Ahahahah, retirement?!?
That ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, annoyed a gang of killer whales, suffered a meteor impact and sunk into a nuclear testing site. It caught fire shortly after.
I'm saving for it, but deep down I know they'll find me dead in my office at 90, and give me a disciplinary for the unmarked papers.
So they can dock your last check
This is already happening. Every store in my vicinity has people who look like they should be spending time with their grandchildren doing menial service jobs.
they might be doing it because they are bored. a low key part time job is a choice some folks make just to get out of the house. don't asssume it's because they are broke.
a lot of people straight up die after they retire because they have no purpose in life anymore, leading to depression and deaths of despair. my dad died like 1.5 years after he retired because all he did was sit around, drink, and gamble.
my grandparents both volunteered and did odd jobs to keep active in retirement and lived until their early 80s thanks to that, they had plenty of money.
they might be doing it because they are bored
Both/And. Retirement is boring. Retirement when you're broke is absolutely enervating. Menial employment kinda-sorta solves both problems. Although, its as much a pox on the employer as the employee. Elderly workers don't tend to be the most motivated or the most energetic. And when you're paying a pittance, they don't want to bend over backwards for you, either.
my grandparents both volunteered and did odd jobs to keep active in retirement and lived until their early 80s thanks to that, they had plenty of money.
I mean, "plenty of money" is sort of a YMMV situation. I've got two in-laws both with less than a million in savings. One lives frugally to the point of a asceticism while the other just seems content to YOLO until he's down to whatever SS has to offer. Idk how much money they're going to need in another ten years. Nevermind another twenty. But they're both in an inflationary vice that keeps squeezing tighter with every year.
My own surviving parent spends her more generous retirement savings endlessly fixing up the four bedroom house she refuses to sell, in between routine visits to the doctor to find a cure for being old. She might actually benefit from getting out of the house to do some bullshit retail work, except she's more of a management-type personality than a worker bee. I'm not worried about her finances nearly as much her mental health. But I could see a future in which she's suckered out of a big part of her fortune, simply because someone on the TV sold her on it in a moment of weakness.
Heroin overdose is my retirement plan at 70-80 depending on my health.
There used to be stories about grandma eating cat food to get by. So probably something like that.
That's why the western world is racing towards fascism.
It's either socialism or barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg put it.
The less sustainable this economic model becomes, especially now that the overexploited nations of the Global South start emancipating themselves and the fruits of imperialism become fewer and fewer, the more state mandated violence will have to be exerted upon us by the capitalist class to keep us from organizing against them.
There will be no retirement plans for most of us. We will die working. Those that will refuse to work themselves to death will be criminalized or slowly killed by the powers that be (existing as homeless is already virtually illegal). Those that are caught living in illegality will be put in prisons and will be loaned out to companies as prison labour (already legal in the US).
That is if we don't die in another Great War just to resuscitate the powers of the empire over the Global South.
Downvoted for self censorship
I see a couple of possibilities:
They're not going to retire. As they age, if they don't land on a lifelong career and progress the ladder at least a little bit, they'll get to work in physically demanding jobs which will destroy their body and they'll die before traditional retirement ages, or just at where older gens would retire. If they do land into some kind of lifelong career, they'll just work till they die. Think: 85 year old programmers looking up how for loops work again...
Another fun possibility is that they will retire after having started saving at a later date but having no children.
Another one is having small savings and moving to poor countries, Africa may see an influx of such persons once South East Asian countries stop letting them in.
Still time for revolutions and complete changes of systems following armed revolts or wars though..
many possibilities ahead.
Yeah that first one is what it was like before social safety nets and pensions were a thing for those who didn't have kids that could support them. It was enough of a problem to cause things to be changed
What's a "retirement age"? That's what's gonna happen.
oh it's gonna be a lot sooner than 30 years.
The vast majority of genx have had their retirement savings raided over and over again. 2000, 2009, covid, now - each saw people raiding their retirement to make ends meet short term. It used to work in a 'well, we pull funds out of this now but we'll be more diligent saving when times are good - "
the good times for most folks rarely came back. I know people in their late 40s and 50s who have basically nothing, and with little hope to keep their head above water, much less pour massive amounts of their income into making up for lost savings.
The great part is that they'll be blamed for it after all the shit they had stolen from them.
Climate change, advanced medical technology + health insurance incentives, political unviability/unsustainability of the federal government (in the US), and automation/AI will make retirement fundamentally different by then.
People in the rural areas or red states will basically be living in third world countries and will almost certainly be left behind as they demographically decay and become even more rabidly rightwing. They will continue to have outside influence on the federal government due to the mechanics of our electoral system, hollowing it out to the point of absurdity (even beyond what they've already done). However, because of the general incompetence stemming from this, the federal government itself will increasingly lose leverage over the economic powerhouse blue states. Workers who are still in rural areas or red states will basically become serfs and never afford to be able to escape to more functional areas of the country once this transition is complete. When climate related famines start happening, they will die off at the highest rates, but because of automation it will be unlikely to meaningfully disrupt the economy.
People will be forced to mass migrate away from the most dangerous climate areas and because the federal government is basically locked systematically into being eternally dysfunctional now, state level balkanization is inevitable. Likely resulting in Seattle, New York City, & most significantly Chicago becoming major city-states within a barely functioning federal system that they can largely just ignore outside the military and currency, using their massive economic leverage to negotiate their own sovereignty as well as influence surrounding more right-wing poor states laws with their own internal trade regulations.
