Morgan Housel

can easily afford to safely have a wonderful retirement and can't bring themselves to spend a penny of it because their financial identity is number goes up every year.

I'm a saver.

And my net worth goes up every year.

And the idea of starting to entrench that down is so painful to them.

The other side of this, of why I think it's actually half rational, is we're fortunate to live in a world where if you retire at 60, there's a meaningful chance you're going to live into your 90s.

And so you're talking about, it was not that long ago.

I mean, 60 or 70 years ago, the idea of retirement by and large didn't exist for most people.

Your retirement party was also your funeral.

That was how it worked.

And retirement was something that rich people could afford to do, but ordinary people, it didn't work at all.

And then even if you go back to the 1980s, you retired at 60, you're probably going to die at 68.

So you're talking, you might need to fund a retirement for three, five, maybe 10 years.

Now you're legitimately looking at people who might need to fund a retirement for 40 years.

And the amount of money that you... So the idea that they are worried about spending too quickly, they're like, yeah, good worry.

You should think about that.

And you retire at 65.

You got, I mean, that's a period of time that you need to fund that would have been just such a magical thing

to my grandparents' generation, to our grandparents' generation.

So the idea that people think about that longevity and don't want to overspend makes a lot of sense.

And you can match that with people who still have a mental affliction of, I can't bear seeing the numbers go down.