Key Takeaways
- A recent Prudential Financial survey of Millennials found that most of them had a rather somber view of their retirement years.
- Millennials grew up in a time of great technological advancements, but also some very significant events that have shaped a scarcity mindset when it comes to how they feel about the future.
- Many of the jobs we have now could not even be fathomed by someone alive less than 100 years ago, and fifty years from now, there will be new technologies that create new jobs, so this helps view the future through an abundance lens.
Prudential Financial did a study called “The 80-Year-Old Millennial” that looked at what Millennials imagined their health, wealth, and work would look like in 50 years. Nine out of ten said they thought they’d be working in to their 80s, and eight out of ten said that it won’t be comfortable like it is right now for people in retirement.
It’s an interesting outlook, because it’s really a scarcity mindset. It makes a lot of sense that Millennials would feel this way due to all that’s happened in the past 20 years. Although there’s been phenomenal technological growth and advancements, it hasn’t been fun. The volatile stock market, people losing their homes, two recessions, 9/11, and so forth, it all contributes to this scarcity mindset. You can see this mindset as well with grandparents or great-grandparents who lived through the Great Depression, that what you experience is what you feel you are going to experience in the future.
However, history shows us that we go through different cycles. By the time Millennials are in their 80s, a half century from now, we’ll be in a totally different cycle. We don’t know what it will look like, and people get concerned about things like Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and all kinds of things happening around the world, so viewed through the scarcity lens, it can be scary.
If you went back to the year 1900, and you mentioned things like writing code, graphic arts, video games, and smartphones to someone living at the time, they wouldn’t even know what those words mean. A vast majority of the jobs involved in those things didn’t even exist then. So when we look at the future, there will be a whole bunch of new jobs we can’t even fathom today that will be around fifty years from now, that will replace the ones we are doing now.
I like to look at this in terms of an abundance mindset, to keep looking forward knowing that while yes, some things will fall by the wayside, new things will take their place. It’s about looking forward and figuring out how we can navigate our way through so that we aren’t hanging around at 80 trying to figure out when we are going to retire.
Until next time, enjoy!
Gary