- 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.
crimson highway 