(MONEY Magazine) – The only thing I like to think about less than my current financial situation is retirement. To me, that means old age, physical and psychic decline and inevitably (sorry, folks) shuffling off this mortal coil. Also, somewhere between then and now we should be good for at least one stock market crash and/or depression to lay waste my 401(k) and IRAs. No fun.

When I was in the third grade, though, thinking about the future was something I did all the time. The only math problem that interested me was calculating my age in the year 2000. Back in 1968, that date was much on people's minds--the subject of innumerable "How We Will Live" features in Life magazine and sober TV documentaries hosted by Walter Cronkite. The year 2000 wasn't a point in time; it was a parallel dimension.

There, technology made everything cool. There would be jet cars, hotels on the moon and food pills, not to mention computers everywhere and pristine plastic cities filled with bald people of both sexes in nylon jumpsuits. Everything would be as clean and white as the inside of Apollo 8.

And come that incredible year, I would be 39--not so young, maybe, I reasoned, but not old either. I would be living some very exciting swinging bachelor life, either as a NASA scientist or possibly James Bond. I even knew the kind of car I would drive: a silver Jaguar XKE. Money did not enter into in my calculations. There would, I was sure, be plenty of it.

Here we are, in 2000 at last, and I am about to turn Jack Benny's age. There are computers everywhere. But the future doesn't seem to have arrived yet. Those PCs, for instance, don't have quite the romance I had counted on, resembling cranky toasters more than they do HAL. I'm married with one child, drive a tan Volvo station wagon and cut my lawn with the same mower my father bought when I was six. This life has its joys, but Star Trek it's not. And money? I'm making much more than I ever have, and somehow I'm still always broke.

As for the future, in 2030, barring a bus crash, nasty illness or nuclear war, I'll be 69. I fully expect to be a spry geezer, kept youthful by a variety of yet-to-be-bioengineered wonder drugs, living in a white plastic retirement colony on the moon and tooling around the lunar seas in a Jaguar jet car. Where will the money for all that come from? I'm not worried. There will be plenty of it.

--Peter Carbonara