Your parents have bankrupted the nation, themselves, and your future. No joke, they are going to have no money and no safety net, and unless you’re some kind of ungrateful sociopath, you will have to spend every dime you ever earn paying for their long-term care in some hellish nursing facility. And you thought your student loans were oppressive…
Ok, maybe I’ve got absolutely no evidence to back this up, but I just finished reading Lee Eisenberg’s dystopian thriller The Number, in which the author sets out to convince you that no sum short of several million dollars will suffice to sustain a pair of convalescing baby boomers when that rascally generation retires a few decades down the line.
Yup, it turns out that the 95% of middle aged persons have not amassed the closets full of gold krugerrands necessary to save themselves from being plunged directly into abject poverty upon leaving the work force. Does this seem like complete and utter horseshit, that at the very least should be backed by extensive research and rigorously vetted data? Perhaps, but Mr. Eisenberg only had 256 pages (paperback, double-spaced) in which to convince you, dear reader, that your fate is sealed! And for the former editor of Esquire, writing anything over 50 pages with no full-page advertisements or celebrity photo spreads is a really taxing endeavor.
Full Disclosure: I gave up on reading this cheesy financial self-help book when, on page 89, the author casually began to refer to the made-up people in his hypothetical scenarios as “crash dummies”, his 21st century spin on the straw men you were taught not to use in high school English class. I skimmed the rest, which was relatively straightforward, since Eisenberg’s editor enforced a strict topic-sentence-based organization with subheadings every second page.
Setting aside the merits of Mr. Eisenberg’s New York Times Bestseller (ouch), it got me thinking about the future of our parents. Or rather, it got me thinking about how to think about the future of our parents. My grandmother made a series of subtly catastrophic life choices that have left her physically incapacitated by diabetes in her old age. My parents, stirred by her example, talk about their own old age in hushed tones, with plans of exercise and extended careers. I see nothing wrong with this: its only natural to make plans to avoid the consequences of another person’s mistakes. But should I somehow interfere on their behalf, attempting to reinforce their promises to themselves to retire in better health, both physically and financially? Is it our responsibility as the younger, poorer set to avert the disasters set in motion by our parents’ decisions?
I have a hard time seeing how any of us have any responsibility for the future of the baby boomers. They tried to change the direction of the political system at our age, and then produced George W. Bush and two new vietnam wars. They broke their own safety net by opposing taxes on an ideological level since Ronald Reagan. If their bloated lifestyles prove unsustainable, so be it; inflation will price them out.
It’s not that I’m unconcerned about the fate of my parents. If the doomsayers are even half-way correct about the fate of the baby boomers, we are all in for some very hard times. But aside from saving as much money as possible and being an intolerable scold about poor lifestyle choices, what is there to do about it? Fearfully eyeing a gloomy forecast won’t make it go away. The best any of us can do is live sustainably, both financially and environmentally (the two tend to go hand in hand anyway) and hope for the best. Now there’s some a common sense financial self-help idea that could never make the New York Times Bestseller list.
