I'm loving this thread . . .
It also reminds me of how incredibly good I have it, working at a university in a very nice area. Pension starts at 50, and I have tax deferred 403b and 457 accounts. I just wish I took that stuff seriously when I started at 29.
The thing about my job is that it is an area of academia that is 'proto-scientific'. . . the result is that I have a lot of colleagues who work 80+ hour weeks year round pumping out derivative non-sense.
Then we collectively review people's work to propose pay increases, which means we basically count their publications. Everyone knows that everyone knows the basic process:
"OMG, what a lot of shit so-and-so has published. Yes, but look how MUCH THERE IS!!!"
It appears that this fact about the field attracts small minds with massive egos. When you hear someone talk about a colleagues, it's invariably "so-and-so has X publications, wow!". It's never, wow, so-and-so discovered X! No one cares, it's just the social ranking brownie points of counting publications.
I checked out of the game about a decade ago when I learned that not only were people deeply narcissistic, some who I foolishly trusted are also Machiavellian--working to undermine one another behind the scenes.
Then I learned about MMM about 5 years ago.