in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, discuss retirement. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The data bears out these experiences: 65 to 79 is the happiest age group for adults, according to the Office for National Statistics. Recently, a report claimed that women in their 80s have more enjoyable sex than those up to 30 years younger. Other research has found that 75% of those aged 50 and over are less bothered about what people think of them and 61% enjoy life more than when they were younger.

So what is the secret to a successful retirement? Private companies run courses to help those on the verge of retirement plan for changes in income, time and relationships. I have spoken to those running such courses, as well as those who have retired. The consensus is that there are five pillars, all of which rest on the “money bit” – the basic level of financial security without which later life is hard. Once that foundation is in place, retirees can build up the second pillar: a social network to replace their former work community. The third pillar is having purpose and challenging one’s mind. Fourth is ongoing personal development – exploring, questioning and learning are an important part of what makes us human; this should never stop, I was told. The fifth and final pillar is having fun.


I tried explaining final-salary pensions to a 20-year-old recently. They looked at me quizzically, as though I was telling them that I had seen a unicorn. When that same 20-year-old, however, tries to explain the traditional concept of retirement to their own children, they might well be met with the same level of incomprehension.

For their children, life might well be more like the joke that Ali Seamer emailed to me during a recent Q&A I ran with readers as part of my investigation into what retirement means today: “I’m going to have to work up to 6pm on the day of my funeral just to be able to afford the coffin,” he said.

In examining the reality of this new age of no retirement, I have become aware of two pitfalls undermining constructive debate. The first is the prejudice that an ageing population will place a huge burden on society.

This is refuted by numerous studies: the volunteer charity WRVS has done the most work to quantify the economic role played by older generations. Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring and volunteer efforts of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.

The research suggests that this benefit to the economy will increase in coming years as increasing numbers of baby-boomers enter retirement. By 2030, it projects that the net contribution of older people will be worth some £75bn.

Older people’s contribution to society is not just economic. An ICM poll for the WRVS study found that 65% of older people say they regularly help out elderly neighbours; they are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.

The second pitfall is the conflict between generations that can be caused by the issue of retirement. The financial problems of the young have been blamed on baby boomers. But the truth is that the UK pension languishes far below that which is provided in most developed countries. And this contributory, taxed income – pensioners pay tax just like anyone else – is all that many old people have to live on.

Nearly 2 million of those aged 55-64 do not have any private pension savings and despite the commonly held belief that older people are all mortgage-free, fewer than 48% of those aged 55-64 own their own homes outright and nearly a quarter are still renting. It is true that some have benefitted greatly from rises in house prices, but the cost of lending was high – often 10% or more – during the 1970s and 1980s. One in 10 of those aged 65 and over still have a mortgage.

For all the recent talk of the average pensioner household being £20 a week better off than working households, the truth is that many are actually working to supplement their income. Still, to people just entering the workforce, the lives of today’s pensioners look impossibly privileged.

Rachael Ingram sums it up. At 19, working full-time and studying for an Open University degree, she is already putting 10% of her income aside for her pension. “I shouldn’t be worrying about saving for my pension at my age,” she told me. “I’m saving money that could go towards a deposit for my first house – I’m currently renting a flat in Liverpool – or out socialising. But I have no faith in government or the state pension. There will be no one to look after me when I’m old.”

Main photograph: Richard Baker/Getty Images

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




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Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for those who paid into additional state pension schemes such as Serps or S2P) applies to those born before those dates.

Frank Field, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, told me that the new figure of just over £8,000 a year is enough to guarantee all pensioners a decent standard of living: an “adequate minimum”, as he put it. Anything above that, he said, should be privately funded, without tax breaks or other government help.

“Once the minimum has been reached, it’s not the job of government to bribe people to save more,” he says. “To provide luxurious pension payments was never the aim of the state pension.”

Whether the new state pension can really be described as a “comfortable minimum” turns out to be a matter of opinion. Dr Ros Altmann, who was brought into government in April 2015 to work on pensions policy, is the UK government’s former older workers’ champion and a governor of the Pensions Policy Institute. When I relayed Field’s comments to her, she was left briefly speechless. Then she managed a “wow”. “Did he really say that? Would he be happy to live on just over £8,000 a year?” she asked, finally.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown, is clear that the new state pension has not been set at a high-enough level to guarantee a dignified older age to those who have no other income. “How sufficient is the new state pension? That’s an easy one to answer: It’s not,” he said.

