We all know we should save for retirement. Yet most people delay, often for far longer than seems sensible. Pensions are pushed aside until the forties or fifties, when the race to catch up begins, sometimes successful but often less so. Why is it so hard to plan for a future we know is coming? The answer is not that we are incapable, irresponsible or in denial, but that we carry the imprint of evolution — an immutable and eternal force of nature quietly orchestrating our thoughts, feelings and actions in ways that made sense for our ancestors but often misalign with the demands of modern life. These ancient priorities continue to play out in our own biographies, shaping what matters to us at different ages, as if the contemporary metropolis were still the ancient savanna. Daniel’s story is a case in point.
At 25, Daniel is finding his way in the City. What little cash remains after rent and essentials goes into what matters most at this stage — new places, new experiences, new faces. Retirement is a faint abstraction, barely worth a thought. Keeping pension contributions to a minimum, or opting out altogether, does not feel unreasonable. The real priority is to show promise, often through the status symbols that signal he has potential — and that he is attractive to prospective mates.
At 35, Daniel’s earnings are higher but so are his outgoings. Some are typical of the life stage — a mortgage, childcare, the costs of a growing household — yet others come from lifestyle inflation, the desire to claim what once felt out of reach. The new car, the larger home, the better holiday all carry a subtext: they signal success. Retirement remains vague, something important in principle but still too distant to command attention. What feels pressing is proving himself, showing that he is successful, dependable and still attractive to prospective mates. Evolution does not care whether he is in a committed relationship or not; it pushes the same imperative, indifferent to social constructs.
At 45, Daniel’s children are older, his earnings higher, and suddenly pensions matter in a way they never did before. The youthful illusion of near-immortality begins to fade; the overconfidence bias that once assured him of endless tomorrows recedes. Even though reproductive success still holds weight — he may still yearn for esteem, affection or legacy — other priorities press harder: security, stability, the unspent future. He pores over reminder letters, logs into his pension account, wonders whether he has done enough. By 55, it feels urgent — a race against time. The trouble is, for many, that race may already be too late.
Daniel’s life appears ordinary, but the shift in his priorities is not random. It follows a pattern that evolutionary psychologists describe through life history theory: the study of how humans allocate limited resources — time, energy, money — across the lifespan. We cannot maximise everything at once, so our priorities change with age.
Pensions: an evolutionary mismatch
At the heart of life history theory is reproductive success: passing genes into the next generation. Survival, like being able to provide for ourselves in later life, matters, but mainly as a prerequisite — we must live long enough to reproduce and support our offspring. Evolution has therefore tilted human priorities towards reproduction, sometimes even at the expense of long-term safety. This, too, makes sense: for most of history, and still in many cultures today, the young are expected to care for the old. Investing in children and kin offered a far greater chance of survival in later life than any resources set aside for oneself.
The ancient algorithm left its mark not only on our bodies but on the ways we think and behave. In youth and early adulthood, much of what we do — consciously or not — flows towards attracting mates, often through signalling status. A young adult may pour earnings and energy into promotions, possessions and other visible markers of achievement — investments in social standing, appearance and experiences that enhance status and attractiveness. Pensions, by contrast, signal little at this stage. They sit quietly, invisible and unnoticed, offering little advantage in the competition for status.
As life unfolds, the balance shifts. Midlife often brings parenting, mortgages and responsibilities that tether us to dependants. The competitive edge of youth begins to fade, and attention turns more readily to stability. Security — the safe home, the steady income, the reliable pension — is survival reframed for modern life, and as midlife unfolds it moves to the foreground, mattering more than the displays of youth. The old drive for reproductive display softens, though it never disappears entirely; it simply takes new forms, shaped by the need to safeguard what has already been built.
Survival and reproduction always interact — both matter throughout life. But in evolutionary terms reproduction takes priority, because without it nothing is passed on. Our minds are tilted towards competition and attraction in the earlier stages, and only later do they allow space for the quieter concern of pensions. These priorities made sense in the ancestral world, but they sit awkwardly in a modern economy that expects us to plan for decades of retirement. This evolutionary mismatch in retirement planning is compounded by another ancient bias we all share: time discounting. We are wired to value immediate rewards more than distant ones. On the savanna, a meal today was worth infinitely more than the promise of a meal in thirty years. For most of human history, few lived long enough to face retirement at all. Our evolution took millions of years; our recorded history spans only a few thousand. Modern pensions, in their current form, are barely a century old — a blink against the deep time that shaped our instincts. Little wonder our behaviour lags so far behind the demands of the present.
Seen in this light, failing to save early is not a personal flaw — nor is it later in life. Unhelpful as they are, such attitudes and behaviours are little more than a predictable outcome of how humans have always lived. Our lives remain shaped by the same evolutionary pressures that once rewarded status, competition and reproduction above all else. Retirement saving was never part of the evolutionary script, the script we never truly authored.
