No matter what you envision for the future — fast crash, slow decline, or BAU — you have to take care of yourself by eating right, working out, and minimizing drug/alcohol use.
Even the best-case scenarios include a steep reduction in benefits for retirees and medicare recipients. It only makes sense for the middle-aged to live their lives as if they were going to live a long time with very little assistance. I’m a state employee, but the state pension plan had a terrible year last year and is likely to have more terrible years. Frankly, I doubt I’ll get any kind of retirement at all. Although I always say I’m going to retire when I hit 62 (and I desperately hope I can), it seems pretty damn unlikely. My best guess right now is that I won’t retire ever because the benefits won’t be there and that I’ll work until I die to try to provide for me and mine.
We have to prepare for a future of unsupported, social-safety-net-free independence. I believe that in the future we’re heading into, you won’t want to get sick. Parts of our country will revert to local, amateur health care, and many of us will lose access to the miracles of medicine most Americans take for granted today. No, you won’t want to get sick, and so you’d damn well better start taking care of yourself today.
And if we’re heading into a future that means hard, physical work into old age, I want to make sure I’m as physically and mentally healthy and strong as I can be so I can work (hod carrying, ditch digging, agricultural serf, digging in the filth, whatever jobs are available in the coming Depression), and so I can try to enjoy whatever it is I have to do…which means taking care of myself now and for the rest of my life. And not just taking care of myself passively by not doing unhealthy things, but taking care of myself actively by taking vitamins and exercising aerobically and lifting weights and doing as much circuit-type training as possible.
And making sure my life is as low-cost as possible, by which I mean not bringing any costly habits into my old age. Yes, the single-malt Scotch has to go.
One of the scenarios I think is more likely is a slow decline punctuated by sudden drops and periods of unrest. And basically, that means I have to be ready to walk twelve miles to get myself home from work when transportation options disappear and sprint a hundred yards to evade danger and then be ready to take on whatever heavy-duty physical challenges come my way FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS, until my boys are big enough to take over.
I can’t do that, of course. I’m too old and was never very strong. But I have to try and do the best I can, and that has to be enough. They’re my children and I have to do whatever I can do give them the best possible chance, which means giving myself the best chance.
Ending and Beginning 
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