thoughts on working, retirement, and pensions in this fucked up day and age

• Working during the best years of your life for a pension during the worst years is kind of a wack trade. Sure, it would be nice to have a steady, reliable income so you could live comfortably when you’re older, but your body only works well for so long before things start to hurt and your health starts to fail, so I think it’s probably best to strike a balance somehow. Maybe moderating how much you work in your best years and making sure to take enough time to really make enjoy your good health, and taking less of a pension later is a good option. Or working like a dog but retiring super early so you at least have a handful of good years left before your arthritis and back issues and fucked heart prevent you from doing anything but watching The Price Is Right and collecting a fat pension you can’t do shit with. Both of those sound reasonable to me.
• But it’s funny how pensions and the promise of lots of money later lure people in. I have co-workers who are obsessed with this stuff and are always thinking about how, if they work this much more and make that much more money for X number of years, they’ll make this much more per year on their pension. They’re always talking about it, always chasing a bigger pension that is 25-30 years down the road. They have fully bought into it, and I think that’s as nuts as a lazy sod being like “nah I’m not gonna work at all, I’m content to live on social assistance and lead an extremely meager existence” — they are equally extreme, just in opposite directions. But we only see the lazy sod as being unhinged, not the pension seeker. I think North American work culture has really done a bang-up job of programming us this way, to overvalue hard work and pensions.
• On top of wasting your good health working instead of living, there is also the risk of dying before you get to collect your pension. I’ve heard of lots of people in my line of work who died within their first year of retirement, and I can’t imagine a more cruel joke. Well, I guess dying while still young and not even getting to retire at all would be a more cruel joke, and I do hear of that happening occasionally too.
• I’m not convinced we are even going to be able to collect pensions by the time I reach 65. Pensions come from financial investments the government makes, and as climate change causes more and more chaos around the globe, I think it’s likely that many investments, and thus pensions, are going to start to collapse. So you could bust your hump so that you are “guaranteed” a big fat pension cheque each month, but if the world becomes a raging inferno and food and water and housing become harder to secure, you can bet all the investments and theoretical wealth around the world will dry up and/or mean nothing. Now there’s no money to pay you for all your hard work all those years ago. It’s a terrifying thought, but I think it’s a realistic one when you look at how extreme wildfires are getting, how more towns and cities are being ravaged by them each year, how we are seeing extended droughts everywhere (even in the winter now), how the lack of snow pack in mountains means rivers running low which means hydro dams can’t create enough electricity to power all the air conditioners we now need to avoid cooking in the summer. I could go on but you get the idea — when the world falls apart, simply surviving will be everyone’s priority. Paying you the pension you earned will not be anyone’s priority.
• Another aspect ties a few of these possibilities together: even if you don’t die soon or run into unpleasant health problems soon, if the world does dissolve into utter chaos due to climate change, it’s gonna be hard living then, period. I believe we are on that course (although the timeline for the real breakdown of society is up in the air — I bet it will be in my lifetime but of course I actually have no idea), and that’s part of why I think it’s so important to enjoy life now. Enjoy it while we still have some water, and 40 degree summer days only occur every for a week or so each year. Enjoy it before it’s your town and home that starts burning. Make the best of this while you can, because things are already alarming now, and they are steadily getting worse as we speak. Don’t wait 30 years to have fun because by then, joy might be pretty hard to find.

^{…before you’re engulfed in flames}

vindication, and vivian’s return

It’s August 10th, 2023. The world has already been scorched worse than ever before, and then yesterday I read in the news that a town in Hawaii was the latest place to burn to the ground. Now I see that BC is expecting a heat wave next week with temps in the mid to high 30’s. That’s fucking hot, almost heat dome hot. Grim.

And you know what? For whatever reason, today I’m not bothered by any of that. I actually just feel pretty darn vindicated, pretty “I told you so.” I think of all the years I raved like a lunatic about how humanity needed to change the way we live on this planet, how our wasteful consumerist culture wasn’t sustainable, and, well, here we are!

What’s my next smug prediction? That the heat here next week will be shitty, that there will be more fires, that people still won’t care, and this will continue to get worse and worse in the coming years until our established systems start to collapse. Then the real chaos will occur.

🙂

In other news, today my fugitive chicken Vivian reappeared after about a week of hiding who knows where. This is the hen who went exploring and got stuck behind a cabinet in the garage for 2-3 days before I happened upon her and had to spend a few hours bathing all the maggots off of her and treating her wounds. I noticed before Vivian disappeared this second time that she was acting a little broody so I thought it was possible she was hiding, sitting on a clutch of eggs somewhere, but wasn’t confident in that. I was more convinced she got stuck somewhere weird again and this time wasn’t lucky enough to be found. It actually made me feel awful for her, being trapped again and slowly dying like that, alone, confused, scared, in pain. So today when I threw a pizza crust out the window for the chickens and heard the distinct vocalizations of a broody hen and saw Vivian zip over and begin ravenously digging into said pizza crust, I was quite pleased. Dang chickens. They’ll break your heart a hundred times over.

middle of the night flood ramblings of an insomniac

I can’t sleep, so I blog.

