Sean Carroll

We're not all fine.

Obviously, you know, one of the difficulties in answering questions like this is I want to make the answers interesting and useful to as wide a fraction of the listening audience as they can be.

And I know that some people have way less wealth and money than I do.

And some listeners have much more wealth and money than I do.

So it's very different circumstances.

But if you're able to save money when you're very, very young, it is hugely helpful to you when you get old because of the miracle of compound interest.

And if you were like me when you were very, very young, there was really no possibility of saving a lot of money.

I mean, not only is your income very low, but you're instantly saddled with debt when you go to college or whatever.

And the amount of debt that a lot of modern college students are saddled with is enormously greater than I had to deal with.

And I also got to sort of postpone paying it because I went to grad school.

And in grad school, you get paid, but you don't need to pay off your debts yet.

But as soon as I was a postdoc, a lot of my free income was just going to – like those would have been good years to put into retirement accounts.

But a lot of it is just going to paying off my student loans.

And that's bad.

It's just sort of a terrible system.

We tell people to be responsible.

We make it very hard for them to do it.

And then it's even worse when you're older.

Like I know young people, you think you have it bad.

But for many, many people here in the United States, when I say society, I mean the United States because that's the one I'm familiar with.