The Retirement Bubble

A “time warp” in science fiction is a literary device typically used to mean a way of moving forward or backward in time. About as close as most of us ever get to a time warp is to relive a past experience or fantasize a future experience entirely in our heads. I have no problem with time warps as a literary device or as fantasy, but “warp” also means “distortion” and time distortion is often something that does bother me when it affects our future planning.

There are many little time warps we experience in our minds that are basically innocent. A parent looks at a newborn child and “sees” him or her twenty years later as a bright, attractive young adult about to set off on their own. A woman looks at the man she will soon marry and “sees” him in decades to come as a good provider, a good father for her children, and a comfortable mate in their “golden years”. A young man walks into an office for the first time to take a new position and “sees” himself as a manager in three years and a vice-president in ten, or whatever fits his fantasy. Obviously, you change the genders in the last two examples, but the point remains the same. And we do this hundreds of times during our lives, “seeing” ourselves in times to come in a new car, a new home, college, summer camp, a vacation spot, and more.

In all these instances, most of us are seeing positive results in the future. And most of us understand that there are hundreds or thousands of steps we have to pass through before we truly see, for example, the babies in the crib become the successful young adults off on their own. The time warp that lets us “see” results well before they happen is restrained by a realization that, as the old saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

When we lose the restraint, the time warp can be a life distortion.

Yes, I am old enough to remember when young couples might spend several years saving money before having their first child, than spend several years saving enough for a down-payment on a house. I remember when Americans had “Christmas accounts” at their savings bank where they put in ten dollars every paycheck so they would have extra money at Christmas for gifts (by the way, I was delighted to find that they still do this in Panama). I remember when a young professional expected to rise slowly up the ladder to a management position, perhaps taking a decade or two or more to get to his or her goal. We did not call this “delayed gratification” in those days. We called it “life”.

Were people then smarter than people today? No. They had lived through 15 years of crap called the Great Depression and World War Two. Any ideas of rapidly attaining a long-term goal in a short-term period were pretty much destroyed by simple circumstances. So what might have been frustrating and irritating to their parents during the “Roaring 20’s” became normal and good. After all, they saw the 20’s collapse into the 30’s. They knew something gained too quickly and too easily could disappear just as quickly and easily.

We may be training another generation to understand that right now as a result of our own distorted time warp. I hope so as it would be nice to think someone is going to benefit from all this!

But our older generation needs to catch on to this too. We are not dead and we look like we are going to be around a lot longer than our parents or grandparents would have expected. We can be 75 and still need to plan our future.

We know we have a problem and we have known it for a long time. For something like 30 years, I have heard people say over and over again that there is too much short-term thinking and too little long-term planning. Companies, governments, and households have all been criticized for expecting instant gratification or promising to deliver it when we all know life does not work that way.

During the most recent real estate bubble, we began to resemble Gollum, that ordinary hobbit in Lord of the Rings who transformed himself into a strange, sad creature wasting his life seeking what he could not have. Gollum had his moments of supreme joy when he thought he had the ring in hand, and he had his periods of depression when he realized it had escaped him again. Sounds a little like some homeowners I have known over the last few years.

We have to break this habit of expecting to reach ambitious goals quickly. We may protest that we are not seeking instant gratification, but it would probably strike a lot of our parents and grandparents that way if they were able to see how we plan today. It is not a question of blame. We have lived through very different experiences than that earlier Depression/War generation. They had their short-comings too and we did a lot to change their world for the better. It is a question of recognizing we have a bad habit and doing something about it.

I can write these words and agree with myself while writing. I suspect the majority you can agree, if you do, just as quickly. But I know that I have to actually work to make this happen in my future planning. Recognition of the general problem is only the first step toward dealing with it myself.

One technique I use is to go ahead and set my ambitious goal, but I assign it to the “future”, without a specific year in mind. Then I plan for the next three to five years. I do not expect to reach that goal in three to five years. If I do, great, but I definitely do not expect it, so I definitely do not plan for it. I just focus on what I can do over those years to move me closer to that goal.

I know that events will occur that cannot be predicted or planned for now, but which will have impact on my planning. Okay, I’m only planning for three to five years and I am not expecting to reach my goal, so I can adjust more easily. It’s a “head thing”. I don’t care, just so long as it works and it has worked.

I started this when I was 40, nearly 25 years ago. At first, I thought in terms of “five year plans”, but that sounded too much like the Soviets and I knew where that took them. Unexpectedly, I discovered that once I got into this habit, I no longer worried about when I would reach my goal, only that I was making real progress.

I have changed my goal more than once to fit changed circumstances, but I have always felt I was moving forward. I have learned that this is enough to keep me positive, and that has made life a lot easier when circumstances have gone negative. It has given me the flexibility to roll with the punches, a very handy benefit in tough times like these and, I trust, will be the same in tough times to come.

There’s no magic in this. I am just warping time for my own benefit, instead of letting it warp me.
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