The real debt-and-deficit crisis facing our country isn’t national—it’s personal. A look at the coming retirement apocalypse and what we have to do to avoid it.

The retirement scenario everyone wants to avoid arrives in 2030. That’s when the largest demographic group in U.S. history, the baby boomers, will have nearly depleted the Social Security trust fund. It’s also when older Generation X-ers will begin moving out of work and into their golden years. But these won’t be the years of leisure that recent generations have known. Consider a typical 2030 retiree–an educated Gen X woman, around 65, who has worked all her life at small and midsize companies. Those firms have created most of the new jobs in the economy for the past 50 years, but only 15% of them offer formal retirement plans. Our retiree has put away savings here and there, but she’s also part of the middle class, which took the biggest wealth hit during the financial crisis of 2008. That–along with the fact that average real wages have been virtually flat for three decades, even as living costs have risen–means she has minimal savings, even less than the $42,000 that today’s average retiree leaves work with. More than half her retirement income comes from Social Security. When you factor in health care spending, she’ll be living on only about 41% of the average national wage. Despite her best efforts to work and save, our Gen X retiree will have trouble maintaining her standard of living. She won’t be alone: the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College estimates that 50% of American retirees will be in the same boat. In all likelihood, then, she won’t actually be retired. Like many of her peers, our Gen X-er finds herself needing a part-time job; she shares her home and many living expenses with her son, a millennial who isn’t doing so well himself. More members of his generation live with Mom and Dad than any generation before, according to the Pew Research Center, in part because they came of age in the post-financial-crisis era, when wages were stagnant and unemployment high. Boomers scrambling to get by on a minimal income. Gen X-ers who can’t afford to stop working. Millennials staring at a bleak financial future. This is the retirement apocalypse coming at us fast–unless we do something about it now.

Regardless of the eventual solution, few dispute that we’re on a dire course at present. Experts estimate that half of Americans are at risk of becoming economically insecure in retirement. Our system is in desperate need of a fix. “We’re facing a tsunami,” says Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa who has proposed his own program. “And we’ve got to deal with it–now.”

Pew’s Paul Taylor, author of the book The Next America, is hopeful that such forced communal living may actually help spark the tough political debate needed to reform entitlements and enhance retirement security while continuing to invest in our economy for the sake of the young. The portion of the population most worried about retirement are the 20- and 30-somethings who see an uncertain future as they struggle to pay off student loans and establish themselves in the work world, and perhaps lean on their parents for support. “There’s a growing sense, for all the generations, that no one has been spared and everyone is suffering to some extent,” says Taylor. “There’s also a sense that we’re all in this together–and maybe that has the potential to change this zero-sum debate.” If we’re lucky, that may help us find the way to a system in which people of all generations can retire with security and dignity.

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