Field makes the assumption that people have enough additional private financial ballast to bolster their state pensions. But the reality is that many people have neither savings – nearly a third of all households would struggle to pay an unexpected £500 bill – nor sufficient private pension provision to bring their state pension entitlement up to a level to ensure a comfortable retirement by most people’s understanding of the term. In fact, savings are the great dividing line in retirement, and the scale of the so-called “pension gap” – the gap between what your pension pot will pay out and the amount you need to live comfortably in older age – is shocking.

Three in 10 Britons aged 55-64 do not have any pension savings at all. Almost half of those in their 30s and 40s are not saving adequately or at all. In part, that is because we underestimate the amount of money we need to save. According to research by Saga earlier this month, four in 10 of those aged over 40 have no idea of the cost of even a basic lifestyle in retirement. When it came to understanding the size of the total pension pot they would need to fund retirement, over 80% admitted they had no idea how big this would need to be.


Retirement is an ancient concept. It caused one of the worst military disasters ever faced by the Roman empire when, in AD14, the imperial power increased the retirement age and decreased the pensions of its legionaries, causing mutiny in Pannonia and Germany. The ringleaders were rounded up and disposed of, but the institution remains so highly prized that any threat to its continued existence is liable to cause mutiny. “Retirement has been stolen. You can pay in as much as you like. They will never pay back. Time for a grey revolution,” one reader emailed.

It was in 1881 that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, made a radical speech to the Reichstag, calling for government-run financial support for those aged over 70 who were “disabled from work by age and invalidity”.


Roger Hall inspects the oyster trestles in Porlock Bay

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Roger Hall in Porlock Bay, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost for the Guardian

The scheme wasn’t the socialist ideal it is sometimes assumed to be: Bismarck was actually advocating a disability pension, not a retirement pension as we understand it today. Besides, the retirement age he recommended just about aligned with average life expectancy in Germany at that time. Bismarck did, however, have a further vision that was genuinely too radical for his era: he proposed a pension that could be drawn at any age, if the contributor was judged unfit for work. Those drawing it earlier would receive a lower amount.

This notion is surfacing again in various forms. The New Economics Foundation is arguing for a shorter working week, via a “slow retirement”, in which employees give up an hour of work per week every year from the age of 35. The idea is that older workers will release more of their work time to younger ones, which will allow a steady handover of retained wisdom. A universal basic income, whereby everyone receives a set sum from the state each year, regardless of how much they do or don’t work, might have a similar effect, enabling people to move to part-time work as they age.

Widespread poverty among the over-65s led to the 1946 National Insurance Act, which introduced the first contributory, flat-rate pension in the UK for women of 60 and men of 65. At first, pension rates were low and most pensioners did not have enough to get by. But by the late 1970s, the value of the state pension rose and an increasing number of people – mainly men – were able to benefit from occupational pension schemes. By 1967, more than 8 million employees working for private companies were entitled to a final-salary pension, along with 4 million state workers. In 1978, the Labour government introduced a fully fledged “earnings-linked” state top-up system for those without access to a company scheme.

With pension payments now at a rate that enabled older people to stop work without risking penury, older men (and to a lesser extent older women) began to enjoy a “third age”, which fell between the end of work and the start of old age. In 1970, the employment rate for men aged 60-64 was 81%; by 1985 it had fallen to 49.7%.

Access to a comfortable old age is a powerful political idea. John Macnicol, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and author of Neoliberalising Old Age, believes that when jobs were needed for younger men after the second world war, a “socially elegant mythology” was created in which retirement was a time for older workers to kick back and relax.

He believes that in the 1990s, however, the narrative was cynically changed and the image of pensioners was deliberately altered: from being poor, frail, dependent and deserving, to well off, hedonistic, politically powerful and selfish. The notion of “the prosperous pensioner was constructed in the face of evidence that showed exactly the opposite to be the case”, he said, “so that the right to retirement [could be] undermined: more coercive working practices, forcing older people to stay in employment, could be presented as providing new ‘opportunities’, removing barriers to working, bestowing greater inclusion and even achieving upward social mobility”.

