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Every now and then the Internet serves up something perfectly pitched to what you assumed were your own very individual fears.

On Thursday, for me, that was Romie Stott’s “futurist vision of retirement planning” at The Billfold. Planning for the eventual end of paid work isn’t just difficult because life is expensive and saving money is hard, she points out — it’s also difficult because the world is ending.

Okay, that might be my fears talking. But Ms. Stott does note that climate change over the next several decades will, at the very least, affect certain popular retiree destinations: “If your retirement dream includes a beach house, lake house, Florida, or New Mexico, add four to 11 degrees to the daily forecast; that’s the EPA’s best prediction for 2100 AD.”

That may sound relatively tame, but she also mentions booming populations of disease-bearing insects, and increasingly catastrophic storms. It’s predictions like this that, for years, have made me think of retirement planning not just in terms of 401(k)s but in terms of learning to build a fire.

Also thinking about the future is Ann Friedman, who smartly analyzes her desire, and that of many younger women, for what she calls “representations of older women who are doing their own thing” — women, that is, through whom we can imagine our future lives.

Her lens is the films of Nancy Meyers. When she’s over sixty, she writes at The Cut, “if there’s still a market for the work I do, I want to be waking up and doing it every day like Meyers’s heroines do.” And, she adds, “I hope I have some savings by then and can do things like remodel my kitchen and have a fleeting romance with the architect who designs it.”

I mean no disrespect to Ms. Friedman, with whom I wholeheartedly agree in the matter of older women doing their own thing, when I say I hope kitchens still exist.

I know that climate change will likely harm the world’s poorest countries the most, and that as a middle-class American I may be lucky enough to weather the storm for quite some time, maybe my whole life. Still, it’s hard not to foresee a time when the storm swallows everybody up, even those currently fortunate.

So when I think of my future, I don’t think of Nancy Meyers heroines, much as I might aspire, as Ms. Friedman does, to their vibrant, multi-decade careers and their way with turtlenecks. I think, instead, of “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Specifically, I look to the Vuvalini, the “many mothers” riding their motorcycles across the post-apocalyptic desert. These women don’t have a home anymore, and they’ve lost many of their number (“we’re all that’s left,” one of them explains). But they have their wits, and their goggles, and at least for a while, they have each other. For me, sometimes, that counts as aspirational.