Do I need a pension if the world's about to end?

Asteroids and second coffees

I work for the i newspaper in the UK a couple of days a week. I love it. The team is gorgeous and it keeps my brain alive while also giving me time to rest around it. I feel lucky to have it.

Yesterday we had a features meeting where we talk about what articles we should be doing. The topic of pensions came up. People were offering up article ideas - colleagues half my age had thoughts.

I just wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and go la la la la but I imagine that wouldn’t be considered professional so I nodded and listened as everyone was talking about the future like it’s a real thing - and I wondered why it never feels like a real thing for me.

Whenever anyone asks me to plan or commit to anything more than a couple of weeks ahead my thought is - why are we planning this? I could be dead. You could be dead. Anything could happen before then and now.

It’s why all my holidays are booked the week before. In some cases a day before. I once had a boyfriend who wanted us to book a summer trip in January. I couldn’t. I couldn’t look that far ahead, not just for us but for me.

So anyway planning freaks me out. I’m sure there is some psychological reason for this that an Instagram post could explain for me - but none is coming to mind right now. Feel free to diagnose!

As the pension conversation went on, I was thinking that the world is changing at such a crazy rate who knows if money is even going to be a thing ten years from now. Or twenty. Will retirement even be a thing? Will the world even be as it is now physically?

But then I told myself that this was stupid thinking, just a sneaky intellectual way of not facing up to my bad decisions and irresponsibility.

I thought of an ad that was on TV years ago. I think it was for Prudential pensions and there was a young woman talking about how she didn’t worry about the future, she just wanted to have a good time now. As she was talking her face got older and older until it became obvious this woman wasn’t a free spirit she was in denial.

Message: don’t be like her.

Reality: I am like her.

As the meeting ended I told myself I would be more responsible. I’d just order one coffee instead of two. And no more £3.50 pastries. Would that sort me out for retirement?

I wondered why I was so foolish in this area.

As I get older the financial differences between my friends and I get more extreme. It makes me feel ashamed and like a child. My sisters both act like money and the future is real, why don’t I? I feel like I’m missing some kind of crucial gene. Or skill. Or that I didn’t get the memo that most of the world got about how to be an adult.

I took a break for lunch and went onto Facebook. Guess what the first thing was on my feed? It was a post by writer Daniel Pinchbeck about how he thinks the world will end in ten years because of ‘new reports of vast amounts of Methane starting to spew into the air….’ He explains: ‘scientists have long warned us that a Methane spike will lead to our extinction, as it could cause a rise of 8 degrees Celsius in a decade. The way extinction happens, by the way, is we run out of Oxygen: 60% of Oxygen is produced by plankton in the oceans. When temperatures get too high, they no longer produce it.’

Bloody hell.

He then goes on to describe the political climate of the US and the rise in fascism which he sees as representative of a kind of death wish, which means that we are not doing the things we need to do to save the world. Now we’re fecked.

Which made me wonder: do I need to save for a pension when the world might be ending?

I called mum to ask her. She told me that every generation thinks the world is going to end and it hasn’t happened yet. I was a bit disappointed by this. It means I need to get a pension.

I heard Nelly put a key in her door. She’s been away in a film festival in Berlin and I went downstairs to say hello. She has the flu, so she talked from her front door as I sat on the stairs a few feet up.

‘Do you think the word is going to end?’ I asked her.

‘Oh my God, Marianne….’ Her tone reminds me of when we were first getting to know each other and she would declare my need to analyse everything as ‘so emo, so intense’. Picture this said in a ‘so emo, so intense’ French accent.

That said she knows everything about everything and will usually answer any question with expert level knowledge.

‘I made a film about this,’ she said. Of course she did.

Disaster Playground is a documentary about how an asteroid wiped out dinosaurs and talks to the scientists who are constantly monitoring the skies for other asteroids that could wipe out civilisation. Nelly explained that if the world came together to deal with a future asteroid it would probably be OK, but humans are terrible at communicating and if one country decides the asteroid is really a bomb, then well, you know, world war etc.

Then she asked me to do an outfit check. Yellow snakeskin trousers. Pink fluffy jacket. Buffalos. ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘Ten out of ten. No notes.’

Nelly would never let an astroid get in the way of a good outfit.

Last night I read another article about why we get more bossy when things are bad. Apparently as anxiety rises so does our need to control things - hence pensions. As I read I realise that I’m the other way. As anxiety rises, I check out and watch hours of Netflix. This weekend I watched Zero Day with Robert De Nero. Another end of days drama. It was terrible and I watched it the whole way through.

It’s not healthy. While I feel sad that twenty year olds are worrying about pensions instead of having a ball, I am no advert for the other way of being.

So what is the answer?

At the bottom of the Daniel Pinchbeck post he asks: ‘I ask myself honestly: How do I want to live out these last years, considering this?’

And that is the question, isn’t it - how we do want to spend this one wild and precious life, whether it ends in ten years or a hundred? In the comments there were beautiful answers about being in the now, being good to people around you, making art… and dancing. These all the kinds of things that we can trivialise and make into the side show, the thing we do around other stuff - but really it is the stuff.

And so I’ve talked myself back into not worrying about the pension - and ordering a second coffee, as I sit in the coffee shop, writing this, comforted by the hubub of chat and rain pouring down the windows.

What else is there?

xx