This change in attitude towards pensioners helped the government bring in a hike in retirement age. In 1995, the Conservative government under John Major announced a steady increase from 60 to 65 in the state pension age for women, to come in between April 2010 and April 2020. Most agreed that equalising the state pension age was fair enough. What they objected to is that the government waited until 2009 – a year before the increases were set to begin – to start contacting those affected, leaving thousands of women without time to rearrange their finances or adjust their employment plans to fill the gaping hole in their income.

Then, in 2011 – when the state pension age for women had risen to 63 – the coalition government accelerated the timetable: the state pension age for women will now reach 65 in November 2018, at which point it will rise alongside men’s: to 66 by 2020 and to 67 by 2028.

When she retired from the ministry of work and pensions in 2016, Ros Altmann stated that she was “not convinced the government had adequately addressed the hardship facing women who have had their state pension age increased at short notice”.

After surviving cancer at 52, Jackie Harrison, now 62, looked over her savings and decided she could just about afford to take early retirement. “I had achieved 36 years of national insurance contributions,” she said. “I used to phone the Department for Work and Pensions every year to ensure that I had worked enough to get my full pension at 60.”

Then she was told her personal pension age was increasing from 60 to 63 years and six months. “I wasn’t eligible for any benefits because of my partner’s pension, but I could nevertheless still just about manage until the new state retirement age,” she said. But when she was 58, the goalposts moved again – this time to 66. “I’d been out of the workplace for so long that I didn’t have a hope of being able to get back into it,” she said. “But nor did it give me enough time to make other financial arrangements.”

Harrison made the agonising decision to raise money by selling her family home and moving to a different city, where she could live more cheaply. Her decisions had heavy implications for the rest of her family – and the state. When she moved, she left behind a vulnerable adult daughter and baby grandchild and octogenarian parents.

“This is not the retirement I had planned at all,” Harrison told me. “I had loads of savings once, but now I live in a constant state of worry due to financial pressures. It seems so unfair when I have worked all my life and planned for my retirement. I just don’t know how I am going to manage for another four years”. Women born in the 1950s are already living in their age of no retirement.


In 2006, it became legal for employers to force their workers to retire at the age of 65. A campaign led by Age Concern and Help the Aged was swift and effective in its argument that the new default retirement age law broke EU rules and gave employers too much leeway to justify direct discrimination on the grounds of age. On 1 October 2011, the law was overturned.

Since then, Britain’s workforce has greyed almost before our eyes: in the last 15 years, the number of working people aged 50-64 has increased by 60% to 8 million (far greater than the increase in the population of people over 50). The proportion of people aged 70-74 in employment, meanwhile, has almost doubled in the past 10 years. This trend will continue. By 2020, one-third of the workforce will be over 50.


Older workers at Steelite International

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A worker at Steelite International ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The proportional increase may be substantial, but it charts growth from a low level. In empirical terms, the impact is less positive: almost one-third of people in the UK aged 50-64 are not working. In fact, a greater number are becoming jobless than finding employment: almost 40% of employment and support allowance claimants are over 50, an indication that many older people are unable to easily find new and sustainable work.

This is unsustainable: by 2020, an estimated 12.5m jobs will become vacant as a result of older people leaving the workforce. Yet there will only be 7 million younger people to fill them. If we can no longer rely on immigration to fill the gaps, employers will have to shed their prejudices, workplaces will have to be adapted, and social services will have to step in to provide the care that ageing people can no longer give their grandchildren, ageing spouses or parents if they remain in the workforce.





Forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good



But forcing older people to work longer if they cannot easily do so can cause more harm than good. Prof Debora Price, director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, told me: “There is evidence to suggest that opportunities for people to work beyond state pension age might well be making inequalities worse, since those able to work into later life tend to be men who are highly educated and have been in higher-paid jobs.”

One answer is to return to Bismarck’s original plan, whereby the state pension can be accessed early by anyone who chooses to collect a smaller pension sum at an age lower than the state retirement age, perhaps because of poor health or other commitments.

This option, however, was rejected last week by John Cridland, the former head of the Confederation of British Industry’s business lobby group, who was appointed by the government in March 2016 to help cut the UK’s £100bn a year pension costs by reviewing the state pension age.

Instead, Cridland has recommended that the state pension age should rise from 67 to 68 by 2039, seven years earlier than currently timetabled. This will push the state retirement age back for a year for anyone in their early 40s. Cridland has rejected calls for early access to the state pension for those in poor health, but has left the door open for additional means-tested support to be made available one year before state pension age for those unable to work owing to ill health or caring responsibilities.


