Why you can't plan for retirement

This article corroborates some vague theories of mine regarding people and retirement. In my experience when retirement is brought up people either blank out or tend to have a HUGE rosy outlook the math can't support.

For the first kind it's like that feeble old person they WILL be will never exist. They ignore that person because it's painful to think too far ahead and in reality everyone's future ends in death. For me that is a shame because typically there is a large gap between when you could "retire" and do more things you enjoy and dying. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of a sad broke old person.

The second type of person is much more interesting to me if only because usually they at least don't deny real math when it is shown to them. My friends and I have a term called "fuzzy math" that originally applied only to people thinking if they only made more money THEN they would become financially solvent or intelligent. Over time this has morphed to mean any number of math tortured exercises people use to assure themselves they are doing great. Some examples:
1. Someone is behind on investing so decides they will invest later in risky investments and "double it up" quickly and so retire in style.
2. The McMansion prophecy. Never satisfied with current housing they continue to move up whether in their means or not assuring themselves there is a perfect McMansion for them that then they will payoff (probably with #1) and live there forever.
3. General smaller predictions of huge travel, gadgets or fun they will have on their large retirement cushion.

When you do the math however it paints a sad picture. I'm an aggressive saver and constantly am looking at models that take my own tendencies to over estimate out of the picture. I still am unsure if I will have enough but at least I'm realistic. This still doesn't cover those who neglect other things for retirement. They never quite get around to making the hard habits stick. Examples include neglecting health, pushing blame onto spouse,kids, parents, etc. (If only they would listen to me) and not having enough outside interests apart from work.

As a coworker who has since died used to tell me. "Life isn't easy but it is simple". None of the above is easy to do given modern life but it is simple to know what you need to do.