I called my financial rep, Shawn, to ask about my investments and make sure my wife was listed as the beneficiary. Inevitably, the conversation drifted toward my anxieties about imminent retirement. I told him I had discovered a new and somewhat dubious incentive to stay alive: I wanted to collect my monthly CalSTRS checks for as long as humanly possible. I had even turned the arrangement into an imaginary game show called Beat the Actuary.
Shawn laughed. “No doubt about it. CalSTRS wants you to die. The sooner, the better.”
“I knew it!” I shouted with gleeful vindication.
Then Shawn said something I found enormously flattering. “You know, you’re the first person who’s ever conceived of retirement this way.”
“Because I’m a college professor,” I said. “I’m paid to overthink.”
“I like it,” he said. “It makes me look at retirement in a whole new light.”
“Damn right,” I said, my chest swollen with pride. “I’m going to live just to spite CalSTRS, and by God, I’m going to win.”
Let us be clear, then. Society pays homage to the sanctity of human life, but look unflinchingly at the actuarial machinery inside bureaucracies such as CalSTRS and Kaiser Permanente and you encounter a colder reality: financially, the books often balance better when people die sooner rather than later. So if you want to retire and beat the system, practice Adversarial Gamification. Turn the bureaucracy into a competition by inventing an opponent, establishing the stakes, and keeping score. Retirement becomes Beat the Actuary, and longevity becomes the scoreboard. Every birthday is another round won. Every pension check is another small defeat for the actuarial tables.
So stick to your Mediterranean diet. Keep doing your cardio. Build your muscle. Maintain your sterling bloodwork. If discipline, good sense, and the desire for excellent health aren’t enough to keep you on the righteous path, try spite.
Sometimes you need an enemy.
Leave a Reply