Yet the mismatch now looms large. We live longer than any of our ancestors could imagine. Ageing populations, lengthening retirements and the irreversible decline of largely unaffordable guaranteed pensions mean we must adapt to realities evolution was never prepared for. But adapting requires more than good intentions. Policy plays a role, yet no system can be designed to fully substitute for individual action, nor should it. Responsibility for the future begins with each of us, in the choices we make today, however small. Because the challenge is not only structural but personal: to recognise the pull of our instincts and take steps to outwit them.
Outwitting our instincts
Recognising why saving for the long term may feel counterintuitive is only half the story. The other half is learning how to act despite it. Evolution may have tilted our instincts towards reproduction and immediacy, but that does not mean we are powerless. We can design systems and habits that work with, rather than against, our wiring. One useful way of doing this is through three themes that run through every retirement story: liquidity, lifestyle and legacy.
Liquidity: Our instincts incline us towards the near term: cash in hand today feels more rewarding than resources we cannot touch for decades. That is why opt-outs and minimum contributions seem attractive, at least in the moment. To outwit this inclination, we can adopt a less-is-more approach, making saving almost effortless by letting small, hidden commitments accumulate quietly over time. Even the smallest pre-commitments can reshape the future. An automatic rise of just 1% in pension contributions whenever salary increases can, over time, create a striking difference through the quiet force of compounding and the benefit of tax relief. When automated, it removes both the paperwork and the mental effort, making the habit effortless. Research shows we part far more easily with money we never see than with money that lingers in our account. Precommitment works because it hides the sacrifice: what might have felt like a loss is transformed into something that never registered at all. By embedding saving into the natural flow of our finances, we make it frictionless — and gradually weaken the pull of short-term gratification.
Lifestyle: Pensions are invisible, offering little display value next to the visible rewards of everyday life: larger homes, longer holidays, limited-edition collectibles. To make them matter, we need to connect them to lifestyle — not as money locked away, but as the freedom to live well later: free from financial worries, free to live life on your terms, free to remain independent and protect those you love. To strengthen such a connection, we need to create vivid mental images of what later life could look like. Research shows that people save more when they can picture their future selves, and the more vivid those images, the stronger the commitment. Taking a moment to imagine where you live, how you spend your days and who you spend them with can make pensions feel less like abstractions. Taking even a few moments for this exercise can be helpful at any stage, but it is especially powerful when we are in that deliberative state of making a precommitment. The extra 1% of salary that first feels like a loss can, in the mind’s eye, begin to feel like an addition: one more trip abroad, one more year of freedom to choose work you enjoy, one more stretch of time to spend with friends or passions. By linking contributions to images that matter now, we transform what looks like subtraction into the promise of future abundance.
Legacy: For most of human history, old age was sustained not by pensions but by kin — survival in later life depended on others. That script still shapes our instincts today, which may explain why saving for ourselves can feel somewhat alien. Yet pensions, properly understood, are part of how we care for others. They buy us independence, sparing loved ones the burden of our needs. A practical way to bring this to life is to reframe contributions not as 'for me' but as 'for us.' Each pound set aside reduces the likelihood that children, siblings or friends will have to shoulder the cost of care or support later on. Even small increases in saving can be imagined as gifts of future relief: fewer difficult choices for our family, more dignity for ourselves. Seen in this way, pensions are not just self-preservation but an act of care and a legacy of independence.
Daniel at 25 could not picture his 65-year-old self. But Daniel at 45 can, and by then the question has shifted from attraction and achievement to stability and security. Each stage brings new goals and new awareness. Life history theory shows us why that shift happens, and time discounting explains why it feels so hard to act early. If pensions are an afterthought, it is not because we are broken. It is because we are human. Our task is not to deny that humanity but to outwit it — to design systems and habits that help our present selves care for the future ones we will inevitably become.
References:
- Buss, D. M. (2024). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind (7th ed.). Routledge.
- Davis, A. C., & Arnocky, S. (2022). An evolutionary perspective on appearance enhancement behavior. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 51(1), 3–37.
- Del Giudice, M. (2020). Rethinking the fast–slow continuum of individual differences. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(6), 536–549.
- Haselton, M. G., & Nettle, D. (2006). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47–66.
- Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23–S37.
- Kenrick, D. T. (2012). Evolutionary theory and human social behavior. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 11–31). SAGE Publications Ltd.
- Mell, H., Baumard, N., & André, J.-B. (2021). Time is money: Waiting costs explain why selection favors steeper time discounting in deprived environments. Evolution and Human Behavior, 42(4), 379–388.
- Thaler, R. H., & Benartzi, S. (2004). Save More Tomorrow™: Using behavioral economics to increase employee saving. Journal of Political Economy, 112(S1), S164–S187.
- Villmoare, B., Klein, D., Liénard, P., & McHale, T. S. (2024). Evolutionary origins of temporal discounting: Modeling how time and uncertainty constrain optimal decision-making strategies across taxa. PLOS ONE, 19(11), e0310658.
- Wade-Benzoni, K. A. (2019). Legacy motivations and the psychology of intergenerational decisions. Current Opinion in Psychology, 26, 19–22.
