Pension funds in Australia are called superannuation funds and there are compulsory contributions that need to be made by employees and employers in the hope that past retirement age, a comfortable living is possible. This is even more important considering that we are living longer on average.
There was another article in the Australian news about this today, using an old chart from the end of 2020 to show the average balance and shortfall across age groups that they would need to ensure (there is no certainty in life, other than death) that a comfortable standard of living is available.
That is quite a pronounced gap at every rung on the age ladder, but even more worrying is that this "should have" amount makes the assumption that a person owns their own home (not renting) and has no mortgage to pay (debt free) - how many are in that position, when currently in Australia, the housing market is booming, even though people are increasingly being left out of it, especially the young. Not only this, inflation is increasing, but wages are not, making life more expensive and reducing the amount put into superannuation relative to what is needed, making the gap larger over time.
The situation is getting increasingly untenable and as the world continues to change and job opportunity is reduced, less and less people will be retiring with anywhere near enough to survive. With an aging population in many countries, this will put increasing pressure on the working population, but there just won't be enough paid work to support the burden. The governments didn't mind plunging the world into economic turmoil to save the old at any cost for a pandemic, but all of us keep aging and unless something radical happens, we are going to live, but suffer a heavy lowering of quality of living standards when we reach into the same age group at risk today. The risk is economic, but it is still going to reach pandemic proportions globally.
Perhaps I shouldn't care at all, but all of this concerns me as at least in my experience, economic hardship doesn't bring out the best in individuals and it definitely doesn't facilitate a healthy society. Revolutions don't happen when things are going well, they happen when life sucks ass and we seem to be delving ever deeper into ass-sucking conditions.
Even if I personally am able to wrangle my way out of being in the financial firing line of the future, my own sense of well-being and quality of life is at least somewhat attached to that of the rest of the population. Not only this, for my daughter to have a rich life, she has to be able to have the "freedom" to explore her world more fully, without having to fear for her life at every turn, from other members of society. There are always risks, but general life shouldn't be akin to living in a warzone, yet I think this is where we are headed, as society itself has become so fragmented and cellular, that people think solely of their own desires, regardless of the harm doing so causes others.
Which gives us headlines like this:
While this might be an extreme case example, people seem far less likely to take responsibility for their behavior, and far more likely to claim some kind of victimhood as an excuse for harming others. The bully at school came from a bad home, the embezzler had to feed a gambling addiction, the rapist did so because he was rejected by women. Everything but the person is the subject of blame.
Economic hardship is called hardship for a reason and it is a keystone problem that puts pressure on all other stones in the arch. The reason is that economy is the ability to manage household finances and while we have pushed this out to a more global macro sense, individuals are still affected personally. As money is something that is required in order to purchase for needs, not having it creates stress factors and these can compound heavily when in combination. On top of this, society interaction has moved toward cellular living, disconnecting us from community, but immersed in an engineered environment geared solely to churn consumer-sourced profits, even though we have less financial availability to partake in the consumption of it and, it keeps ramping up - average life never gets cheaper.
It is a recipe for disaster as we are not emotionally skilled nor tied to a community of people and we are decreasingly able to satisfy our material needs, in a world that is getting increasingly more expensive and precise with its targeting tools to drive the messaging of consumption home. As this more becomes the new normal, the new normal is that an advancing number of people are going to "snap" under the pressure, blaming everything but themselves.
This is everyone's problem, as while we might like to think ourselves insulated, this growing problem will eat away at the space between at the practical level, encroaching more and more into the world of those who had previously thought themselves safe. The economy we currently have in the world is designed to create this increasing gap, where those with, will extend their holdings, and those without, will have less, with the number of those without increasing up the ladder until there is some kind of critical mass and those suffering say, "enough is enough" and the pendulum swings.
But, what they do past this point isn't coming from a calm and rational mind, working out how to better design and build systems to correct the problem, it is coming from individuals who are stressed, under financial and social pressure and are snapping. Masses of people taking to the streets to support causes that they have no solution for, other than "cancelling" whoever made them feel something negative and they blame for the conditions they suffer. Much like the headline above.
In my eyes, society is failing but for many people who are currently living in conditions that they do not see the daily fails and only read about them in the news, they do not see how it is slowly creeping and reaching out to their way of life. Instead of working out ways to change the direction and increase well-being for all, they will wait until they are personally affected by the tragedy of violence before acting - which by then, will likely be too late.
From my own limited view, it requires us taking responsibility for ourselves, but remembering that "who we are" and our well-being is intimately connected to the environment in which we live, which includes the society of people who build the ecosystem of relationships that provide for our living. This responsibility has to be connected to the economy, as it is this as a keystone factor that will affect society itself and we have to use our resources to build a system that supports society to be its best, not one that forces the rich to insulate themselves away behind high fences and armed gates, from the poor who are suffering that much that they will try to scale the walls and take what they believe they deserve.
The saying is, "the root of all suffering is desire", and we have created a world that presents and conditions us to want, even if we do not have the means to have. In that quote, it isn't defined, who suffers, but in the case of a society where a few have a lot and many have a little, it ends up being all of us.
There are better paths to take. Better ways to live.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
