To answer your specific question, there are a bunch of potential alternatives.
You can use a Roth IRA to have access at least to your contributions without penalty, and have tax deferral and tax free earnings.
You should probably put enough to get the full match into your 401k no matter what, as long as you expect to become vested for the company contribution, since taking that out early and paying penalties is still a win versus forgoing the free money your employer is offering.
You can invest in plain old retail investment accounts. You will pay tax every year, but it's possible to minimize the tax hit with tax-efficient investing strategies (low turnover, paying attention to specific gains and losses -- or use tax efficient mutual funds).
You can get some of the tax advantages of retirement savings without the restriction on when you can use the money using permanent life insurance as a savings vehicle. This is very popular with wealthy clients who want to save more than roth and 401k's will allow and have high marginal tax rates. Drawback: To the extent you don't otherwise need life insurance, or fit well with this kind of plan, it may not make sense versus eating the taxes in a retail (non-qualified) investment account. Look at your individual case carefully. (Disclaimer: I make money from selling life insurance.).
The possible implied alternative of not saving at all seems foolish unless you have a very good use for the money now. if living cheap is so easy, why not do it now? you can always spend your money later. If you want to start startups, having some money saved for that is a good idea. If you want to give away a lot, the world will not lose very much by you giving it away plus reasonable investment earnings later versus doing it right now. Saving money retains flexibility. There is no reason it must be permanently earmarked for retirement.
As a planner, I would say that most people I run into, if they save enough, are saving too much in retirement focused vehicles, and not enough elsewhere. I see a lot of people in their 40s and 50s who have 5-15x salary in their 401k/403b, but a barely sufficient (or not even) emergency fund, and essentially zero other assets they can use without penalty before age 59.5. My general recommendation is to have a good portion of your savings outside the retirement 59.5 gate if possible without losing matches or giving up too much tax efficiency.
I'm 22 years old, just got a job, and have the option of putting money in a 401k. More generally, I just started making money and need to think about how I'm going to invest and save it.
As far as long-term/retirement savings goes, the way I see it is that my goal is to ensure that I have a sufficient standard of living when I'm "old" (70-80). I see a few ways that this can happen:
Median optimistic year (10% likelihood): 2022
Median realistic year (50% likelihood): 2040
Median pessimistic year (90% likelihood): 2075
- http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
And even if they're wrong and there's no singularity, it still seems to be very likely that there will be immense wealth creation in the next 60 or so years, and I'm sure that there'll be a fair amount of distribution as well, such that the poorest people will probably have reasonably comfortable lives. I'm a believer in Kurweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, but even if you project linear growth, there'd still be immense growth.
Given all of this, I find thinking that "wealth creation + distribution over the next 60 years -> sufficient standard of living for everyone" is a rather likely scenario. But my logic here is very "outside view-y" - I don't "really understand" the component steps and their associated likelihoods, so my confidence is limited.
Anyway, I think that there is a pretty good chance that I succeed, in, say the next 20 years. I never thought hard enough about it to put a number on it, but I'll try it here.
Say that I get 10 tries to start a startup in the next 20 years (I know that some take longer than 2 years to fail, but 2 years is the average, and it often takes shorter than 2 years to fail). At a 50% chance of success, that's a >99.9% chance that at least one of them succeeds (1-.5^10). I know 50% might seem high, but I think that my rationality skills, domain knowledge (eventually) and experience (eventually) give me an edge. Even at a 10% chance of success, I have about a 65% (1-.9^10) chance at succeeding in one of those 10 tries, and I think that 10% chance of success is very conservative.
Things I may be underestimating: the chances that I judge something else (earning to give? AI research? less altruistic? a girl/family?) to be a better use of my time. Changes in the economy that make success a lot less likely.
Anyway, there seems to be a high likelihood that I continue to start startups until I succeed, and there seems to be a high likelihood that I will succeed by the time I retire, in which case I should have enough money to ensure that I have a sufficient standard of living for the rest of my life.