Retirement is so last century. It’s the stuff of Bruce Springsteen songs about gallant Americans picking themselves up each morning to do work they can’t stand, but that they do with fantastical visions of a merciful endpoint.
New York Times columnist Jessica Grose is arguably channeling a dated vision of retirement. Consider her recent piece titled “The Fantasy of a Comfy Retirement Has Always Been a Mirage.” Oh wow, how depressing. How untrue?
Explicit in Grose’s title is that a comfy retirement has always been a mirage. Really? According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, people 70 and over control “roughly 39% of all equities and mutual funds owned by households.”
Grose might reply that the headline mis-stated her argument, that it’s Gen X facing a difficult future. Which is ironic when it’s remembered that back when Gen X was young, various movies (think Slackers, Singles, Reality Bites) portrayed a downwardly mobile, shirt-folding future for Gen X, not to mention Douglas Coupland’s book (conveniently titled Generation X) that indicated their lives were defined by “low-paying jobs, irony, and post-materialism.” Gen X ultimately grew up and did well, no? Something about authoring the Internet revolution…
It raises a question: How could Gen X’s finances be so bad if they did so well? Grose cites a report from the National Institute on Retirement Security which shows that “the median worker has only $955 saved in defined-contribution retirement accounts.” It all sounds so awful, though it’s seemingly much belied by a booming economic reality that’s defined much of American life for the last 45 years.
To which some who share the skepticism expressed here about Grose’s reporting might ask why the Gen Xers allegedly depressed about so-called retirement fantasies dashed didn’t save even a little during a stretch of soaring U.S. economic growth that naturally coincided with soaring stock and bond markets. It would be a reasonable question, and more realistically a more than mild response to the Trumpian, “carnage”-like picture painted by Grose. But it won’t be asked here.
Instead, it will simply be said that Grose set out to paint a bleak picture of retirement and succeeded by finding some awful stories. Which is too bad. And no, this isn’t a call for Grose to balance her reporting a bit more with stories of future retirees sitting on millions. That’s shooting fish. The critique offered is that Grose is unwilling to embrace what’s likely, that Americans collectively know much more than she does.
She cites a 2024 AARP survey indicating “1 in 5 Americans over 50 has no retirement savings at all,” but does Grose allow for even a little wisdom in big crowds? In other words, Grose didn’t bother to speculate that Americans are perhaps collectively saving less because they don’t need to. If so, Grose might have contemplated why.
Did it occur to Grose that a growing number of people (including Grose, perhaps) like their work much more, and intend to work much longer because they like it? And having perhaps contemplated the latter, Grose might think about the looming implications of AI which, if past technological leaps are indicative, will render work quite a bit more abundant, fulfilling, and remunerative. Considered differently, low retirement savings could signal work that has forever qualities.
That’s the speculation here: Grose is viewing retirement through a lens that was last valid in the 20th century. Except that if the work of today mirrored that of the 20th century, Americans would have a lot more savings. And that would be too bad.
