You should start saving for retirement yesterday Or should you? The looming but distant idea of retirement almost seems like a fantasy when you are not yet to the second half of your twenties. Personally I always just tell myself that I will work until I die, problem solved, no need to retire at all!

Realistically, however as soon as you have an income there is some opinion as to what you should do with it, and saving for retirement is deemed the responsible choice by both the mainstream media and (of course) the banks and hedge funds of America. Many of these different banks will offer different investment calculators to help you “plan” how much money you will make and how much you will need saved to live out the way you want to your end days.

There are a few assumptions however about all of these different calculators, all of them seem to assume that there is a constant rate of exponential growth, while this makes sense in some analyses, that there will always be some growth somewhere, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for the market as a whole. When bad things happen there might be some growth in some part of industry but the stock market does not always move exclusively up. Even on long-for-humans time scales, the stock market can have average slopes that look pretty bad for investment.

Finally if society collapses, owning stock might not be the best move after all. Sure pitchfork sales might experience a large return over investment if society collapses, but the S+P will most definitely stay down if that happens. Here is my slightly tongue in cheek version of an existential retirement calculator. Enjoy!