Young People Not Saving Due to Climate Change Concerns
Many younger people now believe that they don’t need to worry about retirement, since it won’t matter with the apocalypse coming. This gives us some real insight into how they think.
It’s hard enough to get young people to save for anything, let alone retirement. They really don’t need much of an excuse not to save, but now they are telling us that a big reason for not saving is that the world as we know it will be coming to an end, and we presumably will be visited with circumstances so dire that it won’t matter how much or how little money we have.
The threat here isn’t something like nuclear war or a meteor, it’s instead based upon fears of the effects of global warming. The world is indeed warming, and it doesn’t really matter why, but some might be shocked and alarmed to see these young people, or anyone, take such an extreme view of the situation.
There is of course a lot of debate out there about this, both among the general public and among scientists, as to what role humans are playing in all this, whether it’s our carbon emissions that are producing most or a substantial amount of this change or whether it’s just natural events, our moving out of the current ice age that we’re in for instance.
The models that assume it’s humanly created are predicting some fairly dramatic changes over the next century, with the real fear being that as the polar ice caps continue to melt, coastal areas including some very densely populated ones will be underwater.
If we are going to be guided by fear, we at least owe it to ourselves to consider all the evidence and be willing to think about these things enough, to discover whether or not the threat is as significant as we may think, and especially if we think that the outlook is so grim in that we need not bother worrying about retirement anymore.
We Need to Examine These Fears More Closely
The fact that anyone would think this, given what we know, is actually quite disturbing, and we may even wonder where such far-fetched ideas came from. As far as the Earth goes, it has dealt with temperature changes far greater than even the worst predictions, and even if they all come true, this will still leave us with a very cool planet historically speaking.
We have had long periods where there the world was completely ice-free, and other times where ice covered a far greater part of the planet than it does now, and everything in between, and life on Earth has continued to thrive throughout all this. The Earth will be fine.
As far as recent human history goes, while we fret about Greenland’s ice cap melting, Greenland actually got its name honestly, as it was green back when the Vikings discovered it, and Leif Ericsson even had a farm during his time there. The world did not come to an end.
The greatest concern by far with the dimmer scenarios is that we may not be able to support our population explosion as well, with available land to live on and farm shrinking by a significant amount. Overpopulation is actually an even bigger problem and the real one in fact, yet hardly anyone speaks of this anymore, and when we did the concern was surprisingly very minor.
Overpopulation won’t bring much to fear unless you are one of those left on the outside, or actually are there now and will be further burdened, and these young people that are not bothering with their 401(k) savings so much aren’t among this group.
Ironically, as food shortages increase, this will affect the price significantly, and you had better save up for this if it happens.
Some commentators are actually giving credence to what can only be reasonably viewed as paranoia but telling these younger folks to stay the course anyway as it’s just better to have more financial means whatever happens. The only real way out of this though is to have them think more practically about the matter, but in today’s world with today’s young people especially, thinking very much about anything is out of vogue.
Our thinking as a species has always been culturally influenced, but with today’s technology, we seem to have taken that to a whole new level. Popular media itself takes some very biased positions on just about everything, being heavily influenced by advertisers as well as maintaining the status quo for its own sake, and we are so entrenched in it that we may not even see the bias and just accept everything they tell us as truth without the need to even question very much.
We’re Told to Spend It All, and We Obey
This brings us to the real reason why people in Western cultures have such trouble saving, and it’s because they are so bombarded with influences in the media and do not have the wherewithal to retain enough control. This includes but is certainly not limited to advertising, as popular culture itself is inundated with ideas of maximizing consumption and living the so-called good life. Actually, we don’t even need a reason to overspend, as it is even seen as an end in itself, beyond any considerations of practicality.
Many believe that the real problem lies in the lack of so-called financial literacy that we have in general, but this views the problem superficially, and the real issues run much deeper, at the psychological level. These psychological forces are very strong indeed and we can readily see the effects if we just look at how much we save, which is a pittance.
Until we stop seeing consumption as the primary and even the sole means toward self-actualization, it won’t matter if we tell people that they need to worry about the future more if this just falls upon deaf ears due to their being so mired in the present.
This recent survey of young people’s current attitudes toward saving for retirement also brings to light another big reason why saving is seen to be so challenging, and it’s that they see their excessive spending as a remedy for their depression, much like some people overeat as an attempt to cope with this. Young people readily admit that being depressed about the future has taken away what little desire they have to save.
As we continually marinate our brains in worry, we become more prone to the stimulus-response mechanism that shapes our behavior so well, the very things that we are being targeted with in the media. With climate change, there is a particular tendency among people to not only exaggerate the threat but to personalize it as well, where our concern extends to the point where we inflict pain upon ourselves and make ourselves more vulnerable to manipulation.
It simply isn’t sensible to worry about things beyond your scope of influence, and while many may want to become more active in a cause, when we use this to inflict psychological harm upon ourselves be being constantly upset about this, that’s certainly an issue in need of addressing.
If we believe that we as a species are harming the planet unacceptably, there may be a little we can do individually, to at least give us some satisfaction that we spoke up, but when we turn this upon ourselves and make ourselves miserable over it, we should at least wonder why we feel this is necessary.
It is only when we can escape these clutches and seek to take control of our own psychological well-being that we can be put in a position where we can rightfully decide such things as spending habits or how much we should save. Having the knowledge of what the right thing to do is an important first step, but having the will to execute it can be much more challenging.
The real reasons for our not bothering to save money need to be fleshed out properly, and just pretending that this is all normal and not indicative of anything wrong with ourselves, just won’t cut it.
If we don’t address these worries properly, not only will it not go away, it will get worse, especially given how popular social media is. Misery loves company they say, and misery also tends to build as it is shared. What we call the news is almost exclusively a collection of news designed to make us upset, and our means to do that has become much more enhanced today. The fact that we seek this should tell us something about ourselves more interesting than the evening news.
This is all great for business though, and in terms of the economy, it’s clearly a lot better in the short term that people spend as much as they can because this drives growth a lot. We live in the short term. We might even say that our economy is addicted to over-spending, and making real improvements overall with this may end up reducing our overall standard of life dramatically by causing a real economic depression.
Perhaps we are just puppets, but overall, our puppeteers may be choosing the same way as we would if we held the strings as well as the knowledge of what is really going on.
If people started to save 25% of what they make, for instance, we’d see the economy shrink by a shocking degree. A couple of percentage points of shrinkage brings on a real recession, and we can only imagine what something ten times bigger would be called.
However, we decide this one person at a time, ourselves, and this does not mean that we have to follow the flock off the retirement cliff. If we’re going to figure out why we spend so much though, we’re going to have to go deeper than just projecting future income or keeping a budget to ever really get there.
There’s more at stake here than our retirement, as thinking more clearly in general is a real step in the right direction toward directing our own lives based upon sensibilities, and eventually getting away from letting others tell us things and just believing them, which is a disorder of even greater magnitude than our 401(k) balance being too low.
Editor, MarketReview.com
John’s sensible advice on all matters related to personal finance will have you examining your own life and tweaking it to achieve your financial goals better.
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