This paper draws attention to people’s pension savings and their responses to the increasing calls urging them to engage in practices of calculation about their future life as retirees. Recurring studies report that these calculation exercises have turned out to raise problems to people, provoking – at times – frustration or even indifference among pension savers. But why is that so? Why do people not engage in this kind of calculations?

Prior literature suggests that mechanic calculation presupposes a set of conditions. Individual knowledge-based capacity (Lusardi and Mitchell 2007) as well as commensurate translations that enables possibilities for comparisons between different kinds of choices (Espeland and Stevens 1998; Callon & Law, 2005) are but a few conditions that are suggested to be fulfilled in order to make rational calculation feasible. There are situations, however, when calculation is called for and expected to be attended to without controversy, but still turn out as moments where rational principles of calculation do not seem to apply (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Calculating one’s pension might be argued to represent one such situation. Based on our empirical observations, the basis for rational calculation seems to be challenged when pension savers are asked to imagine an existence taking place in a future several decades ahead from the life they lead today. Hence, in order to further explore the reasons to this experienced calculative dilemma, we ask: What role does future play in practicing pension calculations?

The aim of this paper is to extend our understanding of the conditions of calculation. The idea is to investigate situations in which calculation entail dilemmas of rationality. To frame the conditions of calculation, we draw on Jaspers’ idea of boundary situations (2010). A boundary situation is a moment in which a person is faced with discrepancies and contradictions that cannot easily be resolved by means of rational thinking. We suggest that people’s pension management offers such a moment, investigating how people read and understand pension accounts in the light of a future that involves different kinds of ‘deaths’: the termination of professional life; the consequences of physical decay, and the end of life itself.

The study demonstrates that practices of calculations inevitably links to imagining the future but also, and by consequence, how calculations become circumscribed when these future imaginations involve existential concerns that rule out rational reasoning. In such cases, calculations transforms into a practice that stretches beyond rationality, suggesting that when the future is unimaginable, calculation becomes nonsensical or even absurd. This, in turn, adds a time dimension to the conditions of calculation, an issue which to date has not explicitly been addressed in prior accounting literature.