Gen Z Is Thinking of Retirement Too Early and All Wrong
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This makes no sense. Chronic stress and burnout are closely associated with working. Depression and anxiety are health issues that can often be exacerbated by working. In all of these cases ceasing to work, if you can, would be a very reasonable thing to decide to do.
Anecdotally, I've seen men in my life go from healthy, vigorous working men to shells of their former selves in retirement. It's as if retirement aged them fifteen years in two real years.
If you idle your car, it causes more damage to the engine than if you drive it.
Or is like a big picture, being financially secure but aimless, no boss, no work, and being unstressed isn't a way to live, and that you actually need stressors on your life to be a complete human being that doesn't age 15 years in 2.
I'm in the middle of FIRE-ing, but from your experience, it sounds like maybe that's not what I want. I'm willing to buy that, I've heard that getting what you want is can be a curse. I'd love to hear and learn from someone who managed to on what the traps and actual pitfalls are.
Stories of lottery winners who lost it all only take me so far.
People need purpose, no doubt. And while I’m sure there are people who imagine retirement as sitting on a beech with a drink all day, for lots of people FIRE just means being able to pursue the things you want without expectation that they will be lucrative.
Okay..
>Millennials inherited a job market offering unstable employment
>Chronic stress, burnout, depression and anxiety are all factors that could be triggered by work
>However, there are many who “retire” from one job just to pivot into another line of work that perhaps better aligns with creative passions, interests, or doesn’t pay well. Or one person retires and their spouse works, which makes the argument of retirement complicated.
Somewhere along the line, the author forgot to mention how one can even get to that 'sustainable career and life' reliably, and only mentioned several reasons why it won't happen.
Maybe throw in a dose of American exceptionalism too, for the folks in the thread implying that, well, I shouldn't quote that phrase, that's tacky, but we'll just glorifying, justifying and seemingly promoting the soul-suckingness of work because their own soul is devoid of any individual or social pursuits outside of work.
Brilliant comment! Would give you 1000+ points if I could!
The older generations will experience (if not learn) the consequences of voting selfishly all the time, and that price will be paid, sooner or later.
I agree, the price will be paid. But, not by the older generation...
More power to these folks!
"Pursue higher meaning and purpose" is still striving, basically a different face of the hustle culture you speak of. I'm already FIRE, but I basically putter around most days. I don't think there's any particular higher meaning or purpose that makes sense for me to chase.
Anyway, back to enjoying life [outside the United States] where this sort of delusional stockholm-syndrome self-convincing projectory nonsense is far less common. I'm sure the author would be so disappointed with how little of my life is driven my anxiety over my status, or the fact that I'm comfortable living within modest means. Oh nooo!
> Even with that consideration, the notion that 37% of people who want to retire early haven’t started the process
37% of gen Z. I have to imagine there was some miscommunication between the author and editor since this paragraph and the one above contradict each other.
> After the newness of freedom wears off, you’re once again left with the same mental health issues that were pervasive in your previous life.
The problems of not having enough money are not just mental health issues in disguise. It's all well and good to live for today until your job is made redundant and, the rent's due.
> Retirement isn’t typically seen as a career transition, but a point after which you no longer exchange your time and labor for a paycheck.
There's a difference between working because you want to and working because you have to. It's upsetting when I go to McDonald's and there's an elderly person at the window. They're not happy. But plenty of people open restaurants when they retire and are happy.
> The only way to have joy and contentment in retirement, at any age, is to truly live your life en route.
You have to plan significantly far ahead to enjoy retirement. Not that you need to know what you'll be doing when retired, but you need to build up the resources.
I think this bewilderment at fire comes from (1) a blindness to the difficulties the financially-poor elderly face -- go to Walmart or fast food sometime you'll see what I mean (2) a lack of appreciation for the security a pension, which can't be relied upon anymore, used to provide (3) an underestimation of how volatile the jobs market will be over the next 50 years
I would agree that most of the time, this is true.
Every now and then, though, there's an elderly person doing it because all their friends have passed away and they're still healthy and it's the only way to interact with people on a regular basis.
They use techniques such as forced stack ranking to keep you on your toes. You could have done the best thing for the company but if your direct manager doesn't like it, you are screwed.
What kind of a life is this? Fuck it. Just save, invest and FIRE. Let these execs and managers do the real work themselves to earn money.
Also, great, good point, so what. "Yes, I advocate for the soul-crushing status quo because my life would be nothing without work". Sounds like a you problem. Meanwhile, younger generations that, oh I don't know, have their own pursuits, don't really jive with that.
Opinion discarded.
Yeah, may have to double-check those poll results…
They probably polled the kids of rich parents.
Macaroni and cheese.
Bloomberg and being completely out of touch and deliberately misunderstanding the younger generations to please Boomer readers.
Salt and papper.
I'm now old enough to have experienced being around a lot of retired boomers.
You really need to understand the distinction between the state of being retired and the lifestyle that being retired enables. This lifestyle was previously only available to non-retirees if they were independently wealthy or self-employed in a small subset of industries.
I know many retirees that are now busier and happier than they were when they were working!
Some people will pursue FIRE and be unsuccessful (or it will take a really long time). And they will be miserable during that time.
Some other people will quickly succeed, scratch that traveling itch, and then find themselves bored with no idea what to do next.
The article merely points out that building a lifestyle in which you are happy and fulfilled without retirement is now possible for a larger group of people. It's excellent advice. Go spend some time around retirees - you will definitely find that a LOT of them are unhappy, even if they have plenty of money.
