The existence of 401(k)s serves as an admission that salaries/wages are too depressed to extend into retirement the coverage of costs associated with the standard of living a former employee enjoyed while employed.

We are goaded, then, to play the game, to be complicit participants, lest we one day lose the comforts to which we’ve grown accustomed. Here I question the price paid to participate so. I’ve never had a job whose lack of meaning didn’t gnaw at me. You would have to be a dull person indeed to find satisfaction in committing 40 of your waking hours/week to the same efforts for years on end.

In its most plain and PR-friendly form, the argument for a retirement savings plan is that a person should have the financial resources necessary to live comfortably from the day they stop working till the day they die. Indeed, who but a tyrant without conscience would dare oppose a position so humane? However, the same view expressed from the calculated, impersonal perspective of the state–even in retirement, a citizen should be a boon to the economy, not a burden on it–lacks the moral gilding of its counterpart and is more susceptible to attack from the proletariat. Attack it I will, and from a bulwark unseen.

How best to deliver a devastating blow to an opposing view predicated on the unquestioning acceptance of assumptions as facts? Systematically expose each assumption as being one–and one, moreover, whose legitimacy is far from assured–then, as the coup d’etat, show that even supposing all the assumptions bear out, the argument of interest is still flawed, its conclusion being a non sequitur.

I describe below a few assumptions on which the argument for a retirement savings plan depends. In general, a convincing assault on a set of independent assumptions makes for a stronger counter-argument than one whose assault target is a set of assumptions that form an interrelated hierarchy. An advantage of the latter type, nonetheless, is the ease with which they make themselves known, often in rapid succession. So it was in this case, and if the strength of the counter-argument suffers as a consequence, it is yet strong enough to convince me.

On what beliefs, then, does the pro savings plan position depend? An incomplete list includes:

1. The allure of retiring in comfort outweighs minor job dissatisfaction.
2. A country’s economy, inescapably, is largely a function of its citizens’ finances.
3. Over the course of their career, a sufficiently farsighted employee will have contributed enough to their savings to enjoy a dignified retirement for the remainder of their life.

I’ll treat each in turn:

1. Job dissatisfaction grows like mold–slowly, but with a stubborn persistence that defies eradication efforts. It’s clear from the most recent job satisfaction report published by The Conference Board, an apparent authority on this sort of thing, that a majority of employed Americans merely tolerate their work rather than genuinely enjoy it, and have resigned themselves to applying periodic bleach treatments when the mold exceeds a personal tolerance threshold. It is this group about which the assumption may plausibly be true–where the factor determining applicability is whether the allure of retiring in comfort is the main driver for bleach treatments, or, more directly, whether reflecting on a comfortable retirement is the bleach treatment itself. Annual snapshot reports as these are of limited value with respect to the concern at hand, however. More telling would be a decades-long longitudinal study that tracked individuals over the course of their careers and noted the reasons any who ever quit gave for doing so. Lacking such comprehensive data, we must make due with the announcement that in 2015, ~48% of those surveyed responded that they were satisfied with their jobs. To be sure, it’s doubtful even a majority of this minority quit prior employment due to the failure of the allure of a comfortable retirement to outweigh job dissatisfaction. Still, I suspect that such a synopsis applies to enough people–both those among the ~48% as well as the unemployed–to raise doubts that assumption #1 can be taken for granted.

It’s worth asking from where the allure of retirement derives its strength. For those subject to its siren song, I think it is retirement’s intangible existence in the future that makes it a formidable motivator. It’s its position comfortably beyond reach of the present that makes it amenable to being moulded, renders its absence of details and certainties an empty vacuum welcoming of population by the hopes and expectations we have for it. Some may see in retirement a return to early youth, may view employed adulthood as a struggle whose payoff is a reunion with childhood–that brief, innocent period characterized by the absence of responsibility and the freedom to spend one’s time as one wished. Another contributor to the allure’s strength is the very thing assumption #1 pits it against: job dissatisfaction. After all, the more demoralizing the work, the more attractive the notion of an eventual end to engagement in it. This only contributes to a point, of course, beyond which it begins to undermine–depress morale too far and eventual progressively shortens to now.

