Don't look at your 401(k), they said. I looked.

Washington Post

14-04-2025

I opened my first 401(k) at 24, when my first grown-up job agreed to transition me from hourly to salaried. 'It might look like a pay cut,' the human resources rep told me, acknowledging that my monthly check was about to shrink. 'But you get benefits.' She encouraged me to contribute to the organization's retirement plan, which she said involved a 3 percent match at 100 percent and a 2 percent match at 50, and I nodded like I understood what that meant, and then later that night I proudly called my dad to tell him I had a 401(k), and I pronounced it 'four hundred and one.'
And then — then nothing, mostly. The funds were direct-deposited, the match was matched, and every few months I'd dig up my T. Rowe Price log-in to see how things were going, and years passed, and that basically brings us up to this past week.
'Don't look,' an analyst warned as I flipped past NBC. 'I haven't looked,' confided The Post's columnist Michelle Singletary. Money.com teased of the 'worst thing you can do' to your 401(k) right now — and, spoiler alert, that thing was to check it. Your 401(k) was essentially Medusa, and direct eye contact with it could kill you. My favorite surreal headline came from the Times of India, of all places, and it read: 'Donald Trump says he didn't check his 401K. Experts say you shouldn't too.'
I probably don't need to explain to you why financial analysts are right, but as an elder millennial, I feel I need to explain to them what it felt like to be the rest of us this week, us normies, as we all trapped ourselves to the rocket ship called the U.S. economy and waited for either a blastoff or an O-ring failure.
Whatever the American Dream once was, for whole generations of us, it has been distilled down to a 3 percent match. You get to be in charge of your own destiny, was the enthusiastic promise of the 401(k). You get to decide what investments are right for you. Never mind that I have no business deciding what investments are right for anybody. Sir, I majored in English.
But this is what we were given, so this is what we would work with. We rode the bus and we saved enough for the 3 percent match. We side-hustled with Uber and saved enough for the 3 percent match. We bought avocado toast and listened to elders say that if we stopped buying avocado toast then we could be retired by now. (If food tariffs go into effect, they are probably right.) We watched housing prices outstrip income to unprecedented levels, and watched universities start charging 60 grand a year with straight faces, and paid for health insurance with deductibles so high that you wondered how it was even legal to be called insurance. Sometimes I lie awake and marvel about the fact that my granddad was able to raise six kids on the wages of a garbageman, while I just paid $900 to have a splinter removed, but I digress. The 3 percent match was your gateway to financial security. It's pretax, don't you see? It was the best we could do. It was everything we had.
How privileged we were, to have a job with a 3 percent match. And how crazy it is that the chance to gamble your own hard-earned money on the stock market — because the choice is either that or post your personal sob story on GoFundMe — is, in this country, privileged?
By now I hope it's clear that I have no idea what the stock market did this week, or is doing, or will do. But when we are talking about the stock market, what we are talking about is how 35 percent of working-age Americans, according to the Census Bureau, have money in 401(k)s or similar accounts (18 percent have IRAs, and about 14 percent have pensions), and how each of us walked into an HR office at one point believing that we were holding up our end of the bargain. And how each of us saw this week that we might be in charge of our own destinies, but our destinies could explode if one man decided to roll out of bed and declare 145 percent tariffs on China.
There's no bargain there. Not in any sense of the word. There are only the expectations of progress we have been trained to have in this country. That stock markets would rebound, that things would be better for our kids. Three percent better, maybe, with a 100 percent match.
I've also found myself thinking a lot about Florence Thompson this week. In 1936, Thompson was a mother of seven, following crop patterns along the West Coast, as her family eked out a living picking their way through those fields. Outside a pea farm in California, the car broke down and Thompson and her children set up a temporary camp, while Thompson's partner set out to acquire what was needed to get them back on the road again.
They stayed awhile, days or weeks, and at one point a photographer named Dorothea Lange stopped by and asked to take Thompson's photograph, and those images — Thompson nursing one rag-clad child, two others burying their faces in her shoulders, Thompson's hand grazing her chin as she stares out into bleakness and dust — those images became the defining portraits of the Great Depression, a time that nobody would aspire to return to.
The first Social Security payments hadn't been doled out when those photos were taken. They would happen the following year. Medicaid arrived in 1965. Section Eight housing came in 1974. 401(k)s came in 1978. All of those changes would be within Thompson's lifetime. I wonder whether she understood, then, that things would get better, that the country would try really hard to figure out how to provide for its struggling residents.
There's a rocking chair in one of the images. If you're familiar with only the most famous portrait, a close-up, you might not have realized that. But if you look at the whole set of pictures, you'll see: Thompson and her children are sitting in a three-sided tent, and there are wooden crates and a few steamer trunks, and in front of all of it there's an intricate rocking chair.
I think about the possibility that Florence Thompson packed up that rocking chair every time she and her children moved. How cumbersome it would have been. How impractical. But how she took it with her anyway, a promise for a better future. The best she could do, everything she had in the world.