My dad retired shortly before he turned 60. Sadly, he passed away from a stroke shortly after turning 60.
Pretty sad.
Regardless, he was pretty much "set for life" when he stopped working, thanks to a life in which our family cost of living would have been indexed to 100, and the income from his job (after taxes) would have been around 110-115.
In other words, once all the basics from mortgage payments, insurance, foods and clothing and education had been covered there was still money left over to invest and put away for retirement.
Growing up as part of Gen-X — albeit the very oldest wave — there was always this cautionary subtext playing in the background of our existence, that we were going to be the first generation in a really long time to be worse off than our parents.
As life turned out, the majority of my dad's estate passed on to his second wife (AKA not my mother) and she lived on to the ripe old age of 90+, always pretty well provided for, considering she also had her own money.
Because I was very young and getting a good education at the time he died, I'm sure my Dad figured that I would grow up and become successful and build my own life, and I don't blame him for that line of thinking. He had no way of knowing how perverted our world has gradually gotten.
As we all know by now, I did not get to retire at age 60, and it is doubtful that I will ever get to retire. Not because of what anybody did but because the unwritten "social contract" that governed the world when I was a kid is not the same social contract that governs the world today.
Although I ultimately chose a very different path from his, if I had done the exact same work as my dad, and lived the exact same lifestyle we had grown up with, the result would have been that our lifestyle would still have cost an index of 100, but given the development of work and wages over the past 40 years, our income would only have been 85 and we would have been upside down.
And so, we now live in the world where many people — like myself — face a future in which they realize they will never be able to retire, as well as a reality in which many people of retirement age and older who had already retired are finding that they have to go back to work.
Meanwhile, even those who are somewhat financially secure are still facing the distinct possibility that whatever retirement system they paid into for all these years is on much shakier ground than the retirement system of 40 years ago, whether it is a Social Security pension, or a private pension that went through a pension fund that mismanaged the assets.
I'm not really too worried about potentially having to work for the rest of my life because the work I do is not heavy physical labor, but I do worry about the lives of our grandchildren — the oldest of whom is now 16 — and what kind of world they might have by the time they get to the end of a working life. Will there even be a working life or is the whole notion of working becoming obsolete?
Without a doubt, it is a very strange world in which we live!
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2026.07.22 01:43 PDT
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