The best advice I heard in my 20s don’t spend your raise. If you can live of X and now you make Y, still live of X and put everything you don’t spend in a few ETFs. Don’t try to be smart en beat the market, don’t buy stocks, etc.
Just 3 or 4 ETFs that cover the world. Or if you want to be smart read up on the permanent portfolio or all weather portfolio.
You don’t need a more expensive car if your current car still works, you don’t need a new phone every 2 years, etc. Buy what can’t be fixed, don’t pay for upgrades that are not really going to improve your life.
Also buy things that don’t expire (toiletpaper, dishwasher soap, etc) in bulk when the offer it really good.
You don’t have to live as a bum but you can still make sure you don’t overspend.
My retirement plan is to suicide bomb some government structure.
Narrator: It didn’t.
The retweeters went on to live in an even more dystopian future where money still exists, but with no savings to endure a strike.
Once we switch over to bottle caps as currency, I’ll be both instantly rich and utterly distraught at the potential wealth I squandered over the years.
Civilization is resilient
It wont end just because of a couple problems that could kill billions of people
Honestly, true.
We are indeed going to face massive, catastrophic changes to society broadly.
But they will take place over such timespans that most people are just going to get used to things being shitty and the death-tolls from storms, flooding, starvation, forced-migration… it will just be more dull noise in the background for decades and decades.
The “nothing ever happens” shitheads are in the middle of things happening, but our attention-spans have been so thoroughly eroded that people don’t think anything is real unless it literally shakes them out of their bed.
I had a conversation with an older dude this May. It was +30°C in Germany and Germany doesn’t really do air conditioning. The older dude, while sweating bullets, was telling me that we don’t need to do air conditioning because we rarely have high temperatures.
It was +30°C in May. It was +30°C in May for the last 10 years. I think that dude will die of heatsroke, and till his very end he will believe that nothing ever happens and things are exactly the same as they were when he was a child.Well, we do air conditioning more and more nowadays…
Yet, buildings that are being built today don’t have it, and you need to spend a small fortune if you want to have a split system.
People also have this idea that collapse is this overnight thing, like a zombie apocalypse. But while that does sometimes happen historically, a gradual degradation is much more common and realistic. What that actually looks like on the ground is just a general decline in the standard of living all around. In an advanced capitalist economy, we rarely have actual shortages, where the supply of goods simply runs out. Rather, whenever the supply of anything gets tight, the price soars until demand drops.
As things degrade, everything’s just going to become ever more expensive. People used to eating beef will have to switch to chicken. Then they’ll switch to tofu. Eventually just rice and beans. And as prices rise, the world’s poorest, a few million at a time, will find that they can’t even afford rice and beans, and no one will be able to afford to give them food aid either.
Housing will gradually become ever-more expensive. We have a finite capacity to construct housing. And as natural disasters destroy more and more homes and infrastructure, we have to spend more and more of that finite capacity just rebuilding what we’ve lost, rather than constructing new homes. This drives the cost up ever-higher. People switch from owning their home, to renting an apartment, to living with roommates, to abandoning the nuclear family entirely and living in large extended households again.
This is what collapse actually looks like. Prices on everything slowly rise until we look around and realize that the global population has been cut in half by starvation and all but the riches survivors are living in penury.
well… certainly not in so many words. but I definitely don’t expect to get that old.
I’ll look pretty dumb if it should happen.
If you’re right, you won’t know it, but if you’re wrong…
When we met with a financial advisor to interview her to find out if we wanted to work with her, I told her that I’m doing this because I know it’s the right thing to do, not because I think we have any future.
I just want to live long enough to fuck an alien
I just want to live long enough for the anti-aging vaccine to be invented.
BRB, off to go wish for more wishes…
Have fatal illness. 2 or so years left. Suckers!
I admire that you’ve got a sense of humour about it. How are you holding up?
the drugs are still sort of working.
If so 2 years later would you like to not miss a fascist dictator?
I plan to die fighting for the revolution.
In all honesty, my retirement plan is to go out with a bang in an act of left-wing extremist terror. We have seen way too little left-wing extremist terror in the past few years.
In another screenshot I once read “my retirement plan is to die in the socialist revolution” and I think that’s exactly what I hope for
That’s been my plan for years, but now it’s morphed into something more like, “my retirement plan is to die in the American underground fighting the local Nazis.”
Don’t worry. They gonna raise the retirement age.
65? 65?!? My expected retirement age is 7-goddamn-2 and considering that’s in the 2050s shit could happen to that plan in the meantime…
One of my saving graces with being born into a time where retirement seems to become a myth for my generation and younger, is that I really like working. I look to my mom who has failed at retiring 6 or 7 times at this point and I just know that that will be me if I live that long. I dunno if I could ever sit back and be like “I have done my part, now I get to chill until I die”.
I would honest to God become suicidally depressed, and holy hell am I glad my brain is wired like that because feeling the opposite way in this current state of the western world must be a nightmare. If you hate your job and hate working and just want to be able to retire someday but you most likely never will due to the state of the world, I feel so fucking sorry for you. That sucks.
My father was a workaholic. My brother and I were both worried he’d become depressed when he retired. Nope. He created all kinds of work for himself by starting a million projects. He said he never had enough time for all that he wanted to do. It was a great relief.
I’m glad to hear that for your father! ❤️ my dad has also been a little project-machine gun since he retired. He is always doing something, which is awesome to see.
Personally, I know that if I was given all the time in the world like that, I would wither and feel completely hopeless. I don’t have a drive to start things if it is only for myself. For me, working is a relief because I’m needed by others and I feel a purpose.