Retirement: Abducted and probed ...
As I near the age of 50, and accept that mostly, probably, I won't live to see 80 ... well, as I approach this moment I look back upon my life and especially at all the stupid time wasted pondering, planning, expecting, "retirement".
If you are currently retired, and happy, and over the age of 68, then wonderful - keep being happy. You are like those first clients of Bernie Madoff and no one holds this against you. I don't. Sure, my dad died when he was 68, never retired, basically worked himself to death and then died broke. He fought in WW2, and paid into Social Security, and that added a couple hundred bucks a month to my mom's retirement income - until her death many years later.
If you are nearing retirement, and expect to ride off into the sunset on your 401K? - well, I think you will be disappointed.
But here's the thing ...
The "good genetics and self-care" might work for a very small fraction of the US population, but for most of you the last few decades of your life will be an undignified and accelerated schedule of visitations where you'll be probed, prodded, administered pills and injections, cut into, scanned, and then dumped back into the world or, rather, your assisted living facility.
I don't care to live as someone that is more lab specimen than human - so, let death be catastrophic. Let it happen quickly, and let it be as painless as possible. If I get cancer? - no, I probably won't be getting chemo. But, given that I never intend to see a doctor again, not unless I'm unconscious (hence my desire to get a DNR tattoo on my chest), I wouldn't know if I were dying of cancer right now any ways ... could have cancer ... right now ... don't care, don't need to know. You look at the informational ads, the billboards, etc? - we could all have cancer and we need to HURRY to get our MRI or CT or PET to find out. Of all the healthcare business scams, medical imaging is one of the worst - every trend in hard-tech has been deflationary ... but those imaging machines (they're magical).
If you do intend to live to be 100, then accept that entropy will wreck your body and perhaps your mind. You will be manhandled and abused ... unless you have someone to take care of you, that will also respect you ... and that's hard without robots.
If you made the right choices, raised a family as humans are supposed to, you were kind, caring, wise, just ... raised'm right? - then maybe there will be someone there to help you - to at least provide a warm, dry, place to die, and a decent place for your ashes to be scattered.
But for those of us that didn't have kids, a family, the divorced, the broken, the alone? - their best case scenario is to die in their sleep in some flop house, but likely someplace worse. This does not bother me - this is the reality we have been given, and it's about time most of us got wise to it!
By the way: I find ZERO appealing about hospitals and assisted living facilities or dying in one of those nasty places ...
The good news? - I have no retirement money, and I think social security is a mega-scam (kind of on the scale of John Law and French money printing using the French Louisiana colonial lands as collateral), so there is no risk of me ending up in one of those places. I think the USA is bankrupt, perhaps the entire world, and the last ten years of "boom-boom" growth have been less than spectacular (and that's putting it nicely). So, whatever comes next, economically? - it's either going to be "unicorn awesome" or "hellish hell-scape suck'y", the temporary super-stability of this local maxima of human civilization is degrading, losing its stickiness. Whatever the specific causes of this disintegration of stability, the stability is going away - either State 1: super-robot-no-work'y OR State 2: most-of-the-people-you-know-will-not-be-alive-in-ten-years ... one of these "states" is coming, it will be sticky, and we'll cycle on it for a time, but the likelihood of "more of the same"? - I think this is low.
So please, by all means, plan ... plan away ... I love plans, and so does God.
But be wise, especially if you're alone - this may seem counter-intuitive, but for you, if you are lonely like me, isolated, then the strategy to follow is to LIVE LIFE and embrace it. Stop throwing money at bullshit ... stop feeding into a system of fear ... stop taking ALL 20 of those drugs ... start taking RSO or CBD oils ... you can make different choices, and at least have some happiness now ... or, you can believe in hope'y bullshit, and be swindled out of money ... and worse ... TIME.
At this point? - there is no upside to "saving for retirement", at least for me. I guess if I had faith in the system, if I believed I wasn't being lied to 24/7 by those good and kind managers of society? ... maybe I would care. I simply don't care. Our economic system is really just a networked system of scams and corporate welfare schemes and other kinds of socialist crap. No upside for me, I simply hope there's enough cash to pay to have my body burned - but hey, the compost dumpster works too ...
There is no retirement for me ...
And probably, likely, only anal probes for you ... best case.