It’s been raining buckets for days here, like biblical proportions. The other night when I was lying in bed going to sleep the rain was absolutely hammering the house, which I always enjoy, but I could swear I heard some other faint sound underneath all the relentless rain on the roof and window. I thought I heard a very dull “thump” every several seconds but it was so faint that I wasn’t convinced I actually heard it. At one point when I turned from one side onto my back, I couldn’t hear it anymore, plus our rubber garbage cans with their rubber lids are just outside our bedroom window and when it’s raining hard sometimes the drips on those lids sounds like the sound I thought I was possibly hearing, so I put it out of my mind, went to sleep, and then went to work yesterday.

At work, I bumped into someone who mentioned their basement was flooded. We have a crawlspace here at home so I thought, “huh, in the 13 years I’ve been in this house we’ve never had a problem with water down there but I should look anyway just to be diligent.” I got home and when I had a minute, I took a look and saw that the dull thumping sound I heard the night before was our numerous tupperware bins in the basement, floating around and bumping into each other. One section of the crawlspace was absolute chaos, with everything knocked off and all over the place, and the concrete floor was still damp. Luckily, there is a drain down there and it did its job and all the water was gone now, and it looks like there was only ever maybe 8-10″ of water and that was only at the deepest point by the drain. And it’s just concrete down there so no wood or drywall or insulation damage, and most of our shit was in tupperware bins so it’s mostly fine. There will just be a few boxes of Halloween costume shit and stuff like that to dry out or toss.

So really, we’re incredibly lucky. Last night Jenn and I were looking at pics of the flooding throughout the rest of the province — highways washed out, mobile homes being washed away, entire neighbourhoods with water up to the windows of their homes, communities cut off from the rest of the world due to mudslides or road damage — and I thought if all we have to do is spend a few hours cleaning up some shit we haven’t even looked at in years, we’ve got a lot to be grateful for. At least our home and neighbourhood isn’t completely destroyed, and we aren’t cut off from the rest of the world. There are many people who are going to be feeling the effects of this crazy weather for a long time to come so I really can’t complain. I always feel really lucky in these moments.

On the other hand, Jenn thinks the apocalypse is nigh. She pointed out the pandemic that has had far-reaching effects no one could have predicted, the heat dome this last summer that killed a shocking number of people, and now the worst flooding we’ve ever seen. I agree it’s been an exciting time lately but I want nuclear war and/or Mad Max-style chaos before I’m willing to call it an apocalypse. And I’d like that kind of shit to all go down at once too — this slow rollout of several unprecedented (lol) events over the course of 1-2 years isn’t cohesive enough for me to grant it such an auspicious title. I want it all happening either back to back or simultaneously, and all our support measures to completely collapse. THEN I’ll clap my hands and laugh shrilly, and call it an apocalypse.

I took some melatonin and valerian root extract when I started writing this, in the hope I’d feel tired enough to sleep by now. I don’t think I do feel that, but maybe? It’s worth a try though. Over and out.

a short lightning round

There’s a big rain and wind storm starting right now. The news and weather stations keeping calling it a “bomb cyclone.” I’ve never heard that dumb term before in my life. What’s wrong with “wind storm”? I feel like that term is as viable and easily understood as ever.

And before this was the “heat dome,” instead of heat wave. And in recent years there was a snowmageddon, and a snowpocalypse. Have millenials taken over weather news or something? What’s with all these new juvenile and over-the-top names, when we already have perfectly good ones?

Blech, I guess the weather news is just catering to more millenials and their love of this kind of thing. I bet the next big weather event will be called “ninja turtle pj’s 90’s nostalgia low muscle tone/soft-bodied/chubby gamer who calls in sick so they can binge watch Netflix super tsunami.” Whatever, I’m happily hunkered down here, cleaning the house and listening to chillwave radio while the “bomb cyclone” does its thing outside. I liked watching the wind blow all the leaves off the maple trees, they were swirling around and it was a very pretty, very classic fall scene.

Speaking of chillwave, for some reason this morning I spent a bunch of time listening to new-to-me metal: Primitive Man, Circle of Dead Children, Vermin Womb, Joy, Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire, I forget what else. None of it was bad but none of it did anything for me at all. Then I put on chillwave radio and it’s great, totally hits the spot. I wonder what’s going on with me. Do I just not relate to metal as much as I used to? I still hate the human race — more than ever before, actually — and I still would love to listen to music that captures all the awful feelings I have, so I don’t think I’m outgrowing metal. Yeah, that’s not it, because I’ve come across some metal I love lately (like Jupiterian, for example). I think I’m just too familiar with metal to accept any of it that doesn’t knock my dick into the dirt. Rob Mitchell said that once, I don’t know what it means but I like it.

Ok now to do some more house cleaning. I want to move the corn plant closer to the window in the guest room but also keep the fan somewhere that Liam can access it easily when he’s drumming. Decisions, decisions.