Retirement planning assumes

Retirement planning assumes you will want to stop being useful at exactly the moment the system stops wanting you to be useful. This perfect alignment is not coincidence—it’s design.

──── The productivity-to-obsolescence pipeline

Every retirement calculator assumes the same trajectory: maximum productivity during “prime years,” followed by voluntary withdrawal when efficiency declines. This isn’t planning for your future; it’s planning for your managed obsolescence.

The system has convinced you that your desire to rest will conveniently coincide with its desire to replace you. How remarkably efficient.

Most retirement advice treats this as natural law rather than social construction. “Save 10-15% of your income for 40 years so you can afford to become irrelevant.”

──── Compound assumptions about compound interest

Retirement planning assumes compound interest will outpace the compounding degradation of everything else—healthcare costs, housing costs, food security, social infrastructure, climate stability.

The mathematics are sound. The premise is insane.

You’re betting that financial growth curves will remain steeper than decay curves across every system you depend on for survival. This assumes stability in fundamentally unstable systems.

Meanwhile, the same economic mechanisms generating your investment returns are actively destabilizing the environment those returns are supposed to secure.

──── The delayed gratification trap

Retirement planning assumes your current self should sacrifice for your future self, while your current self pays taxes that subsidize systems designed to extract value from both versions of you.

This temporal arbitrage only works if the future resembles the present enough for current savings to retain meaning, but differs enough to justify current sacrifice.

The assumption is that you’ll want the same things at 70 that you want at 30, just with less ability to obtain them, so you better start hoarding now.

──── Demographic pyramid schemes

Retirement planning assumes younger generations will remain numerous enough and productive enough to sustain the systems your retirement depends on.

Population growth, productivity growth, resource availability, political stability—every retirement model assumes these trend lines continue indefinitely.

Your individual financial planning relies on collective demographic patterns that are already breaking down. You’re buying insurance from a company that’s slowly going bankrupt.

──── The healthcare cost void

Retirement planning assumes you’ll either stay healthy enough to avoid catastrophic medical expenses, or unhealthy enough that those expenses become someone else’s problem.

The middle ground—chronic conditions requiring expensive ongoing care—destroys most retirement models. This isn’t acknowledged; it’s just factored out as statistical noise.

Healthcare inflation consistently outpaces investment returns, but retirement calculators treat this as a minor variable rather than the primary risk.

──── Labor replacement assumptions

Retirement planning assumes your job will become obsolete gradually enough for you to plan your exit, rather than disappearing suddenly through automation, outsourcing, or economic restructuring.

It assumes you’ll have 40 years of steady employment to fund 20 years of voluntary unemployment. Both assumptions are increasingly fictional.

Most people will experience multiple career disruptions that make linear retirement planning impossible, but the industry continues selling linear models.

──── The dignity-dependency transition

Retirement planning assumes you’ll accept dependence gracefully after decades of being told that independence defines your worth.

You spend your productive years accumulating resources to purchase services you currently provide for yourself. This isn’t freedom—it’s outsourcing your competence to people who will exploit your helplessness.

──── Value system alignment

Most fundamentally, retirement planning assumes the value system that makes you save for retirement will persist long enough for you to spend those savings on things you’ll still value.

If work gives your life meaning, retirement is existential crisis by design. If consumption gives your life meaning, retirement is managed decline into dependency. If independence gives your life meaning, retirement is systematic removal of autonomy.

The entire concept only makes sense if you value security over agency, predictability over adaptability, and financial abstraction over direct capability.

──── Post-monetary scenarios

Retirement planning assumes money will continue to function as a store of value across the time horizons involved.

Climate change, political instability, technological disruption, resource depletion—any of these could make your accumulated financial assets meaningless before you need them.

You’re optimizing for scenarios where complex financial systems remain stable while everything else changes dramatically. This seems backwards.

──── Alternative value frameworks

What if instead of planning to become useless, you planned to become more useful in different ways?

What if instead of accumulating financial assets, you developed skills that remain valuable across various scenarios?

What if instead of deferring life satisfaction, you optimized for resilience and adaptability?

These questions don’t generate commission fees for financial advisors, so they remain unasked.

──── The real retirement planning

Actual retirement planning would prepare you for scenarios where current systems break down, where your assumptions prove wrong, where your financial assets become worthless.

It would develop community connections, practical skills, and physical health rather than optimizing portfolio allocation.

It would question the assumption that you need to accumulate resources rather than developing capabilities.

──── Systemic purpose

Retirement planning serves the system more than it serves you. It channels your money into investment markets that fund the same corporate structures making your labor obsolete.

It makes you complicit in your own replacement by investing in the automation of your job.

It distracts you from questioning why societies organize around making people useless rather than finding ways to remain useful.

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The most radical act might be refusing to plan for retirement while planning to never stop being valuable to your community in ways that don’t require their permission or your accumulated assets.

But that would require acknowledging that the entire framework is designed to benefit someone other than you.