Thinking further on this thread subject, it seems to me that in retirement, we have more control over the things we choose to pay attention to. We can focus on all the negative news and spend time worrying about things we have little or no control over.
Conversely, we can focus on the things we have always wanted to do, but never had time for. We no longer have to worry about having and keeping a job. Instead we are faced with what to do with ourselves over the course of a day. Isn't that something we dreamed about when we were working full time, waiting for that day when we had more control over our time?
Well, we are here (assuming we here in these forums are retired), and the time we have been waiting for is now. Are we going to now waste that period of our lives that we have worked so long for worrying about things that may never happen, or are we going to do the things that we had long dreamed about?
The focus in media and typical discussions regarding preparing for retirement seems to be all about money and having enough. The assumption seems to be that either you retire a millionaire or you are going to be eating dog food and living in a cheap hotel downtown. As usual, the reality is somewhere in between. I suspect that most of us have a fixed income consisting of Social Security (or whatever the equivalent is outside the US) and hopefully some sort of retirement savings to augment that.
For my wife and I, planning for retirement was at least as much about what we wanted to do, which in turn dictates how much money you need. We gathered the things we needed over the course of our working lives for our hobbies in retirement, and are therefore able to do what we want while living quite moderately. To me, what we want to do comes first, and then we consider how much we needed to save. Much retirement planning and discussion seems to me to be backwards in that regard.
So, all that said, it seems to me that the pursuit of our hobbies, doing the things we always wanted to do but never had time for, is a better way to live than to be worried about when the world is going to end and carrying all those silly phobias around to weigh us down.
Sometimes, in the face of these kinds of discussion as in this thread, it is a good idea to take a step back and refocus - remember what we dreamed of doing in retirement and then focusing on that, rather than all the bad things that might (but rarely do) happen to us.
I sincerely hope that we will collectively do that instead of focusing on the negative. There are good things in this world and in our lives and, if we refuse to see that, life can indeed be very miserable. However, it doesn't have to be. It is our choice and only we individually can make that choice. Yes, we all will die someday. Until then, why not choose to live?
Tony