The cannon life It's a song by the Madrid-based group Alcalá NorteBut it is also the expression chosen by journalist Analía Plaza to title her book – published by Temas de Hoy – and to describe the living conditions of a very specific generation as they reach old age: the baby boomersThose who, in the case of Spain, were born between 1957 and 1977. According to the data and profiles collected by the author, these individuals have already paid off their homes, enjoyed more stable careers than their children, and are now retiring with good pensions and a wealth of cultural experience.

We read it in the ARA (with our reading glasses, which we just lost and found). The dossierChallenges and policies in the age of longevity, published this Monday by CaixaBank Research, tells us that "to finance pensions it will be necessary to postpone the retirement age to 68 years." It seems that the fault lies with us, with the children of the baby boom, that not only are there too many of us to collect, but on top of that, when we reached the age of procreation, we didn't follow the example of our hardworking parents. My parents had six. I had one. Where are you going? In my childhood and adolescence, marked by the series Cone eight is enough (about the extended family of a widowed journalist, father of eight, living in Sacramento and making ends meet), we were often joked about, which we all picked up on as adults. "You're a oginet", they told you. It meant that your parents, poor, at the time without a cell phone, without Netflix, without heating, without cheap Japanese restaurants, had to spend the boredom and the cold in bed making love (hidden from their grandparents and the whole gang of children they already had). In the absence of condoms, the famous method of Dr. Ogino, which was based on abstaining the days close to ovulation and doing like rabbits the rest of the month. It was a method, of course, that failed more than an umbrella bought on the subway, and hence the children of the method that didn't work were called oginetes.

The Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security has proposed to the social partners -main trade unions and employers' organisations- a temporary increase in contributions to fill the reserve fund, better known as the pension fund, which currently only has around 2,000 million euros, and to cope with the increase in the cost of benefits once the baby boomers retire, the generation born in the 1960s, which is the largest and which will also generate higher pensions than the current ones due to their working life.

The Social Security Minister, José Luis Escrivá, has taken 24 hours to admit that he was wrong in the statements he made on Thursday about the pensions of the baby boomer generation. While yesterday he assured that this generation born between the 50s and mid-70s would have to choose between collecting a lower pension or working more years, this Friday he has hastened to correct his own words. "Yesterday I did not have my best day", he admitted during the press conference to assess the unemployment data for June. "[My words] were misunderstood, I was thinking out loud", he added.

The pension system has long been in question. The structural unemployment of the Spanish economy, much higher than the European average (and aggravated by the last two crises, together with the progressive precariousness of the labour market in recent decades, which has harmed not only workers but also Social Security contributions), has led the pension system to a situation that is unsustainable over time. To this we must add two more factors. One, which is obvious, is the lengthening of life expectancy: many people live 30 or more years after retirement. The other factor is that the baby boom generation, which in Catalonia and Spain is the generation born between the late 50s and early 70s, is now approaching retirement age on a massive scale, which has made it imperative to act before there is a collapse. It is no longer enough to keep chasing the ball forward. The problem is already upon us, it is time to face the situation. And Europe has become serious. For all these reasons, the reform that the Spanish government has now introduced cannot surprise anyone. We were warned.