You could just stockpile long shelf-life foods and literally save today's production for future consumption https://www.offthegridnews.com/off-grid-foods/stockp

You could just stockpile long shelf-life foods and literally save today's production for future consumption https://www.offthegridnews.com/off-grid-foods/stockpiling-101-which-foods-really-have-the-longest-shelf-life/ https://www.offthegridnews.com/off-grid-foods/stockpiling-10... > You need actual future goods production. That's the real key to "world savings", and in your terms you can think of it as "making youth more productive" (or making the elderly productive enough). In the desert island, You seem to imagine that labor is a zero-sum game (the desert island is the same tomorrow as today) rather than a positive-sum, where I improve the world by my labor, in addition to providing for today's consumption. Imagine an isolated homesteading family with no community. How would this person/family save for old age? By building up the farm, building tools, planting orchards, building irrigation systems, managing forests, so that today's labor can reduce the amount of labor required for the future. Agafia Lykova is such a person - https://www.businessinsider.com/72-year-old-hermit-lives-in-siberian-wilderness-photos-video-2017-6#and-hey-maybe-you-read-russian-22 https://www.businessinsider.com/72-year-old-hermit-lives-in-... - she lives alone, using tools saved from an earlier time, in a home her family built in previous decades. Life with this infrastructure, including maintenance, requires less effort than initial construction, which was done when there was surplus labor available. Similarly for a country or a world - the net savings exists in acquired infrastructure (capital) that enables future production (& consumption). Trees are a good example - by planting fruit trees (capital investment), I enable future fruit harvests. Managed timber forests provide future lumber (or fuel) production decades later. Similar investments in infrastructure (water systems, equipment, buildings, etc.) all represent net saved value today that enhances future production in subsequent years. Yes, labor is required in future years, both for production and maintenance (unless/until we can fully automate), but the ratio of consumption today to future consumption is not constant, even in global sum (e.g., the years 1940-1945 may have been a world-wide net loss of acquired capital, certainly for Europe). That net improvement in infrastructure is global savings (or loss).