Except California and other south western blue/purple states, whose fate is questionable due to climate change.
Automation and AI will fundamentally alter the job economy. White collar work will continue to exist but will pay barely any better than a basic service job and AI use will be mandatory/expected. Service jobs will exist but only in luxury spaces where people pay for human interaction in their dining and shopping experiences. Factory, farming, transport, will all become heavily automated and virtually cease to exist as jobs sectors. Leaving largely repair/mechanic/plumbing/hvac & construction (though even these job sectors will shrink with automation) as some of the only options left. Technology, Healthcare, and Legal services will continue to exist as high paying career paths for the lucky few but all the entry and mid-level stuff will get shrunk to basically nothing.
One of the few silver linings in terms of retirement itself & getting old: For people living in the more functional parts of the US (mainly in major cities in climate refuge zones) Government incentives to avoid having to pay out retirement when intersecting with currently rapidly advancing geroscience & birthrate decline will likely mandate anti-aging treatments. Most people will legitimately significantly live longer and healthier as aging's impacts are significantly mitigated and even partially reversed but they will likely be trading this for retirement and will be probably expected to work until death. And a huge chunk of their income will go straight to health insurance companies who are also incentivized to mandate anti-aging treatments to even qualify for health insurance as anti-aging treatments will probably be cheaper and more profitable than treating the pathology of aging (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc) which tends to lose them money. Make no mistake, everyone here is evil, they are just are the pragmatic kind of evil who'd rather exploit your labor indefinitely than have to spend a bunch of money paying to keep a patient alive who will never work again. But this will result in people living decades longer at least and in relatively good health... you'll just never stop working. Ever.
We will basically live in a strange mostly-dystopic lightly-utopic US that is likely very alien to the one we currently live in.
I feel like you'd enjoy FutureTimeline, or maybe already do
yup, and we're just starting to see the beginning; the oil shock caused by the pointless trump debacle in iran is already hitting farmers trying to fertilize fields, it's going to have multiple waves of effect in the coming months when those crops are blighted by an increasingly hostile climate, then when the farmers don't have enough resources to harvest their crops and get them to market.
we're just at the beginning and shit's about to get real.
And almost all of it is self inflicted.
Bold of you to assume any of us will be able to "retire"
I'm pretty sure I'll be selling candies at a bus station just to stay alive.
It's gonna be like skid row in LA but in every town in America. Idk might be kinda fun, I'll definitely try to make the best of my golden years.
If you worry about that, wait until you see the current AI slaughter
I'm in the tech sector looking for a new job
300+ resumes sent so far, got a single intro call
5 Tara ago I had more calls than resumes sent, as recruiters picked up. Now? nothing
If I lose my current job, I'll basically have the option to become homeless or move to another country
Fun times
the current AI slaughter
That's not A(rtificial) I(ntelligence). That's A(ctually) I(ndonesian).
Chevron just laid off its IT department and sent all the jobs to call centers in East Asia, and it is going exactly as bad as you might expect. My own company tried to eliminate its DBA office and send the work to a subcontractor of a subcontractor. It's now the worst performing department in the office.
This isn't a new policy. I've worked at half a dozen firms who have all tried to outsource their work to save a buck. And it saves maybe half a buck, then starts costing them their clients in droves.
5 Tara ago I had more calls than resumes sent, as recruiters picked up. Now? nothing
I don't know how long a Tara is, but that sounds pretty nice for you. I remember the '08 and '14 and '21 IT markets being particularly rough. But then the rebound had people getting vacuumed up out of middling back office positions with five figure signing bonuses and 50% salary adjustments.
The prediction of The End Of All The Jobs gets made on the eve of every downturn. Then we get a slew of "Nobody Wants To Work Anymore" apoplexy from the business community when they realize they cut into their own bones and can't function properly anymore.
If I lose my current job, I’ll basically have the option to become homeless or move to another country
Unemployment claims typically last 26-52 weeks by state. If you're that worried about making rent, might want to downgrade your unit now rather than waiting for the pink slip. But also, consider that the COVID layoff/rebound wave was measured in months and - thanks to the wave of Boomer retirements - resulted in a labor market tighter than when it began. Generally good for anyone looking for a raise or a bigger bonus.
Long term, I predict a violent revolution of the young overthrowing the tyranny of the old.
Aging societies tend to divert resources from the young to the old. People vote for their own interests. When retirees outnumber parents, more money goes to retirees and less to kids. This lowers the birth rate even more and continues the spiral. In increasingly aging societies, young people face the prospect of having to pay a lifetime of ruinously high taxes (far higher than their elders did) to pay for the retirements of the old that outnumber them. And they'll do this knowing that they themselves will never have a retirement of anywhere near the quality of the retirements they're being taxed to death to fund.
Long term, we're entering a very dangerous situation in developed countries. We have a trifecta of three dangerous conditions:
These are the conditions that historically brew revolutions. People take up arms typically when they see no hope for the future or feel they have nothing to lose. The young may not be able to outvote the old. But they certainly can outshoot the old.
As someone on the downswing of this seesaw, I welcome a rebalancing.
I think a big issue for working class folks who can even afford to prep for retirement is we don't know how much we'll need. And basically the fewer rights and social safety nets you have, the more money you need to attempt to insulate yourself from the ravages of capitalism.
If we had more socialist policies to keep everyone relatively comfortable even the poor, then working people wouldn't have to be so mercenary about building their nest egg (which will never be big enough to be totally safe anyway).
My retirement is wandering out into the deadly heat wave so my children don’t waste water on me
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