Your investment portfolio

 If you've made enough money during your working life to invest in a portfolio that will now support you in comfortable leisure in retirement, congratulations.

You don't need to be a major plutocrat to enjoy the advantages of the system that they have designed. Investment for profit is open to anyone who wants to buy in with whatever spare money they have lying around.

Many employers offer pension plans. At higher income levels, the pension can be a considerable inducement to take a job and do your best to hold onto it. Keep your eyes on the pot of gold waiting in the luminous fog of the future.

If your employer doesn't offer a plan, you can still shop around for a mutual fund, or piece together your own collection. Some people are good at this, or lucky. The more money you have, the more luck seems to find you. It isn't insider trading if it just comes up in social conversation, right?

However you collect your pile, remember that you are being supported by the labor of others. The higher your income during your career, the more you were paid with money that was denied to others. The income on your investments is almost entirely money that is denied to others still working. This does include the CEOs and other top management at profitable corporations, who have to sacrifice some of the profits to pay investors. It's all part of the game. They're well compensated enough for it to be a game for them.

Critics of Social Security complain, among other things, that retirees now are getting money put into the system by workers who have not yet retired. The active workers are subsidizing the retirees. But that's exactly how an investment-based retirement plan works as well. The money that private industry generates to pay a return on investment is made using their active labor force, or otherwise stressing the active labor force by laying a bunch of them off and buying back stock with the money saved on payroll.

The only way to save for retirement without relying on younger people to pay your way is to hoard gold, and hope that it still has value by the time you try to trade your nuggets and ingots for the real necessities.

An unstoppable wave of suffering and death

 The current crisis in Ukraine not only puts us on the verge -- if not an inescapable path -- to nuclear destruction, it also forces humanity to ignore the environmental collapse that's been brewing since the beginning of the 20th Century.

World-wide, authoritarian governments push back against democracy, while democratic countries and confederations have to satisfy voters in order to get anything done. While individual voters may value their freedom, and access to government, large groups of them act from narrow interests to the detriment not only of their nation but of the world as a whole. We've had decades to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, for instance, but instead have only looked for cheaper prices for the poison.

This fossil fuel dependency plays strongly into the doom set in motion as Russia warms up the missile launchers in eager anticipation of the showdown with the West. China might hope to play the moderator, but no one can put the brakes on Putin's aggression except Putin himself. And the war crimes of his soldiers show that he has no shortage of depraved followers enjoying the sadistic task of terrorizing their way to a dominant role strictly by virtue of their willingness to take us all to hell with them in a fireball. As long as democratic governments are rightly afraid to ask their citizens to sacrifice for the war effort by dealing with high prices and shortages in a wartime economy, Russia will continue to act with justifiable confidence.

As Russia and China play Bad Cop/Slightly Less Bad Cop with the rest of the world, the cult of the strongman leader seems to offer a path to safety for anyone willing to knuckle under and kiss up. The depraved and sadistic see career opportunities in such regimes. None of them seem to give much thought to how short a run they'll have. One side or the other will probably blink in the nuclear confrontation, but by then we'll have lost too much time on the environmental collapse and we're probably going to end up in a society where you'd best not depart visibly from a narrow set of norms.

The odds favor a pretty miserable future. I challenge you to prove me wrong.