What will retirement look like in ten or fifteen years?

MONDAY, 17 JUNE 2024

The simple truth: I have said what I wanted to say. Now I do what I need to do to ensure I can enjoy a relatively comfortable retirement in a few years.

TUESDAY, 18 JUNE 2024

Now that we’re on the subject: What will retirement look like in ten or fifteen years?

Will a comfortable but not luxurious lower-middle-class life cost more than it does now or less, relatively speaking?

Will proper healthcare be more expensive or cheaper?

How affordable will domestic robots be? Surely they’ll become both cheaper and more useful, as has been the case with personal computers over the past thirty years.

What about food production? It is already possible for inner-city apartment dwellers to grow a wide variety of vegetables in their living rooms, or in a spare room. How essential will independent food production be for survival in the city in 2030, or 2035, or 2026?

How expensive will it be to travel? Self-driving taxi to the train station where you’ll travel by high-speed train to your destination – more expensive than now or more affordable? Would a person in their sixties or seventies even want to travel to other places with the associated risk if they could stay at home and experience any town, city, mountain or beach in the world with virtual technology?

With fruits and vegetables free of chemicals, plenty of exercise, low crime in high-security communities, affordable healthcare, your average Generation Xer might live longer over the next few decades. The big question: How much money would you need to sustain this retirement?

Another thing: How will money work ten years from now? Paper money and coins will likely be phased out. How much will your Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies be worth in 2035? Will it be replaced by digital currencies managed by a Ministry of Finance or Central Bank? How much influence will these institutions have on political opinion – especially opinions critical of the government on foreign policy, crime control, immigration, and vaccines?

Certainly it deserves a proper discussion, but can democracy work in reality, or is democracy like the old saying goes, “Two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner”?

Speaking of wolves and a sheep, what will life on the self-governing island of Taiwan look like in a decade or so? Will America find another lamb to sacrifice for its bloodlust and greed? The Philippines perhaps? South Korea? Japan? How far will China go to make it clear to Imperial America that if Taiwan is going to be a vassal state, it is certainly not going to be one of a crumbling empire in the West?

How physically demanding will retirement be in your sixties or seventies in a decade? Will your body be kept alive artificially with tubes and machines while your mind is on vacation or travelling the world? Of course, the tubes will just keep pumping nutrients into your veins while your credit lasts. The moment your credit reaches zero, your view of the beach, or of the Eiffel Tower, will fade until you hear one final “bleep.”

What about a medical institution that assists you in ending your own life when you reach a certain age? Or when you develop some disease that can be cured, but it will take time and money. Or when your money runs out. How popular will this be for people who cannot afford a comfortable retirement, or for whom something went wrong a few years before they were supposed to retire? How normal will it be ten years from now for doctors and other professionals who work with older people to present it as a “dignified” solution? (Will medical professionals earn a commission for their recommendations?)

Is this going to be a case of people with money living to the ripe old age of 120 or even longer, with freshly printed or developed organs, new teeth, and all sorts of other medical wonders in place of their old parts, and people who by 45 or 50 have failed to achieve financial success, or who haven’t inherited enough from the previous generation, being encouraged to receive state-subsidized euthanasia?

______________________

Four stories from the seventies and a few other decades

TUESDAY, 28 MAY 2024

The BBC’s Culture section posted an article with an interview they did in 1976 with amongst other people, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten.

Rotten, who got his nickname because of the state of his teeth, filled decent people of the middle to late 1970s with loathing and fear for the future.

Yet what did Rotten do as soon as he had some cash in his pocket? Spend it on drug-fuelled parties? Got himself a hotel room for a couple of months and spent all his money on booze and women? No, he bought himself a nice apartment in a nice neighbourhood, where he settled down with his wife. They remained happily married for more than four decades, until she died after several years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. For the last five years of her life, Johnny Rotten was her full-time caregiver. Very rotten of old Johnny.

FRIDAY, 31 MAY 2024

Europe, in the 1860s. A princess known for her beauty is engaged to the crown prince of a neighbouring state. Everyone thinks they are a beautiful couple. Then the prince dies. His fiancée returns to her native country. She’s inconsolable. Her fiancé’s family let it be known that they really liked her, and what are the chances that she might marry her late fiancé’s brother (who is madly in love with one of his mother’s chambermaids). She replies that she is very sad and that nothing can change that. Nevertheless, the brother visits her. They cry together. Then they get engaged. Everyone thinks they are a beautiful couple. She gives birth to four sons and a few daughters. She and her husband ascend to the throne after terrorists blow off her father-in-law’s leg. After a decade, her eldest son becomes king. She is convinced that her adopted country needs reform to stave off revolution. However, little reform is implemented. Twenty years later, her eldest son, the king, her daughter-in-law, and six of her grandchildren are murdered in the basement of a large house where they were kept under arrest by revolutionaries that had overthrown the government. She and her daughters flee south. Her sister, who was married to the king of another country, convinces her own son, now himself king of her adopted country, to send a ship. The group of seventeen nobles who are thus saved includes her one daughter who goes on board with five of her sons, six dogs, and a canary.

