The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job.
We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. And then on retirement, people would still have their hobbies and passion projects they had been working on their entire life.
That is the biggest rock in the bucket. Smaller rocks include social media use, diet, exercise, whether the person is in a toxic home environment, mental health, or has children.
I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work. So I try to optimise my life to give me the most energy that I can have. I eat really healthy; high protein, high fibre, low saturated fat. I try to keep my social media use low, using ScreenZen. I meditate. I do resistance exercise a few times a week.
But even still, I find that my mind is exhausted part of a way through a workday, usually by 14:00-15:00. Maybe that's because I'm a software engineer.
I don't know how to fix it. But I'd really appreciate an extra day a week off, even at the cost of some remuneration. I love my work, but I don't want it to feel like it's the only thing I have going.
> they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering
This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.
> I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
This is why I am so thankful that I grew up before the days of social media and devices. I have direct first hand knowledge that the world does not end because some feed hasn't been checked in the past 5 minutes. I am forced to hear others doom scrolling their feeds and listening to the disjointed audio from short clips looping or getting interrupted to get to the next one, and I am constantly reminded of those that would sit on the sofa with the remote constantly flipping channels. Nothing was on the screen long enough to really see what was on, but just enough they decided not what they wanted to see. It's like the exact same personality cranked to 11.
> There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time.
I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest.
I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks / etc...
There tends to be a decompression stage after leaving work environment that didn't suit the person, then a deconstruction / rebuilding / searching stage afterwards.
I think it's also common for large lottery winners to become depressed because they have trouble searching for what to do afterwards.
Yep, the statement is so bad with a pattern of "because most won't, then all won't", which commonly used during birth rate issues too. It's either ignorant or malicious with hidden agenda behind.
Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
> I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants,
The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years.
There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients reported a marginally higher rate of thinking about maybe starting a business, but they weren't actually doing it.
As I remember it, there were four kinds of UBI trials:
- Low UBI, short term
- Low UBI, long term
- High UBI, short term
- High UBI, long term
Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.
High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.
High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.
I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.
Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.
This has been my experience as well. My stock advice to people who want to save money is to simply work more. Not because the marginal hours will be meaningfully worth it, but because it stops them from spending money by default.
> This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
Wrong.
> I know many people with a lot of free time...
Not a valid argument for, or against anything.
You probably mean to say you already know humans are just 'lazy' and the evidence for it is vibes, which is completely and totally sufficient for you but for anyone who thinks otherwise - they better come up with evidence that isn't just vibes.
i think people trying to argue that we would be more productive is a symptom of the productivity disease. where all we value is productivity and thats the only way we can justify more non-work time. i personally just think we should all have more time to do what we want, whether that is being productive on personal projects, talking to people, playing games, or doing nothing. happier people right? why should 10% of the richest people enslave the rest of us.
edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.
The people I know who have done it best are a friend's parents. They are both general practitioners and just gradually scaled back how many hours per week they worked, and gradually filled the time with various community and outdoor activities (church, choir, book clubs, hiking, biking, etc). My aim is to do the same, but I think I need to shift from being a tech employee to some kind of consulting to do that since scaling back is seen as weakness in corporate culture.
If there's a schedule to your tiredness then can probably reschedule it. This is a lesson I've discovered to good effect. [Side note: 2-3pm is probably due to food/glucose/insulin levels - its worth investigating]
Don't be fooled by tiredness. You can be mentally tired but not physically tired. These are not opposites. You can be physically tired in one aspect but not another.
You can be mentally tired but because you like to paint, then painting will regenerate you. It will make you less tired after you paint or even better: have you now appropriately tired that you properly sleep due to that tiredness.
Tired is not tired. You be tired in one way and not in another. This blanket use of the word isn't helpful and leaves a lot of potential left behind as you sit on the couch "tired".
It's hard for me to even contemplate having "nothing to do." I haven't had paid work for many, many years, yet I don't feel like I have any spare time at all.
The only way I can get anything meaningful done outside of work is to do it before work.
Those first few hours of the day are precious, as far as energy goes. Or attention, or will.
On a related note, I put Q2 of Eisenhower Matrix (important but not urgent, i.e. the stuff you want to get done "someday" but keep putting off indefinitely... i.e. your hopes and dreams) at the front of the day, because Q1 (urgent and important) basically forces you to do it and requires no special attention.
To put it bluntly, the long term stuff needs to be scheduled and consistently acted upon, or the default outcome will be very depressing.
never heard of the eisenhower matrix but my time management resonates with what you wrote. ill try forcing q2 stuff earlier as well as ive noticed it never gets done! yes, the default outcome is depressing.
> The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering.
I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can't do anything else with their lives, but if we changed that to 38% of their waking hours they'd be so bored that they be starting businesses and volunteering all over. That's not even consistent with your own experience of being exhausted halfway through the work day. Two extra hours per day isn't going to translate to launching a new business or volunteer effort.
