Pensions are boring. I say this from a position of some knowledge. I spend quite a lot of my working life talking about pension policy. I find the subject almost endlessly fascinating, but I am aware that most normal, healthy, well-adjusted people do not. For friends and colleagues, my fascination is regarded as something between an idiosyncrasy and a pathology
Being bored by pensions is rational. Pensions are often complicated and hard to engage with. I have lost count of the number of times people have told me they have a pile of envelopes from multiple pension providers sitting unopened in a drawer at home. We know we should open them and do something about the contents, but who has the time or enthusiasm?
This is basic human psychology in action. We are hardwired to focus on the present more than the future. Our brains simply do not engage well with things that seem a long way off.
This indifference has shaped pensions policy for years. One of the central features of UK pension policy over the last decade and a half has been auto-enrolment, whereby people are automatically placed into a workplace pension when they start a job, unless they actively choose to opt out. In essence, pension policy has made a virtue of boredom and inertia, using people’s lack of engagement to get them to save anyway.
