I have been thinking about retirement a lot lately and, just how unprepared I am for it. The more I look into it, the more unachievable early retirement becomes and, even retiring at the maximum age, the pension amount is highly unlikely to cover anything more than a basic lifestyle, if that. As I was saying to my wife last night who said, "We'll survive" -
Is survival enough?
I don't think it is personally, because life in my opinion needs to have meaning and just surviving is not meaning enough. If anything, it is just a waste of resources that other might be able to use to bring meaning to their lives. Which might sound like a depressing point of view, but I have watched many people who are "surviving" over the years and most of them don't seem to get much joy in their lives through the constant struggle. But at the same time, most don't want to just "give up" which is natural, as humans are built to survive, like all animals.
Perhaps this was the point of first attack using economics to hack our code, where an economic tax of some kind was applied and people were forced to pay, because they wanted to survive. It is like a mafia shakedown,
Pay this, or else.
These days, it is the same for work, where we are "forced" to work or else we are unable to pay for the things we need to survive, or, the things we fell we need to survive or brings meaning or quality to our lives.
In the conversation I was having with my wife last night, I tried to get across the point that much of what we actually work with is absolutely pointless to the survival of our species and has no meaning at all, other than what it allows us to do outside of work. It is hard to explain this to some people, because many define themselves through their work, making it part of their identity, which feels like meaning. However, is this the case?
I work in a software company that provides business service and management software. While this management is necessary for the businesses to run, what those thousands of businesses do is pretty unimportant overall in the grand scheme of species survival. The company I work for is just a link in the supply chain of useless at that level, but all the way along that chain, people are working to feed an end goal of unimportant. However, this does provide meaning for people, no matter how meaningless those end goals or what is produced may be.
It is busy work.
Most of what we do for work, just feeds the consumer mechanisms either directly or indirectly, but because we are also consumers looking to take advantage of what is produced at various stages of the supply chain, we don't recognize it as meaning less, as it helps us get what we want. It is a repetitive cycle that at the end of the day does very little for our species and in many cases, is actually a driver toward our extinction, as it includes the same processes that lead to conflict and the creation of weapons to compete against each other. But, this feels like meaning, doesn't it?
Something to fight for!
It is a funny old world that we have created for ourselves and regardless of what many might say, there is no stepping out of it except for that "final step out". Despite all we have created, we have painted ourselves into a shrinking economic circle with more people needing to fit into that smaller space, raising the opportunity for more conflict - like all the family getting together under the one roof for a holiday.
Yet, because there is no stepping out of the economy of society without becoming a completely self-subsisting hermit (yet to meet a single one), All that we can really do is use the tools oat our disposal to improve what we have available. Crypto is part of this toolkit now and while all of the economic activity might be meaningless at the grand scale, it seems to be enough to keep a person busy for a lifetime and offer enough encouragement for some to have children and keep the species ticking over, even if the incentive to do so is actually an arbitrary and pointless result.
This makes the economy part of our evolutionary resources to continue as a species and if it ever gets to the point where people are unwilling to take part, collaborate and add value of some kind, the human species will collapse, like every empire does that fails to meet the needs of the masses through their own greed for more power.
In my personal opinion, the only reason to really do anything is to add to the quality of relationships we have with each other. But, just spending time together doesn't do this, because not only do we need to eat, we need to feel that we are being fulfilled by life, which is why we keep evolving what we do anyway. This incremental change in what we are able to provide makes us feel more valuable in society, even if what we are providing is largely pointless.
So much of our lives these days seem to be centered around trying to meet our human needs of connection, yet what we are doing is consuming more economically in ways that don't actually bring most of us any closer together. The digital world of living through screens is an example of this, where the more we have the opportunity to immerse ourselves, the less we are actually building the relationships that keep our species going. There should be no wonder why there is a falling birthrate.
Problem or not, the main reason given to the falling birthrate is part of a societal success story, the increasing education of women and their participation in the workforce. The only reason for education is to get people into the workforce and the more people working, the fewer babies being born - score.
But, it is more than just women in work these days, as many young people are opting out of having children because they get in the way of lifestyle or, they are unable to form the relationships they feel they need in order to have children. And it is a catch-22, because the lifestyle that children get in the way of is one that feeds that useless work that the majority of us do, and the reason that people aren't finding adequate connection, is fed by the same mechanisms for consumer industry development.
In the past, it was the poorer who would have the majority of children due to need for workers on farms and as risk mitigation for the high potential of death. However, with several countries expecting a 50% decline in their population over the next 80 years, I suspect that there will be a bucking of the trend up until this point and there will be a global drive by the wealthy to have more children, because they can afford to.
Increasingly, having children is a luxury due to the costs associated with care, health and education. So, people who can, will want more children to "work on the farms" to fill the jobs in the economy that provide all that useless consumer content that we value in our lives. This means a rebalancing of governance too, as there will be more children born to the minority of the wealthy, and the poorer will have less, whilst feeding more into the consumer activity that keeps the wealthy, wealthy and able to increase the wealthy population.
As always though, the laws of supply and demand are always in play and, this goes for children too, it is just that the timeframe of production across generations are quite long and go over the bounds of a single life. At the end of the day, all of the population control arguments will become moot, because control is built into the design of the economy, one way or another - as it is for all species.
Do the economic ends, justify the meanings?
I suspect that like all things and whether we want to survive or not, we will end too - how or why is up for debate. Just like the work we do though, retirement is also meaningless, isn't it? What are we retiring from? Life? Yet, considering it and earning for it, gives us a reason to keep on working.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]