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I watched this 90 minute documentary called "The Bubble" yesterday, and thought people might find it as interesting (and depressing) as I did:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jp0nqJ1yrrg
Ignore the clickbait/signalling subtitle that Vice have given it- the documentary is much more nuanced and balanced. And the last 40 minutes is just discussion with the director.
It's about a massive retirement community for upper-middle/middle-middle Americans in Florida called "The Villages". The documentary itself is beautifully shot, and does a pretty good job of being balanced and showing the different perspectives of the competing interests.
But what I found much more interesting than the plot of "wealthy capitalists push out rural locals" (although that is interesting) was what it had to say (implicitly) about aging societies in the West and the world we've created over the last 70 years.
The Villages are essentially a permanent vacation town of 150,000 or so old people (I think, wikipedia seems to suggest a smaller number). There are some absolutely bizarre and surreal scenes of 80 year olds getting drunk at parties, doing karaoke, dancing and so on.
I think the first two things that it made me think of were Wall-E and the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. Not that these people are particularly fat (in fact they're all rather active and healthy), but the decadent nature of it all. In the Culture, there is a post-scaracity and immortal society where people have to come up with how to occupy themselves when all meaning is lost. I suppose it's a bit like a college town, but there was something deeply depressing and unnerving that I found watching these people who are supposed to be the elders of our society essentially abdicating any responsibility. There's a narrative that reaches its climax towards the end about the nature of retirement and just deserts, where some of the interviewees admit that they don't really care all that much for their children, or the problems of the world ("that'll be a problem for the 40 year olds").
And whilst I'm sure that it takes two to tango on these matters (children don't look after their parents in the same way), there was a deep sense of meaningless and doom that I found watching these people who essentially shouldn't (in historical terms) be alive, confronted with their own lack of place in society, move away to die.
I could absolutely see this becoming more and more common as the numbers of elderly retirees continues to become unsustainably large. And I think there is probably something to be said about the unrealistic expectations we all have about how life is supposed to work. The idea that you work for 40 years and then stop and do nothing for the last 15-20, spending all your accumulated wealth (which in this case gets sucked out by the service economy and healthcare costs), or in perhaps more welfare minded countries, by the taxpayer, is a historical anomaly. At some point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that people will have to keep working much longer (or maybe that they ought to want to work longer).
If historically there was always only a very small number of people that lived long enough to stop working at all, then their place in society was guaranteed to be one of respect, carrying on wisdom and experience from the past. But now we have a glut of people who are basically useless (there's only so many wise story tellers you can support) who decide that now is the correct place (the only place) in life to have fun and play golf all day. It is almost tragic- that these people built up all this wealth and pension money and so on just for it to be spent on activities they can barely take part in due to their age, and for all that wealth and work of a life time to get spent on margaritas, property tax and health (death) care costs.
There is also an environmental/industrialisation angle (the ideal of ruralised life in Florida and the reality of ersatz parades and lawns).
Give it a watch- the Austrian director does do a good job in my view of not over playing the liberal angle on stuff, and the general themes are very thought provoking.
Is this behavior actually unsustainable, though? A large group of people retiring for a long time is historically unusual, but so are many other things about today. The amount of work required to produce many necessities is historically unusual. The amount of workers we have now in service roles or in roles doing intellectual labor is extremely historically unusual.
While I share your disdain for the current model of retirement, I don't see the current model becoming unsustainable any time soon. The vast majority of modern economies seems to go towards making luxuries or money pits like healthcare, not the necessities for life. In these areas it is far more possible for quality to drop without disrupting the status quo.
Where and how do you see the current model breaking down?
Maybe you're right- I suppose the point where it begins to collapse is when demographics start to look like South Korea. The US will be fine for a long time (not as bad demographics issues, plus the petrodollar). But in for example, the UK, we're already nearly at breaking point with our social care system, and with inflation driven declining standards of living/property bubble, I don't see us having as good a time of it.
Then again, we don't have anything like the Villages, so perhaps there is a much shorter distance to fall.
Is the crisis in the UK due to paying out pensions, or due to trying to give unrealistically good healthcare to every single person? I've heard a bunch about funding issues with public health in the UK but not much about funding issues with their pensions.
It's possible the UK will try to gut pensions to throw yet more money into the endless pit of healthcare, but the unsustainable element here isn't the part where we pay people a pension for 15-20 years after 40 years of work.
Well if the whispers coming out recently about public sector pensions are to be believed (extensive use of incredibly highly leveraged tools to try and deliver increasingly unrealistic inflation linked expectations) then pensions do seem to be an upcoming issue. But no, it is mostly due to healthcare costs. Not unrealistically good healthcare to everyone though, at this point it is nearing basic adequate healthcare to a subset of the population. The NHS is in a really, really bad shape at this point (Emergency response times are sky-high). But that's mostly just an allocation issue like you said.
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