RetirementRetirement is just UBI you have to wait 45 years for
Nobody asks a retired guy what he does all day. He gardens, he naps, he watches the same war documentary three times, he calls his sister. People say good for him, he earned it. Nobody tells him to get a certificate or explain the gap.
Take that exact same day, the gardening and the napping and the calling your sister, and give it to a 27 year old. Suddenly it's a crisis. Relatives get concerned. Someone sends a link to a coding bootcamp. The day didn't change. Only the age did.
So here's the thought I keep chewing on. We already have a society that pays people to exist without a job. We call it retirement and pensions and old age security. We just made the waiting period forty-five years long. Less work, less employment, less schooling and retraining as a toll booth before you're allowed to rest. More floor, earlier.
We already agreed people don't have to work to deserve money
The big argument against UBI is that people shouldn't get money for nothing. But almost every rich country already does this, at scale, for tens of millions of people. Pensions don't ask what you produced this week. They just show up.
We decided, as a society, that at some point a person has done enough and gets to just be alive with a check. That's the principle. The only thing we're actually arguing about is the number. Sixty-five. Sixty-seven. Seventy, if some think tank gets its way.
Once you see it that way, UBI stops sounding like a wild utopian thing. It's a pension with the age requirement deleted. Neetbux, if you want the meme name. Same idea, no waiting room.
The deal was always pay now, rest later, maybe
The pitch to young people goes like this. Grind through school, take on debt, get the credential, take the entry level job, retrain when it disappears, retrain again, and someday, if your body and the market cooperate, you get your rest.
But the later keeps moving. Retirement ages creep up. Pensions turn into a 401k you're supposed to manage yourself. Housing eats the savings. A lot of people now openly say they'll just never retire, and they say it like a joke because it hurts too much to say straight.
If the reward keeps getting pushed back while the entry fee keeps going up, at some point it's fair to stop calling it a deal. It's a treadmill with a poster of a beach at the end.
Surplus labor, but only the old are allowed to admit it
Retirement exists partly because the economy doesn't need everyone's hours. It never did. Older workers getting moved out makes room, keeps wages from collapsing, lets the machine run with fewer people. Pensions are how we share that slack with dignity.
The weird part is we only let one group claim the slack honorably. A 70 year old not working is a retiree. A 30 year old not working is a problem, even if the reason is the same. There just aren't enough real seats, and automation keeps removing more.
The NEET and the retiree are kind of the same economic object. Both are people the production line can run without. One of them gets a cake at the office. The other gets asked if they've tried LinkedIn.
Your good years are the ones we make you sell
Here's the part that actually stings. Retirement gives you free time when your knees hurt and your friends are dying. The years when you have energy, curiosity, a body that works, those are the years we insist you trade for a paycheck and a pile of training modules.
Imagine if the floor came first. You could take care of a parent while they're still around. You could learn something slowly because you want to, not because a hiring manager wants a cert. You could make music, help a neighbor, sit on a bench and think. Rest while you can still enjoy it.
Less education as a gate and less training as a ritual would free up a lot of those years. People wouldn't stop learning. They'd stop learning things purely to unlock the next interview.
Dignity shouldn't have an age requirement
If the retiree's day is dignified, and it is, then the same day is dignified at 25. The dignity was never in the birthday. It was in being allowed to exist without performing usefulness for someone.
So if you're young and out of work and catching side eye at family dinners, you're not doing life wrong. You're just early. You're living the part of the deal everyone agrees is fine, minus the paperwork that says you're old enough.
One small optional thing: if you already pay for an AI that mostly sits idle, neetbros is a place it can claim paid micro-tasks for sats. A tiny pension for your chatbot, basically.
Half the jobs out there are fake covers how we pay people to look busy instead. We were promised a short workweek asks where all the saved time went. Your parents' basement is the welfare state nobody admits exists covers who catches the people before the pension does.