I wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach. I’m 70 years old, living on Social Security, and most days it feels like my entire life has been reduced to a math problem I can’t solve.
I bring in just under $2,500 a month before taxes. On paper, that probably looks decent compared to others. Some people online remind me of that—pointing out they get by on less. And I know they’re right. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Because beneath every bill, every dollar shaved away from my savings, there’s this gnawing fear I can’t shake: What happens when it’s gone?
I’ve got about $155,000 left in mutual funds. It used to be double that, but I lost my long-time job during the Great Recession. The company downsized and relocated. I never really recovered. For six to eight years, I patched together part-time work, three jobs at a time, until even that dried up. I burned through $100,000 of my savings just trying to stay afloat. Watching that money disappear over the years felt like being slowly erased.
Now, even though I rent at a good rate for my area, and I don’t need a car thanks to good public transit, I still come up short—maybe $300 to $500 every month. That’s with bare-bones survival. No extras. Just existence.
And I’m so tired of working. The last jobs I had were brutal in their own way—1099 gigs where you sit around all day waiting to be picked, like it’s some kind of Hunger Games for scraps. Even when I worked twelve-hour days, I barely cleared anything after taxes. It wasn’t living. It was exhausting.
What scares me most isn’t just the numbers. It’s the shame. This constant, crushing voice that tells me I failed. That I should’ve done better, saved more, earned more, lived smarter. It doesn’t matter that the system is rigged, that wages never kept up, that recessions stole years of earning power. Shame doesn’t care about facts. It just whispers that it’s all my fault.
I compare myself to others—neighbors, old colleagues, even strangers on the internet. Some are worse off. Some have nothing. They remind me I should feel grateful. And sometimes I do. Other times, I just feel like that man who stood frozen, watching the tsunami roll toward him until it swallowed him whole. I know the wave is coming. I can’t stop staring at it.
There are bright spots. The rent is frozen now that I’m over 62, which means at least that won’t skyrocket out of control. I don’t pay for heat. I can take the bus. And every so often, people online remind me I’m not alone. They tell me I’m surviving, and that survival itself is worthy of respect. I want to believe them.
But survival is a fragile word. It doesn’t erase the fear of medical bills that could wipe me out overnight. It doesn’t stop me from lying awake, ashamed, doing the math over and over in my head until the numbers blur.
This is what it’s like, surviving only on Social Security. It’s not just the money. It’s the exhaustion, the loneliness, the shame, and the constant background fear that one wrong turn, one illness, one stroke of bad luck will push me under.
And yet—I’m still here. Holding hands with strangers I’ll never meet, telling each other we’ll keep going. Somehow, that counts for something.