In spite of their anxieties about money, one of the things I have been most struck by, in my many conversations with older readers, is the pleasure they take in life.

One grandmother told me: “Last week, I swept across a crowded pub to pick up a raffle prize … with my dress tucked into my knickers! A few years ago I would have been mortified. Not any more. Told ’em they were lucky it was cold and I had knickers on!”

Monica Hartwell, 69, is part of the team at the volunteer-run Regal theatre in Minehead, as well as the film society and the museum. “The joy of getting older is much greater self-confidence,” she told me. “It’s the loss of angst about what people think of you: the size of your bum or whether others are judging you correctly. It’s not an arrogance, but you know who you are when you’re older and all those roles you played to fit in when you were younger are irrelevant.”


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Women in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, discuss retirement. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The data bears out these experiences: 65 to 79 is the happiest age group for adults, according to the Office for National Statistics. Recently, a report claimed that women in their 80s have more enjoyable sex than those up to 30 years younger. Other research has found that 75% of those aged 50 and over are less bothered about what people think of them and 61% enjoy life more than when they were younger.

So what is the secret to a successful retirement? Private companies run courses to help those on the verge of retirement plan for changes in income, time and relationships. I have spoken to those running such courses, as well as those who have retired. The consensus is that there are five pillars, all of which rest on the “money bit” – the basic level of financial security without which later life is hard. Once that foundation is in place, retirees can build up the second pillar: a social network to replace their former work community. The third pillar is having purpose and challenging one’s mind. Fourth is ongoing personal development – exploring, questioning and learning are an important part of what makes us human; this should never stop, I was told. The fifth and final pillar is having fun.


I tried explaining final-salary pensions to a 20-year-old recently. They looked at me quizzically, as though I was telling them that I had seen a unicorn. When that same 20-year-old, however, tries to explain the traditional concept of retirement to their own children, they might well be met with the same level of incomprehension.

For their children, life might well be more like the joke that Ali Seamer emailed to me during a recent Q&A I ran with readers as part of my investigation into what retirement means today: “I’m going to have to work up to 6pm on the day of my funeral just to be able to afford the coffin,” he said.

In examining the reality of this new age of no retirement, I have become aware of two pitfalls undermining constructive debate. The first is the prejudice that an ageing population will place a huge burden on society.

This is refuted by numerous studies: the volunteer charity WRVS has done the most work to quantify the economic role played by older generations. Taking together the tax payments, spending power, caring and volunteer efforts of people aged 65-plus, it calculates that they contribute almost £40bn more to the UK economy than they receive in state pensions, welfare and health services.

The research suggests that this benefit to the economy will increase in coming years as increasing numbers of baby-boomers enter retirement. By 2030, it projects that the net contribution of older people will be worth some £75bn.

Older people’s contribution to society is not just economic. An ICM poll for the WRVS study found that 65% of older people say they regularly help out elderly neighbours; they are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.

The second pitfall is the conflict between generations that can be caused by the issue of retirement. The financial problems of the young have been blamed on baby boomers. But the truth is that the UK pension languishes far below that which is provided in most developed countries. And this contributory, taxed income – pensioners pay tax just like anyone else – is all that many old people have to live on.

Nearly 2 million of those aged 55-64 do not have any private pension savings and despite the commonly held belief that older people are all mortgage-free, fewer than 48% of those aged 55-64 own their own homes outright and nearly a quarter are still renting. It is true that some have benefitted greatly from rises in house prices, but the cost of lending was high – often 10% or more – during the 1970s and 1980s. One in 10 of those aged 65 and over still have a mortgage.

For all the recent talk of the average pensioner household being £20 a week better off than working households, the truth is that many are actually working to supplement their income. Still, to people just entering the workforce, the lives of today’s pensioners look impossibly privileged.

Rachael Ingram sums it up. At 19, working full-time and studying for an Open University degree, she is already putting 10% of her income aside for her pension. “I shouldn’t be worrying about saving for my pension at my age,” she told me. “I’m saving money that could go towards a deposit for my first house – I’m currently renting a flat in Liverpool – or out socialising. But I have no faith in government or the state pension. There will be no one to look after me when I’m old.”