No. [explicative] nah.
I definitely know one of those. She complains about being bored.
And I just...don't know how. I think many of them just never got into anything. No hobbies. No activities outside the home aside from the occasional vacation. They spend their weekends passively watching TV, but not really interested in what they're watching.
Me, I have a Steam game backlog pages long. I have an RC car that I'd like more time to play with. I want to become a better drone pilot. I'd like to have a better kept house.
Most importantly, I want to live without needing an alarm clock 5 days/week.
But with limited free time, I feel like I need to min/max my time spent not working. Like...I don't want to do the dishes, I've only got 3 hours until I need to go to bed if I want to get 8 hours of sleep!
Most _people_ don't like their jobs. This isn't generational, this is just how it is. When people have to work to survive and there are limited jobs out there, it's natural that people will complain about working and want to retire early.
Gen Z is coming into the working world in an era very different and in many measures worse off than the working worlds Boomers or Millennials did. Housing is more expensive than ever, healthcare costs are continuously ballooning too. And the US minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Companies are proud when they offer $15 an hour, which is now a starvation wage in most areas. Meanwhile, a lot of Gen Z is deciding if they're going to college and if so, how much debt they are willing to take on. 17 and 18-year-olds are deciding if they will take out potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to go to school, another sector that has ballooned significantly over time.
Maybe let's not blame the literal children here, and instead push for changes in our government. We need price caps for medicine and healthcare yesterday, we need more affordable housing, we need to increase the minimum wage, and we need to slow the ever-increasing costs of education.
Finally, we need to consider that the 40-hour work week is arbitrary and has only existed since the '40s. Many companies have tried 4 day works weeks to much success and maybe, just maybe, as technology develops at increasingly faster rates around us people will start to realize that not everyone needs to work 40 hours a week to get their job done (this is already exceedingly common in office jobs) and then maybe it won't be so common for younger people to want to retire so early. A lot of jobs aren't really that bad, it's the amount of time per week that gets to people.
You can't just couch-surf to 65 and collect a free paycheck unless you're also playing SSDI fraud (which has its own earned-income credit system too, IIRC).
https://eand.co/if-the-point-of-capitalism-is-to-escape-capi...
ETA: often this work is volunteerism, which does not have a capital incentive in the individual case here.
No one wants to work in the style of American capitalism, so this is one thing that people stop doing, for sure. In prior systems, no matter what you did, you always had to keep doing things you didn’t want to do (assuming one isn’t in love with perpetual farm labor).
If we are talking about Garden of Eden levels of natural abundance hunter gathering, then that is surely peak human lifestyle, but I don’t know of any scalable system that remotely compares to that.
But I do oil changes (and otherwise maintain my car) because I like being able to travel dozens of miles each day. So I gain a responsibility to take care of my car to be able to continue to live like this.
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Do you like hot showers in the morning? Well, you better build, and maintain, a home with pipes, drain, and water heater.
Do you like computers? Electricity? Etc. etc.
Each luxury device we own today is not strictly necessary. But the bulk of work today is maintaining our luxuries.
I think it does. Many people working office jobs are barely doing anything, esp. compared to manual labor in hellish factories just 100 years ago. And, for that puny amount of office work, we live so much better than people 100 years ago.
Also, it's currently possible to work less by just not buying top of the line consumer option. It's perhaps harder in the US, where such options does not exist, but other parts of the world have e.g. specific brands of cheap, crappy cars you could buy and work less in consequence.
We have those busy work office jobs because capitalism demands us to make capital. Ideally, as our basic needs are met (housing, plumbing, food, etc...) we wouldn't need busy work jobs. Even if we do need busy work jobs, then consider this: when I worked as a programmer I did so 5 days a week as a web developer. Given modern web frameworks and the abundance of open source packages, I could easily accomplish in a day what would have taken a web developer a week or more to accomplish ~20 years ago. So the question is, if I'm 5x more productive, then why am I working 5 days a week? Why not 1 day a week for the same pay? Ideally, we would not classify the work week in terms of hours worked, but rather by productivity.
Because your competitors have also become 5x more productive. If they hadn't you could work 1 day a week for the same pay.
This is exactly what is happening, but on a slower and more noisy timescale that you'd expect. That's why we work less than people 100 years ago, and yet make so much more money.
Instead of us walking down to the stream to drink like our hunter/gatherer forefathers did before us, we create pipes that send water anywhere we wish to settle.
The creation of automated pipes / automated water movement has created an entire industry (plumbing), as people move further and further away from streams. And into deserts even, requiring more and more plumbing to even live.
That's the story of technology. We continuously are depending on more-and-more of it. Be it a modern technology stack like a computer, or a 2500-year-old technology like plumbing / aqueducts.
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The bulk of all jobs today is in the maintenance of this automation. HVAC to automate our air conditions. Plumbing to automate our water. Cookware to automate food preparation (fast foods, chefs, etc. etc.). We don't grind grain ourselves anymore, we use flour that's been processed ahead of time in mass.
And we all specialize upon our particular niche. And around Hacker News, we focus on the most abstract of automations: automation of communications, computers, mathematics. We write programs that send messages faster, simpler, easier through various social networks.
You know, instead of running those messages by hand, or by horse. We have wires that talk to a computer router that talks to a network that... eventually delivers the message.
Is that good news for the plumber you know?
Probably not unless he (and millions of others) are able to figure out how to survive when their labor is worthless.