* * *

East Coast of America, February 1978. A catastrophic blizzard hits people on their way home. It snows continuously for more than thirty hours. Schools and universities and businesses shut down. Trains stop running. Thousands of cars are stuck on the highway and other roads. Fourteen people die because their cars are so covered in snow that the exhaust gases cannot escape. Many people are without heat, water, food and electricity for days. Accumulated snow is dumped into the harbour to make way for more snow. Many houses collapse or are washed away into the ocean. One child disappears a few meters from the front door of his house during the storm. His body was not found until three weeks later.

* * *

England and Ireland, 1970s. A woman born into a rich family sells all her shares in the family business, sells her house, and distributes the cash to poor people. She lives with her lover in a working-class neighbourhood. Together they rob her family’s mansion. Later she joins a terrorist organization in Ireland. She throws milk jugs with explosives from a helicopter. She takes part in another robbery. This time they steal a bunch of paintings – among them the only Vermeer outside Buckingham Palace in private hands. The police find the paintings in the trunk of a car. In prison she marries another lover and gives birth to his child. On the loose again, she makes powerful missiles, with packets of cookies to absorb the recoil. She continues arguing and fighting until she dies decades later, penniless, living with old nuns in a retirement home run by the Poor Servants of the Mother of God.

______________________

Opinion on Israel since October 2023

WEDNESDAY 20 MARCH 2024

My opinion of Israel has changed since last October.

It is now clear that a significant percentage of the Israeli population, and probably the majority of the political elite, have had a Final Plan in mind for decades for the Palestinian population of the biblical Israel.

The plan is to, if possible, force all Palestinians to flee across the border into Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. And Palestinians who refuse to spend the rest of their lives as refugees will simply be wiped out – one by one, man, woman, child and old people, in cold blood, or dozens at a time with bombing campaigns. To encourage people to flee Israel systematically destroys every building or facility that can be used for education or medical care or any type of community activity.

And when the areas now under the control of the Palestinians have been emptied, and homes and schools and hospitals and universities and mosques have been reduced to rubble, Jewish immigrants from America and elsewhere in the West, along with citizens of Israel, will move in and build new homes, and new schools, and new hospitals, and new buildings to practice their own religion.

The Palestinian Problem will finally be solved.

People would give Israelis a dirty look for a few years, but – so I reckon, a significant percentage of the Israeli population and probably the majority of the political elite reckon – eventually people will forget, and they’ll move on to another horror story in another part of the world.

The dream will finally be reality.

______________________

A low point that still gives me nightmares

THURSDAY, 7 MARCH 2024

At the end of the film, Fight Club, the main character says to his girlfriend: “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

My wife met me, not so much at a strange time in my life, but just before I began a years-long stumble to a low point that still gives me nightmares sometimes.

Between March and July 2003, I worked feverishly on a set of writings that I later called, “The Personal Agenda of Brand Smit.” And because I didn’t stop writing that type of material, I later added that it was Book One. The later months of 2003 and the first two months of 2004 were also quite feverish, with the fever breaking with “The February Plan” and “[The Big Untitled]”. The dust then settled for a few weeks, and by May I was again hard at work thinking and writing about new insights that were supposed to make sense of my life – and even life in general. By July 2004 I had definitely broken new ground in terms of clarity and confidence in who and what I was.

However, by the fall of 2004 (October in Taiwan), I was rolling on fumes: my tank was empty.

And it was exactly at that moment that I met a certain young lady who had just arrived in Taiwan.

The excitement of new love – if I have to look back now – gave me a new zest for life. But serious love is a different world from the one of the Lone Ranger. And if you no longer walk alone, you are not the same person you were a few months before. You constantly appear to someone you want to impress, and you appear differently to yourself.

With spiritual dedication and abandon I worked in 2003 and 2004 on pieces of text that were supposed to reveal the truth to myself, and if it was legible, to anyone into whose hands the pieces of paper might fall.

And I was still making notes in 2005.

But I wanted to do better. I wanted to make money. I wanted to create a better life not only for myself, but for the person who had so beautifully messed up my life as Someone Who Walked Alone.

Little did I know I had already reached my peak. The abyss was near. And I crossed it without noticing.

It would take me years to reach even ground again.

______________________

One truth and a few pieces of advice

TUESDAY, 5 MARCH 2024

You’re here.

Try your best to make it worth the trouble.

Try not to cause too much damage.

Try to comfort – if you can.

Try to lighten someone else’s load – if you can.

Try to stay healthy.

Try to stay strong.

Look out for big and small breakthroughs that can take you to a higher level, or just to a better place.

Be grateful for the good things in your life. Be grateful when you’ve survived something bad.

And remember: We are not born into the same circumstances, or with the same abilities or talents. And yet, your life remains, to a significant extent, the result of how you play with the cards you were dealt.

______________________