Retire or Be Retired
From the Diary of an Incarcerated Alien
On Xobtihs, where I lived before I got trapped in Happy’s mind, I didn’t have to worry about resources. If I got hungry, my BIG DICK led me to food. That’s my Basic Information Gadget for Detailed Interactions with Content Kingdoms. If I needed to exchange my hiking boots for sneakers, there was always a kiosk nearby. I could sleep under the stars or in the finest accommodations imaginable. Whatever I wanted or needed, my BIG DICK delivered.
And yes, before you ask, Xobtihs has a surplus of sex robots. The BIG DICK is an efficient resource allocation system. It provides everything a user wants or needs, with one key exception—relationships. The BIG DICK is programmed to maximize the distance between you and the next closest user. I couldn’t tell you how many people live on Xobtihs, but it’s a lot less than 8.2 billion, a lot less.
Just saying 8.2 billion out loud makes my mustache tingle. And trapped in this shitbag’s mind, in this slice of space and time, it tingles nonstop.
Humans are very tribal. Despite having the option to connect with diverse groups of people across vast geographic and philosophical distances, humans opt to connect with a small group of like-minded individuals. Call it survival instinct.
Apparently, thousands of years before the current shit show, the humans traveled in groups, hunted and slept together. Kill or be killed—that’s the human way. Defending your tribe is an evolutionary instinct so embedded in their source code that even today a human might fight another human at the grocery store for the last bag of cheese puffs. From where I reside in Happy’s mind hole, modern man still resembles his primitive ancestor. Tribes are just more digital and decentralized now, like the blockchain.
And because there are so many humans, and resources are—or are perceived to be—scarce, humans accumulate as much as they can.
Humans live their lives to retire. Happy is no different than the rest of his cohort.
If I’m honest, “retirement” is an odd thing to want. On Xobtihs, “retirement” means uselessness. If your BIG DICK no longer functions, you retire it. If a robot chef consistently over salts your food, you retire it. Retirement is not a positive state of being.
But in American Suburbia humans covet “retirement”. It’s like the designer handbag that everybody wants. Or a fancy sports car. In fact, there is a movement called Financial Independence Retire Early, or FIRE. This is a financial threshold where a human is no longer required to function in productive society.
The general rule of FIRE is to save 25 times your annual expenses. So if you and your family spend 75 thousand dollars a year, then as a rule of thumb, you might need 1,875,000 dollars to cease working.
Retirement math demands that every assumption hold. But consider the FIRE devotee who has decided he needs exactly $1.9 million to stop working — who saves, sacrifices, and defers living for years to hit that target. Can he really reach it and, only then, give himself permission to enjoy his life?
How does one foretell a lifetime of future expenses without considering unexpected outcomes? And sans BIG DICK?
But the humans work and dream of retirement—and not the other way around. Perhaps with so many people on Earth, there are few good jobs. A human will work a job he is lucky enough to have, to save the money he is lucky enough to make, until he can retire and be happy.
Not that my existence on Xobtihs was perfect, but fulfillment as a function of retirement savings feels dubious. But what do I know?
And although I wouldn’t label Happy a FIRE-brand—and I wouldn’t criticize him or any human for accumulating savings—I would say that a mind overly focused on accumulation misses something vital in the human experience—as shitty as that experience is.
Nonetheless, Happy Julius Pipe toils in these permutations. As you might imagine, the entity known as the Accountant is a formidable presence in the mind of this shitbag.
I ran into him the other day. He’s a big fucker.
Stay tuned for the next installment of Alien Idiom where Kuf—that’s me—interacts with the demon known as The Accountant. And subscribe here.
I pop one off around the end of every month in the hopes that other humans might read it. Mostly, they don’t, but maybe you will.