#Pension

Retirement planning is the ritual of clinging to spreadsheets and numbers in the vain hope that the magic of social security never runs out. It is a sequence of austerities imagined for the day of retirement, complete with prayerful investments and emotional rollercoasters on pension disbursement days. Yet to truly feel secure, one must be ready to laugh off the absurdity of entrusting one’s life guarantee to mere figures. In essence, retirement planning is the most socially sanctioned apparatus for converting future anxieties into present self-inflicted penance.

Social security is a system in which the working population contributes small amounts of their wages to be returned in old age or illness. It gently envelops citizens' anxieties while subjecting them to convoluted procedures and inexplicable mountains of paperwork, offering hope and despair in equal measure. Everyone proclaims security, yet lives in constant fear of slipping through the cracks of the very system meant to protect them. Whenever whispers of funding shortages arise, help recedes and only the individual's desperate screams remain. Ironically, the greatest reassurance seems to come from fearing the unpredictable future of a system that might never fail.