On retirement

I don't think retirement is a human right. If you live in a rich state that sells oil and agrees to oay a share of that to fund your last 30 years... Then please, enjoy. Likewise, if you work hard and make yourself a fortune and want to stop working, then by all means. Also, If you raised great children that want to take care of you then please, do enjoy your great sucess. But the idea that tax payers have to pay for your retirement in hopes that other tax payers pay for their retirement is ludicrous. I'm not raising a moral issue. It's just an economic issue.

This is one of those thing that are impossible to clawback one people had them. 

The only reason people believe this nonsense is that a government told them that it's possible. It's an irresistibly good deal. It's so good that it suspends the brains of the general population, and a great many skeptics.

There's something so cruel about the promise of retirement. It's a way to get people to extend themswlves professionally beyond their means. If you didn't know you'd retire in a certain number of years, you wouldn't push as hard. You'd adopt a mantaimable pace. It also gets people to accept lower wages and stop planning for their future because the mighty government does that for them.

The perfect life of many years on this planet should be filled with productive employmemt for most of it. You start working and only stop right before you die. People would work more when they're younget because they can. There are part of their lives, maybe a decade or more when it's all about work. There are other times where they work less, maybe when they have young children. At the age of 65, people would probably have to hold fewer working hours, maybe work 6 hours a day or maybe 4 days a week or maybe 8 months a year. But the idea of not working at all ever again is not just preposterous, it's also anti-human. 

I don't want to write about the origins of this idea and why if it ever made sense, it now definitely doesn't. The singular point that I'm pushing is that: you're not entitled to it. The same way you're not entitled to being rich. It's nice if we can give you that, but when we can't afford it, wr have to reevaluate how out culture works.

We spend 65 years teaching people and filling them with expensive, invaluable experience and knowledge, and then someday, we tell them to go home and not come back. Oh, and I have to pay for that but that's a topic for another day. 

Isn't it a more sustainable approach to not burn people in the first place? To employ them in such a way that they don't even want to retire? Every lawyer, journalist, writer knows about this. But it's hard to imagine for a factory worker. Well... I can totally imagine it for all workers. If you can't image yourself doing something forever than it's not worth doing. If you don't have options, that's unfortunate but there's nothing special about it. People don't have options in many things that they commit to for life.

I'm not paiting that pictire f despair of the 65-year old dreading every day because they can't rest. They should be able to rest. Some of that should come from their planning for their future where they can accept lower wages in exchange for less work, some of that through their family, some of it can even be through state-run pension programs. No issue there. Whatever you saved, we invest it for you and you can now enjoy your own money. We can even susidize it with other people's money, but most of it has to be your own. The current pension programs pay people stupid pensions.