The concept of "retirement", that is, a fit and able person would quit doing anything and go on a permanent vacation is pretty new, as is the idea that you'd plow all your extra money into stock market and bond market speculation and hope it's still there when you're old. In prior eras, and still sometimes today, people that did back-breaking labor basically had to retire because their bodies gave out. For people who sit in an office, their chair-ass time is actually the biggest threat to their health.
The idea of retiring is actually a significant source of stress and anxiety for many people. They hope they'll have enough paper assets set aside to live off for an indeterminate amount of time until they die. It's pretty bleak.
It's prudent to save and to "build an ark" as described a couple of posts ago, but's it's foolish to hoard money tokens like some dime store version of Smaug. Money and paper assets are vampire-like.
It's pretty liberating to discard the idea of retiring that's been sold so hard over the past several decades. The 401(k)/IRA and other money-boxes that enable some coastal vampires to live a gross lavish lifestyle is just one form of "saving". My guess is those money boxes won't be a "store of value" anyway--they'll be systematically robbed (not just via inflation) to pay debts gone bad so the Babylonians can keep Satan from torching them.
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