Every now and then the Internet serves up something perfectly pitched to what you assumed were your own very individual fears.
On Thursday, for me, that was Romie Stott’s “futurist vision of retirement planning” at The Billfold. Planning for the eventual end of paid work isn’t just difficult because life is expensive and saving money is hard, she points out — it’s also difficult because the world is ending.
Okay, that might be my fears talking. But Ms. Stott does note that climate change over the next several decades will, at the very least, affect certain popular retiree destinations: “If your retirement dream includes a beach house, lake house, Florida, or New Mexico, add four to 11 degrees to the daily forecast; that’s the EPA’s best prediction for 2100 AD.”
That may sound relatively tame, but she also mentions booming populations of disease-bearing insects, and increasingly catastrophic storms. It’s predictions like this that, for years, have made me think of retirement planning not just in terms of 401(k)s but in terms of learning to build a fire.
Read more: NY Times