me_irl

Retirement is not an age, it's a financial status.

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.

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.

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.

30 years? It's happening right now!

https://thehill.com/business/personal-finance/3991136-nearly-half-of-baby-boomers-have-no-retirement-savings/

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.

What's a "retirement age"? That's what's gonna happen.

Probably something like this.

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:

1. The young will be ruinously taxed to fund retirements of existing elderly, a retirement far more generous than they will ever receive.
2. The young will be completely shut out of political power due to being outnumbered by the old.
3. The young are the only ones actually capable of fighting in a war.

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.

The same thing that happens every generation to the god-awful number of people who never had hope of retiring to begin with.

Bold of you to assume any of us will be able to "retire"

It'll look like a lot of old people working themselves to death, or dying on the street AND future conservative politicians pointing backwards and saying "This is all because you voted for {insert socialist or left leading etc government here} but if we had have conserved X, Y, and Z like we said back then this wouldn't have happened. Only my conservative/far right or variant of nazi party can get us out of this trouble."

It's what they've been doing for decades, and the fucking idiots keep on believing that bullshit decade after decade.

A lot of them will work shit jobs until they keel over delivering Doordash or shouting "welcome to Walmart."

Exactly the way the system was designed.

Downvoted for self censorship

My retirement is wandering out into the deadly heat wave so my children don’t waste water on me

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.

I'm 50; when I started my career pretty much everyone a little older than me had pensions and I arrived right as the pensions were being phased out. It was a running joke when they would talk about pensions and I would say "what's a pension?"

So my age group will be retiring in 15 years, not 30 years. Almost everyone I know my age has a meager 401k and nothing else.

The streets are going to be flooded with people too old to work and no retirement income in much less than 30 years...

There used to be stories about grandma eating cat food to get by. So probably something like that.

Don't worry, climate collapse will render industrial agriculture extremely difficult in the current form and society will collapse from there. It's really a tossup as to who gets it worse, but the whole world will be thrown into chaos and any retirement plan that you DO have will be obliterated and stolen by technocrats and before they too crash and burn.

I wish that it were any other way but every single time I see something about the climate, it is scientists discovering that things are actually happening sooner and worse than they thought. This has been happening for at least 15 years. What was once "2100 or beyond" became "by 2100" became "by the end of the century" became "around mid century" became "by 2050" became "it could happen any day. It may have already tipped over the edge"

I'm tired.

Bold of you to assume that retirement age means anything or is some fixed time when one has to stop working, working becomes illegal or that the society is even stable enough to allow such a thing.

We're all just going to keep on working until death.

Poverty. Mass, wide scale poverty.

In 30 years? Its happening now to anyone that ever had a medical emergency or a layoff . I think the administration just made it easier for people to borrow against their already meager retirement

Same thing that happens to the people who have no savings now when they reach state retirement age. They simply can't afford to, and have to continue working.

Unfortunately retirement is as much a financial state as it is an age.

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.

30 years? it’s happening already! But hey at least Israel has free education and free health coverage and they are killing all their neighbors and taking their homes on our dime. It’s not like the most powerful military in history is being cucked by israel!

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.

A lot of suicides

Im guessing prison would make a decent retirement plan for many. Make a game of it to see how many billionaire pedophiles you can take down before they catch you. The "retirees" may even luck out and get a jury that gives a "not guilty" verdict and can then make money off a book deal or something.

Boardroom suicide bombings probably.

I truly don't know what my wife and I are going to do. I can't seem to hold down a job for more than a year at a time, and when I do have work there is nothing left beyond bills, food, and car. It's just too much.

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

I went off a medication a couple years ago but I didn't tell anyone. I still get it filled routinely, my benefits pay for it. It's hidden away in a safe place for when it's time for me to go. I figure maybe 8 more years.