Used to, only the wealthiest folks retired. Others simply died working, or got too infirm to make their own way, and moved in with family so they could die in peace. Most folks didn’t talk about retirement. A few got a pension from somewhere, but that was mostly a European thing.
Then along came this brilliant idea called Social Security, which was supposed to encourage folks to save up a little so they could retire. That is, you could pay into this fund, wherein you had an account. When you got to a certain age most workers didn’t see, you could begin drawing on this account to supplement your savings. Nice idea; never properly implemented. Nobody much bothered to save for old age, so they ended up nearly starving on Social Security payments.
But it served to get old folks out of the work force, along with mandatory schooling to the 12th year. This created a phony shortage of workers, which did manage to raise wages a bit. The other, unintended consequences are too many to name here — all bad. So consumerism went up, advertising supported the idea you had to have the next new toy, and recreation became a major obsession with us. Suddenly, working was something you had to do, it wasn’t supposed to be fun, and you forgot about it as quickly as possible.
Over the following decades, a lot of other nasty things were done to us. We quit saving, we started investing, and more than anything else, we borrowed and spent, and borrowed and spent, and… Then we all worked at jobs which really don’t create anything, while the jobs which built things were sold off to poor countries. We just bought that stuff from them; it was cheaper. We even borrowed the money from other places to pay for the stuff they sold us. Then, in our greed, we created some phony mathematical tools for creating wealth out of thin air. Actually, we were stealing it, but the process was so convoluted, everyone went along voluntarily. The momentum was like putting way too much air inside an ever-thinning stretching container — like a soap bubble. And it broke.
All of a sudden our jobs, most of which were meaningless anyway, are gone. A few real jobs remain, but those depend too much on the fake ones. Soon, too many people will be unemployed, and won’t be buying much. So all the dependent jobs will end. And unemployment will snowball. But wait! It’s just possible a few smart minds will realize we don’t need all that junk we used to buy, we just need food, shelter and clothing. So they’ll start making some of that stuff again, little by little, shifting all the unused labor resources to things we used to do quite well many years ago.
Meanwhile, all the retirement money? Gone, invested in those fancy mathematical formulas. All that government pension money, including Social Security payments? Gone, because government has been doing something similar, and is so far in the hole, it can’t climb out. All that money we used to borrow from other countries? Gone, because they bought the math formulas, too. In fact, all we left with is just a lot of debt. A mountain of debt, an ocean of debt, a solar system of debt. Should someone offer you any job at all, regardless of your age and condition, you better take it.
