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You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power – he’s free again.

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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I am free to write whatever I please without it detrimentally affecting my career prosects. Nobody can meaningfully threaten to ruin my career if I say something that they do not like. Nor can I be cancelled because I am not engaged or employed or contracted.

I am however powerless. I have no influence and no power by association. I am largely inconsequential – without obvious consequence.

One can say that my relative freedom comes at a price, power. Provided that I don’t break any laws or slander anyone I can carry on writing in this tiny unknown corner of the internet. I cannot exert power over anyone because I have no positional power to exert.

I have the power to choose what brand of tinned sweetcorn I use. That should not be too upsetting to anyone.

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It is also true that because I have no power to lose others cannot threaten loss of that power either. My position cannot be threatened because I don’t have one. I cannot be sacked or fired or shunned or ostracised.

As a “grey”, a sixty year old pensioner, I am almost invisible. I sat in a room of other greys at Eurofins this morning to have a blood sample taken for analysis. I was at the younger end of cohort. We gather at urology departments for prostate exams and at orthopaedics for joint replacements. We know the ins and outs of modern medical imaging. We move around during the 9-5 hours invisible to the employed and those hard at work. We are a hidden host of greys…faceless unnoticed.

It is difficult for people to have a lot of power over us because we are not overly susceptible to the normal socio-political leverage. We don’t have much to lose and very little to prove. We don’t care that much what people think, we are not worried about our precious reputation. We are not “on the make”.

Some people don’t like being powerless, they like to be big cheeses and order others around. They like to be boss, to have their will done. They do not understand that they are slaves to their own positional power. Being a big cheese too has a price.

It is difficult to understand that there is a weird kind of power in powerlessness. It is not to everyone’s taste…

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