Main photograph: Richard Baker/Getty Images

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double


We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

In 2010, British women got their state pension at 60 and men got theirs at 65. By October 2020, both sexes will have to wait until they are 66. By 2028, the age will rise again, to 67. And the creep will continue. By the early 2060s, people will still be working in their 70s, but according to research, we will all need to keep working into our 80s if we want to enjoy the same standard of retirement as our parents.

This is what a world without retirement looks like. Workers will be unable to down tools, even when they can barely hold them with hands gnarled by age-related arthritis. The raising of the state retirement age will create a new social inequality. Those living in areas in which the average life expectancy is lower than the state retirement age (south-east England has the highest average life expectancy, Scotland the lowest) will subsidise those better off by dying before they can claim the pension they have contributed to throughout their lives. In other words, wealthier people become beneficiaries of what remains of the welfare state.

Retirement is likely to be sustained in recognisable form in the short and medium term. Looming on the horizon, however, is a complete dismantling of this safety net.

For those of pensionable age who cannot afford to retire, but cannot continue working – because of poor health, or ageing parents who need care, or because potential employers would rather hire younger workers – the great progress Britain has made in tackling poverty among the elderly over the last two decades will be reversed. This group is liable to suffer the sort of widespread poverty not seen in Britain for 30 to 40 years.

Many now in their 20s will be unable to save throughout their youth and middle age because of increasingly casualised employment, student debt and rising property prices. By the time they are old, members of this new generation of poor pensioners are liable to be, on average, far worse off than the average poor pensioner today.

A series of factors has contributed to this situation: increased life expectancy, woeful pension planning by successive governments, the end of the final-salary pension scheme (in which people got two-thirds of their final salary as a pension) and our own failure to save.

For two months, as part of an experiment by the Guardian in collaborative reporting, I have been investigating what retirement looks like today – and what it might look like for the next wave of retirees, their children and grandchildren. The evidence reveals a sinkhole beneath the state’s provision of pensions. Under the weight of our vastly increased longevity, retirement – one of our most cherished institutions – is in danger of collapsing into it.





What happens to women when they retire?




Read more

Many of those contemplating retirement are alarmed by the new landscape. A 62-year-old woman, who is for the first time in her life struggling to pay her mortgage (and wishes to remain anonymous), told me: “I am more stressed now than I was in my 30s. I lived on a very tight budget then, but I was young and could cope emotionally. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I never thought I would feel this scared of the future at my age. I’m not remotely materialistic and have never wanted a fancy lifestyle. But not knowing if I will be without a home in the next few months is a very scary place to be.”

And it is not just the older generation who fear old age. Adam Palfrey is 30, with three children and a disabled wife who cannot work. “I must confess, I am absolutely terrified of retirement,” he told me. “I have nothing stashed away. Savings are out of the question. I only just earn enough that, with housing benefit, disability living allowance and tax credits, I manage to keep our heads above water. I work every hour I can just to keep things afloat. There’s no way I could keep this up aged 70-plus, just so that my partner and I can live a basic life. As for my three children … God knows. I can scarcely bring myself to think about it.”


It is not news that the population is ageing. What is remarkable is that we have failed to prepare the ground for this inevitable change. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Thanks to a period of relative peace in the UK, low infant mortality and continual medical advances, over the past two decades the life expectancy of babies born here has increased by some five years. (A baby born at the end of my eight-week The new retirement series has a life expectancy almost 12 days longer than a baby born at the start of it.)


Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park

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Dr Peter Jarvis and Sue Perkins at Bletchley Park. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. In little more than a decade, half of the country’s population will be aged over 50. This will transform Britain – and it is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. This year marked a demographic turning point in the UK. As the baby-boom generation (now aged between 53 and 71) entered retirement, for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age.

The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years. By 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. Half of all children born in the UK are predicted to live to 103. Some 10 million of us currently alive in the UK (and 130 million throughout Europe) are likely to live past the age of 100.





Governments see raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population



The challenges are considerable. The tax imbalance that comes with an ageing population, whose tax contribution falls far short of their use of services, will rise to £15bn a year by 2060. Covering this gap will cost the equivalent of a 4p income tax rise for the working-age population.

It is easy to see why governments might regard raising the state retirement age as a way to cover the cost of an ageing population. A successful pursuit of full employment of people into their late 60s could maintain the ratio of workers to non-workers for many decades to come. And were the employment rate for older workers to match that of the 30-40 age group, the additional tax payments could be as much as £88.4bn. According to PwC’s Golden Age Index, had our employment rates for those aged 55 years and older been as high as those in Sweden between 2003 and 2013, UK national GDP would have been £105bn – or 5.8% – higher.

