Thursday, December 12, 2024

The Elusion Of Retirement

Retirement is supposed to be, at best, the attainable, blissful follow-up to the career that one has invested perhaps decades into.  It is the outcome that hopefully makes all the hours and years of labor, planning, financial caution, and willpower worthwhile.  Ideally, no one would ever need to end their retirement to supplement their current savings by returning to the workforce, nor would anything but the most tumultuous economic circumstances on a regional, national, or international level threaten their freedom to rely on what they have accumulated during their years of professional labor.  Maybe they even have relatively passive income sources set up at this point (though no income is purely passive, one way or another).

A genuine, lasting retirement, much less the ideal kind, becomes more and more elusive every time high compensation is locked behind a potentially shrinking number of jobs where arbitrary years of experience and educational background are major barriers for applicants.  It becomes more elusive every time inflation erodes the purchasing power of whatever amount of money someone possesses.  Faced with job scarcity, layoffs, inflation, and low wages/salaries, many workers could find that their retirement will have to be delayed or it will never be fully experienced at all.  Terrible workplaces might deter more people from working to begin with, or at least in certain companies or industries.

There are ways to strive for financial/material security in retirement that do not involve overworking oneself at multiple jobs or in predatory corporate environments for years and years.  The rewards are simply lesser.  Retiring to live more carefully on a smaller than desired amount of money or non-financial resources is an option, though this lacks a greater degree of security.  If one is relying on dwindling savings that were on the smaller side to begin with, many crises could force one back into the labor pool one has escaped from.  However, even if one has a vast fortune in reserve on top of many material necessities and luxuries, it is not as if all of that wealth could not be destroyed quickly by circumstances beyond one's control.  A smaller retirement fund just makes this more difficult to guard against.

Having a significant other who was also able to work and contribute to mutual savings is another option leading up to retirement, but should the right disability befall them, they would not longer be able to generate an income during what would be their working years, and whether or not their partner has retired, resources would have to be used to take care of them.  Dating or marrying primarily or solely for economic reasons is asinine, of course; the only valid reasons to commit to someone in this way are ideological and affection-based ones (other things, like sexual attraction and wealth, are great additional benefits, but only if the other factors are already present).  In America, the contemporary expenses and inconveniences of healthcare make this more of a burden--not the person who is sick or disabled, but the trials of providing for them in a country dominated by America's delusional version of capitalism.

There are many factors involved with a careful, safe retirement, and unfortunately, they are becoming more overwhelming and resting more beyond the control of many workers.  The elusion of retirement is that the ability to permanently end one's professional labor is becoming more challenging to attain, if one is lucky enough to be able to pursue it.  To live a life unpolluted by the social constructs of the workplace and the demands and Irrationality of American capitalism is itself a luxury in one sense.  With a more stable economy and greatly amplified capacity to save money from a wider range of jobs, all while still living a healthy, comfortable life in the meantime, retirement would not be so far from the grasp of as many people at this time.  Slavery to abusive corporations, economic reductionism, and financial worry will have to be alleviated on a broad scale before the freedom to retire to be enjoyed by truly anyone who is monetarily responsible.

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