2. The implication here is that one should feel compelled to save for retirement out of allegiance to country (i.e. seniors counting pennies is no good for GDP). What a riot! The state of the union is splintered, xenophobic, and fractious. Public opinion of government–that institutional proxy for the notion of nation–is the lowest it’s been in recent history, corresponding to disapproval so severe as to hijack the current election cycle. I suspect a modern audience would receive JFK’s famous patriotic advice with less enthusiasm than did those who heard him speak, deciding instead that it’s high time the country did something for them. The individualism fostered by the capitalistic life-blood of our economy, combined with a sustained, multi-year recession, is spawning an opportunistic everyone for themselves mentality that acknowledges an ongoing decline in purchasing power. No, allegiance to country cannot now be relied on to motivate the population; it’s an antiquated concept that exists in the minds of the ever-fewer elderly for whom it once served as a guiding principle.

If it was simple to establish the implication as ludicrous, my inability to find fault with the underlying assumption leaves things bittersweet. The health of a country’s economy can be defined myriad ways, and many of these will support the declaration of dependence between wallet and Treasury.

3. This one is the easiest of the three to debunk. Oh, to be sure, investment brokers are naturally fond of touting the benefits of saving early, but rosy projections of future worth are reduced to unremarkable levels upon incorporation of the dotcom and housing bubble bursts. How many who had been eyeing retirement within a year are still working today because of the 2008/2009 crash? While it’s certainly possible to profit from stocks that lose value, the size of the employee population to which this 3rd assumption applies shrinks a good deal if fluency in Options trading is presumed.

Time now to unsheathe the knife for the coup. Suppose an employee’s future, accurately foretold by a crystal ball, validates the stated assumptions. Why do I contend that, even so, the decision to invest in a 401(k) is a non sequitur? Because such a decision erroneously accepts retirement as a forgone conclusion, whether it can be afforded or not. If working beyond a certain age was disallowed by decree, then investing would indeed be the only sensible choice, practically without regard to assumption validity, but such restrictions are not generally in place, and we have the right to work until our last effort is the digging of our own grave.

The question shifts, then, from whether to save for retirement via a 401(k) or similar investment vehicle, to whether to retire at all. It’s clearly a personal choice and one I’ve made for myself–I emphatically reject the work-to-retire paradigm. I have a few reasons for feeling this way, but concern over lack of anything to do–despite the trope of the retiree who reenters the workforce to address exactly that quandary–isn’t one of them. No, I’ve too many interests to be caught putzing aimlessly around the house were I to abide by convention and retire an arthritic old man. It is these interests, in fact, that I refuse to wait until retirement to indulge. I’ve sought to balance full-time employment against engagement in meaningful pursuits, but in vain. In my experience, the 44 hrs/week (4×10 working hours + 8×1/2 hour associated commute) doesn’t translate to all remaining waking hours being available to do as I wish. Instead, I need a couple hours post-work for my mind to recover to a state conducive to creative exploration. Dinner, dishes, preparation of tomorrow’s lunch…always too soon it’s time for bed. I have countless novels collecting dust, likewise with 6 volumes of Poe’s works. I’ve barely played a note on my synthesizer. I’ve barely written. I’d like to begin a study of syntax. Etc., etc.

As far as I’m concerned, working towards retirement fails to make sense with respect to a couple measures. For one, imagine I retire at 65 and suppose, generously, that I live till I’m 80. Assuming an average of 8 hrs nightly sleep, those 15 years can be considered to represent (2/3)*15 = 10 waking years to do as I please. Compare this with working part-time from now till I’m 70 (a 10 year deficit applied to 80 based on the expectation that working till death is correlated with a shorter life), [[((24-8)*7) – 20 working hours – 2 commuting hours]*52*(70-32)]/(24*7*52) = ~19.5 years! The other measure concerns the detrimental effect on the brain of spending ~36+% of one’s waking hours performing the same sorts of tasks year after fucking year. Is there any doubt that a person who keeps the same job for decades will leave it with a more inflexible brain–comparatively limited in what it can derive from new experiences–if it’s a full-time gig than if it’s part-time? What good is a substantial bank balance and 10 years’ worth of free time if my mind can only see things in terms of the career it was devoted to? I would take no pleasure in reading Burgess if senility confused characters and plot.

At a certain point on the earnings scale, time eclipses money in importance. My impression is that, for me, this point occurs at a lower income than it does on average. If the objective is to survive while enjoying substantial leisure, it’s literally worth one’s while to work only as much as is necessary to pay for lodging, accoutrements, and food/drink. Beyond coverage of these costs, the incentive to work erodes quickly. I’m too restless, life is too rich.