There are, of course, problems to this approach. Those who can happily work into their 70s and beyond are likely to be the privileged few: the highly educated elite who haven’t spent their working lives in jobs that negatively affect their health. If the state pension age is pushed further away, for those with failing health, family responsibilities or no jobs, life will become very difficult.

The new state pension, introduced on 6 April 2016, will be paid to men born on or after 6 April 1951, and women born on or after 6 April 1953. Assuming you have paid 35 years of National Insurance, it will pay out £155.65 a week. The old scheme (worth a basic sum of £119.30 per week, with more for t

Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.



Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is uncomfortable and unmentioned, both because the model has worked so well financially in the past and because addressing it challenges the traditional business model. Analysis of sustainability reports cited in this paper uncovers an alarming lack of attention to natural resource limits. The few quotes in this report attributable to corporate spokespeople boldly referencing resource limitations are notable for their rarity.

It is not necessary to insist that people make do with less goods or that some people cannot have goods but rather that companies innovate new business models that deliver shareholder value and that shape and meet consumers’ needs in a different way. There are encouraging signs that some companies are examining their business models in a new light. Examples include companies that have put ideas like circular manufacturing and collaborative consumption into practice or that have created new ways of selling the services their products provide instead of selling the product itself. Several examples are discussed in this paper; however, none are yet mainstream.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to normalize the topic so that sustainability professionals, the C-suite, the board, and investors are able to openly recognize and discuss the challenges. It is only by having these conversations that businesses can start to identify transformational business models; models that will enable business to thrive by serving the markets of the future within the limits of the planet’s resources.

This report calls on companies to
1.do the math by looking openly and honestly at their dependency on natural resources and the associated limits on business growth;
2.take a leadership role by using their influence to change the conversation with key stakeholders; and
3.transform the business to one that will thrive in a resource-constrained environment.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the world has accepted the challenge of delivering growth in societal well-being while staying within the limits of the planet’s resources. Business sits at the nexus of this challenge. Future business success demands that business growth be delinked from increasing resource and environmental impact. Businesses that do so will be there to serve their customers and their shareholders. Those that do not will be outcompeted by disruptive new entrants that are more innovative and transformational.




Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets

by Samantha Putt del Pino, Eliot Metzger, Deborah Drew and Kevin Moss - March 2017




|More


The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet’s limits and generate stakeholder value in new and exciting ways.



Download 1 MB / pdf






publication


Contact:
Eliot Metzger

Projects:
Tomorrow’s Markets

Topics:
Business

Tags:
business

License:
Creative Commons




Executive Summary


There has been a sea change in business leadership on environmental and sustainable development issues over the past 20 years. Many CEOs speak “sustainability,” and many multinational companies have invested resources to build internal capacity on sustainability. It has become common for these companies to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and renewable energy goals and to address water risk and deforestation. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how the historic Paris Agreement on climate change or the United Nations’ wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals could have been cemented without the support of business.

However, underneath this welcome progress lies an uncomfortable truth: Most businesses’ growth is still predicated on more people buying more goods. The world will have more than 9 billion people by 2050, and the middle class will have swelled by 3 billion by 2030. On top of this, consumer expectations for yet more are being stoked by trends such as fast fashion. The rapid expansion of consumption-driven markets in the coming decades is the anticipated engine for continued business growth.

The problem is that the planet’s natural systems and finite resources cannot keep up. Studies cited in this report show that we are already at or close to the limits of the planet’s ability to provide. A continuation of business as usual would mean not just a slight additional strain, but three times our current consumption on the planet’s already overused resources.

Without a change to current business models in which growth is predicated on selling more goods to more people, environmental stresses will pose increasing business risks and costs. Ultimately, it will be a brake on business growth. Whether we look at consumer durables, fast-moving consumer goods, or consumables (this paper looks at all three), the pattern and risk of selling more stuff to more people is the same, and we see that efficiency improvements underway are not sufficient to counteract anticipated global growth.

Fifteen years ago, climate change was the “elephant in the corporate boardroom.” Now the conversation is so normalized that more than 200 companies have science-based carbon reduction targets, a dramatic increase in ambition. Business growth predicated on consumption is not surprisingly an elephant in the corporate boardroom. It is unco