prototyping retirement
in the age of loneliness
october 20, 2024

tl;dr
Dreading a lonely future, Kenta divests from net wealth and invests in net health. He prototyped a fictional digital retirement app to realign values, restructure behavior, and redesign life. Now lives in an intergenerational ecovillage outside of tokyo with his life partner feeding chickens, making compost, and tending rice paddies.

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At the end of last year, I had a joyous opportunity to voluntarily resign from my former employer, giving me the time, energy, and focus on what’s been on my mind recently: retirement.

To be completely transparent, I am nowhere near reaching retirement goals and my financial literacy is laughably close to zero. Sometimes I catch myself watching youtubers half my age in hopes to receive “professional” investment advice. But jokes aside, I've been confused by the game we all silently play. The one where we invest in our portfolio of diverse assets to drive up our personal “value” in society. Whether it’s 401ks, ira, cma, crypto or the duplex you just bought to rent out, oh my are we addicted to net wealth.

Maybe it’s because I'm emotionally immature but whenever I think about financial investments, I feel hollow. This emptiness makes me question, what are we all blindly investing in? And alternatively, what are we not investing in?

This disillusionment probably stems from growing up in the U.S. but amplified when I moved to Japan five years ago. Why I moved is a story for another day, but reading headlines after headlines about Japan’s “crisis of loneliness” was nothing but ~ b a d v i b e s ~. Whether it's the 68,000 annual kodokushi (lonely deaths) of elderly over 65, “the decline in legal marriages know as marriage ice-age”, or the government setting up the ministry of loneliness it’s really not looking too great. With the superposition of the lost decade, aging population, urban migration, dissolution of the nuclear family, and importation of western consumerism culture, we have the perfect formula for the loneliness epidemic here in Japan. This is nothing new and unfortunately it’s spreading.

Now, if you want to observe this loneliness in action, I would suggest visiting Japan (while the yen is stupidly weak) and taking a stroll to a not so busy park somewhere in Tokyo. There you’ll probably see an elderly sitting alone on a park-bench under a tree shade with a canned beverage they bought at the nearby vending machine. Just observe them and wait patiently until they leave. Many people will have passed by; as too will the hours. As you head back home in a jam packed train car watching passengers magnificently perform synchronized doom-scrolling, you soon realize that in thirty years or so you too will probably be at a similar quiet park sitting alone on some park-bench under a tree shade with a canned beverage you bought at a nearby vending machine.

(photo taken in Shibuya one autumn day in 2024)

What’s worth noting is that this is not unique to Japan. While on a flight from Seattle to New York, I had a chance to chat with a 70 year old fellow from Omaha visiting Montauk avoiding the peak tourist season. He spoke to me about his retirement life, family dynamics, and how things were different back then. “It's great that two of my sons are in the bay area working as engineers but it just feels as if we’re all separated. I feel lonely, you know? What happened to the American family unit?”... and to be honest, I wasn't ready for that level of vulnerability when my plan was to simply watch Inside Out 2.

The fact is, this isn’t just a few boomers feeling lonely. Earlier this year, the American Psychiatric Association released a poll noting “30% of Americans aged 18-34” said “they were lonely every day or several times a week.” In addition, in 2023 the surgeon general warned that the crisis of loneliness should be taken as seriously as tobacco, obesity, and substance use disorder. Social media has also been primary suspects for the lonliness crisis among youth in recent years. While we can’t claim loneliness has increased over time, we can say loneliness is affecting all generations wherever they may be.

(graphs from Office of U.S. Suregon General because data makes this article look a bit somewhat more credible)

For better or for worse, Japan simply has been ahead of the curve. like romantic sexlessness, once thought to be a weird Japanese social phenomenon, is now taking roots across the globe. According to Herbenick et al. “sexual frequency has declined in the U.S. and in other countries”. If Japan is leading the pack in global loneliness, it gets me wondering how the western world will develop their own versions of johatsu (evaportated) people, Aokigahara suicide forest, kodokushi cleaning services, 2D virtual girlfriends, and rentable people.

Whether social, familial, physical, intergenerational, or whatever form it may take, loneliness is lurking among us. The modern consumerist world has extracted the riches of life and unintentionally created the conditions for societal loneliness. And that’s that. but what fuels me are the everyday rebellions -- the acts of individuals who go against the absurdity of this lonely world. We often see them pop up as small social experiments hoping to create their very own mini utopia. They include a group of single mothers banding together in “mommunes” to co-raise their children while cutting household costs in florida, an indian-american son who built a culturally-relevant community-centered retirement home for his immigrant indian parents, or a landlord developing intergenerational housing apartment in Saitama prefecture to make life more dynamic for the elderly and affordable for the youth. We see sparks of a social rebellion all across the world. And this got me thinking…

What if we invested in net health, not net wealth?

To investigate further, I quickly prototyped a digital retirement app from an alternate reality. A reality where retirement services aren’t crunching numbers into your investment web browser with your financial advisor but rather a holistic service incorporating the different dimensions of health. Have a look and allow me to pitch this to you.

This is the Werrill investment app by Werrill, a bank of wellness company. A personal investment app for your meaningful retirement. Invest your personal time, your limited time, your precious time to what you value most. Family, friends, hobbies, sleep, or career, don’t spend your retirement regretting over how you spent your life. Invest in today, with Werrill.

