The British pensioners I know live quite frugally.
Discussion
That's good news. Maybe the UK isn't as borked as I thought. Here in the US, 70-80 year olds live in houses 4x bigger than they need, have brand new RVs and boats in their driveways, and spend half the year on cruises, while paying "house sitters" (millenials with degrees they were never allowed to use because there's no jobs in their specialized fields) to take care of their pets while they're away. And the whole economic and political system is designed to perpetuate this absurdity.
A bit of a tangent, but this shows how hard it is to be objective. What i thought was well reasoned analysis may just be misleading insights derived from personal observations
True. But personal observations generally lead to better analysis than impersonal observations, since the latter involves trusting someone else. All the information coming at you is actually more like noise, and it becomes information via your own perspective finding a way to orient it to your own observations. Or, as I just heard Professor Vervaeke say in a video, "I can't be unbiased, that's not a thing."