Before & After

Before

Retirement is another concept we created where the hope is that we can work long enough, hard enough, and earn enough to not only support ourselves and our families during our working life, but that we can save enough money to be able to survive when we are no longer able to work. Many people today are simply unable to put aside the required amount of money to survive in retirement because they can barely make ends meet now, and others decide that the only way is to work well in to their seventies so that they might have some chance of making it in old age. We are also encouraged to gamble any retirement savings we have in the stock market and we just hope that catastrophe won't strike when there is a downturn and our savings are depleted just at the wrong time. From the time we start work all the way through to retirement age we keep our fingers crossed that we will make it and we won't suffer in our old age.

Those who do make it to retirement and are financially sound often find it hard to adjust to life after work. During their working years they had a fulfilling life with purpose and they interacted with many other people, whereas retirement can represent a life of solitude once the novelty has worn off, but society doesn't see much value in people passed a certain age and most cannot get hired.

After

There is no such thing as retirement in Nutopia. There is no concept of having a career or working for decades on the same job and accumulating wealth to support yourself once you reach a certain age. Instead people learn new skills their whole life depending on the needs of the community, and they contribute their labor as long as they are able to. Instead of being put out to pasture, the amount of labor people are expected to do reduces over the course of a lifetime, but they can continue to enjoy the variety of work and the company of other people as long as they want.