Although tempting, the goal of designing this app is not to make an innovative retirement service to pitch to Y-combinator. The goal here is to trick the mind into believing that this alternate universe exists. By embedding possible future values and constraints into ordinary everyday objects, you can experience just for a brief moment how people might feel in this alternate “net health” focused world. This state of mental dislocation sets the condition for people to reflect on, question, and critique our present-day behaviors.

So... why go through the effort of mocking up an entire app? Simply because “having ideas” is nothing but an intellectual activity that satiates the mind. Only when an idea takes a form outside the body and in front of the creator does an idea hold any intrinsic worth. For me, making is a form of meditation. It’s not the breathe-from-your-nose type of meditation, but rather a discourse guided by the hands. It's a silent dialogue between the creator and the created where the resolution of the discussion points are carefully designed into the details. “Make to think” some designers might call this. For example, some questions that came to my mind while making this mock screen include...

What forms of non-monetary capital exist?
Do hobbies, friends, and environments count as capital?
How do you measure friendship? companionship? or trust?
How might we visualize that?
What if we focused more on time instead of money?
Is all time measured equally?
What’s the difference in quality of time versus quantity of time?
Does this app track you or do you manually enter it?
Do I even want to outsource my time management to a thirdparty?
Who would I want to share this information with?
What interventions would foster a long-term community mindset?
What if we started creating a communal investment account?
What companies might enter this space?
Will it be a startup, bank, or a large insurance company?
What’s the backend of this service look like?
and so on...
As I scrolled through this fictional app on my phone, I became further disillusioned by today’s investment game. To check whether I was just reinforcing my confirmation bias, I shared this screen to a couple of others and, unsurprisingly, they too held a similar unsettling sentiment towards their current investment habits. “Thanks for the unpleasant sensation,” a friend said. “You are welcome,” I replied with an ironic smile.

As modern-day laborers, we sacrifice so much of the present moment with the promise of a “happy” pre-afterlife just to inconveniently find out we forgot to opt-in for the anti-loneliness package. When Nietzsche proclaimed “god is dead”, maybe he took down the heaven-and-hell governance mechanism as well. To quell the anxiety of the secularizing public, society unanimously shifted the “happiness” rewards program from a post-death eternal promise to a pre-death nominal status. It's rather ironic really. We are constantly told to invest for our future state of “happiness” without really experiencing what makes us “happy”. We focus an absurd amount of our limited time aimed for future potential while neglecting our present reality as is. If anything, we have been made to believe that “happiness” is some sort of attainable end-goal, like an airline platinum mileage status, rather than simply being one of life’s fleeting sensations to savor.

So what now? If traditional investing has a loneliness trap and if happiness isn’t the end goal either, what should we be investing in? At least one thing became clear to me building out this fictional app. In a world where people prioritize net health over net wealth, investing for the future feels quite similar to sharing your limited time with those around you. They can be your parents, children, partner, friends, or neighbors. Heck, they might not even be humans like trees, worms, bumblebees, microorganisms, soil and so on. By allocating some portion of your limited time with your surrounding community and environment, maybe, just maybe, we can slowly begin to build social reslience at the speed of trust.

With this newfound perspective towards personal investment, my life-partner and I moved out of Tokyo and moved into an experimental eco-village where we now share snippets of our everyday life with our neighbors. Our lives may coincidentally overlap with one another when we feed the chickens, water the organic gardens, or turn over hot compost. We may meet at the community managed rice paddy, attend the bi-weekly neighborhood dinner, or hear the children shout over toys. We may gossip over a snake sighting, forage backyard blueberries, or share our leftovers from last night’s dinner. The beauty of these organic interactions is that they aren’t forced, promised, or expected of. Rather they are unplanned, fostered, and shared by each individual. It’s like making nutrient rich compost. By sharing our time and space, we create layers of social memories that overlap and ferment slowly over time enriching our collective being. We’re only one year into this experiment and things may change. But one thing is for certain. For now, “the crisis of loneliness” doesn’t feel all too daunting.

Now, I’m not here to convince you to throw away your retirement plan and join some hippie eco-commune. Community chickens are wholesome but there are many ways to confront loneliness. What we know is that the societal symptoms of late-stage capitalism are emerging across the globe and people are feeling it. Japan is definitely ahead of the pack but many nations will soon follow. With humanity’s learned behavior of needing to forever innovate, many companies will most likely flood the “Care” Economy. And let’s be blunt here. No matter how noble the mission statement, how inspiring the origin stories, how resonating the company values may be, at least for this problem, Capitalism is not going to care. Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but I don’t know how the very economic model that got us here in the first place is well suited to ~~solve~~ care for the very problem it inadvertently created. So, let’s get resourceful and bricolage this from the bottom up. All we need is a bit of imagination and collective action. As societal cracks get larger and social bonds begin to fracture, I’d love to see how you will prototype your very own retirement.

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p.s. If you were in Providence, RI about ten years ago, you might remember this graffiti by Devin Costa. “LONELY AS I’VE EVER BEEN...” It was nothing but raw emotion. My RISD and Brown University art friends might get mad at me for saying this but this is the only artwork I remember from this time. I remember walking by wondering if it was just me that felt something from these powerful crooked letters. Somehow I felt a little less lonely about being lonely. I felt okay... maybe even a bit saved.

(photo from Brown Daily Herald)