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Comment by 1270018080 | Hacker News Reader

This seems so... stupid. In the moment, you can always tell yourself the world is ending and that there's no point. But we have a 15000 year track record (modern civilization) that things are going to keep functioning and you'll be around tomorrow to live with today's choices. Most things are normal most of the time, and neglecting to prepare for the likely outcome while instead focusing on the .00001% chance of collapse is foolish.

It's like the preppers who spend their entire life savings on a preparing for an apocalypse that never comes. It's just stupid.

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It is stupid, but I see this attitude in several people I personally know who are in their 20s. I'm talking about people who could afford to save or invest some money, but don't.

I keep telling them that whatever doom and gloom scenario they expect of the future will for sure be even gloomier for poor people than for those who have at least some money set aside.

While it’s true that saying the general trend over the last 15,000 years has been upward, it’s a poor strategy to define micro-behaviour of 5,10,40 years (short, medium, long term financial horizons of a human lifespan) against such an enormous time period. It’s just stupid.

It’s better to examine the immediate temporal surroundings and exploit advantages that are likely to materialise in your lifetime - which may include market crashes (there have been 3 large ones in my lifetime) so that one can profit and survive though changes at this appropriate time scale.

Just saying 15,000 years is up, therefore always up, is a poor strategy that misses the nuance of reality

What market crashes? Over a 40 year working career, pick any point in the stock market's existence and you're winning. Short term drops are a non issue if you're an investor.

I don’t think people expect complete societal collapse but significant events that would make whatever they could have been saving worth less. For example inflation is quite high right now, the stock market is tanking, there is nowhere to put money besides like I-bonds that is safe and won’t be significantly affected by current inflation.

Also at least in the US I expect faith in public institutions is at a pretty low point. At least with who I know, people genuinely think the US could Balkanize. We are always told about climate catastrophe and how we are doing literally nothing to stop it.

With that outlook why would you bother to save money now when things are supposedly to only get worse from now on. Money is make believe, if shit goes down having saved some money isn’t going to matter.

If money doesn't matter, who is going to fare the best when things start to collapse? I would imagine, like with seemingly every major event in history, the rich usually end up fine and the poor bare the brunt of the pain and no one cares. If the collapse is inevitable, I'd still rather have money/assets.

But you won't "have" possessions in a "collapse".

Imagine arriving at a concentration camp or whatever future euphemism they come up with.

You could try to bribe a guard with a Rolex. Then he has a Rolex, and smirks at you as you silently scream "we had a deal!".

Or perhaps they grab your hands, look at them, and say "ah, no calluses, looks like you don't do real work".

Or they see your glasses, and say "ah, an intellectual".

Or they see you have gold fillings, and say "you people always have gold".

Any which way, they take everything you have on you and proceed as planned.

What counts, what leads to survival, is extreme luck and being more useful alive than dead. Possessions are no help.

There are other scenarios for "collapse", I grant you. But whatever shape it takes, it always devalues property that depends on stable society and by comparison, skills and knowledge and adaptation become more important.

Also, don't say "shibboleth" the wrong way.

>focusing on the .00001% chance of collapse is foolish

But...there's a 100% chance of "collapse". What's just stupid is preparing to live forever as a retiree in perfect health.

Even a perfectly average life expectancy is only about ten years longer than standard retirement age.

Many people can look around at their extended family and know that living to be a retiree at all is about 50/50.

Even if you still insist it's idiotic to reevaluate saving for retirement, it seems to me that the current inflation is strong evidence that people are doing it and moving consumption from the future to the present. I don't think anything else can account for the magnitude of the change.

Civilizations have ended in a much shorter timeframe than that. Just this year, any pretense of civilization in Afghanistan, for instance.

Its not the entire world, but for those without the means to relocate, what difference does that make?

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