You hinted at the real problem: Most people don't have the time management skills and motivation that they think they do. Remove a couple hours of work per week from most people's lives and those hours will get redistributed to mostly leisure time. Some of it more productive than other options (socializing with the community, working on hobbies).
Are you considering jobs that are extraordinarily demanding? What if you're an ER Doctor? Or an Air Traffic Controller? Or someone getting started in their career in their early 20s, when most of us possess the unique combination of a lack of life experience that would prevent exploitation and ambition? For these jobs, I can easily sympathize with the idea that after a workday they're too tired to develop personally. Moreover, it's a manager's job to sap every ounce of productivity out of a person. Modern technology increasingly makes this possible. Even seemingly mundane jobs like working in a call center can be so orchestrated that using the bathroom makes them fall behind. And productivity has done nothing but rise for decades!
I also don't see how your final paragraph really refutes rather than just restates their opinion. Hobbies produce projects and business ventures all the time. Someone also has to find some way or another to socialize with the community. Volunteering is a great way to do that.
Jobs that you want to do vs jobs that you have to do are entirely different levels of motivating and result in completely different energy levels for people.
If I have to do a job I hate for the rest of my life I would eternally be low energy. If I could do the thing I loved every day, the thing I truly wanted to do, I would get up excited every day and would have high energy throughout.
Having more free time, yes people would get bored. But the resulting things that they work on would be things that invigorate them.
"9-5" jobs in America are anything but. Since the popularity of smartphones people are reachable 24/7 and employers are taking full advantage.
Hourly employees have it even worse. When your schedule varies week to week and even on your "day off" your employer may be constantly reaching out trying to bully you into taking another shift, it's very hard to maintain regular non-work activities. Perhaps you have friends who work similar schedules to you, but good luck going to a sports team or club that meets Thursdays at 6 when you don't know if you'll be available then until 12 hours before if ever.
I lay down and close my eyes (and sometimes nap) pretty much every day for like 20 min. When the mid afternoon slump hits, instead of trying to fight it or use caffeine I just lay down. Does wonders for my energy levels afterwards.
We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.
I think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off.
Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...
Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.
On the other hand, ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces for people to congregate, socialize, and otherwise involve themselves with their communities
> ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces
For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor.
I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)
Medieval serfs typically worked about 150 10 hour days a year.
In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance.
All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".
FWIW: That 150 hour estimate came from work by Gregory Clark at UC Davis who has since cast doubt on it.
“There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year.
In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work.
If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.
It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
> Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.
> Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work
Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.
My claim is, that the market is encouraging segregation less than society. Jobs force people to work together. If nobody forces them, they often just don't work together, and stay in their bubble.
It's kind of a six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation IMO. Modern society does tend to have extreme social bubbles, but those are also a product of market forces, which in turn were influenced by previous states of society, etc etc back to the beginning of time.
Really? This just proves the point of the grandparent comment. I can think of at least three types of activities off the top of my head: sports (granted, not all of them, but definitely true for my sport - squash), music (playing an instrument in a group setting), and volunteering. I also know people who are in a bridge club with people twice their age.
There are still social activities connecting people of different age groups although I agree with the above comment that structurally the society we have has been eroding non-labour market interactions.
All three activities are hobbies. Things people mostly do when they feel good. It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.
I disagree quite strongly. I derive a lot of meaning from these types of activities (in addition to family and friends of course) and zero meaning from my job. It's the narrow focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life that is the problem - and that's what the comments above highlight.
I would suggest that it's the fact your job has no meaning to you that raises the meaning the other things have in your life. That's a good thing. When people really love their job, it lowers the meaning the other things have in their life (I won't say family, necessarily, though it can, but also things like hobbies or friends often suffer, because the job is all-encompassing).
There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.
I take your point that there is a limit on meaningful activities one can undertake but I disagree that it's some kind of zero-sum situation. I used to find my work more meaningful and I don't think it made any other things less meaningful - I just felt that I spent more of my day doing things that meant something to me. Life, on the whole, can feel more or less meaningful; we don't distribute a fixed amount of meaning across all the things we do.
This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised.
No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.
No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.
> No time for being a governor at the local school
The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life.
Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs.
Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other.
> No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day?
This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work.
So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.
They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.
I think what we've shed are more things like chairing a committee for the VFW, selling snacks at little league games, or being active in a lowers voice, looks over shoulder union. These are things that would traditionally take up the social slack left by not punching a clock every day, and we've eliminated them systematically to make room for more marketized activities. Today's retirees are "richer" than their parents were, so they can take cruises, travel, pursue expensive hobbies, etc. but they largely don't have a social context to make those things satisfying, and there are fewer grandkids to take care of than ever.
Most unions pay their elected officers and administrative staff. Members might volunteer for some activities but the roles that come with a significant time commitment are jobs like any other.
VFW membership has declined because even with continuous wars for decades, the end of conscription has meant a lot fewer veterans. And many VFW halls functioned more like dive bars than anything else: nothing wrong with that, but not particularly attractive to most younger veterans.
In what way have we "eliminated them systematically"? Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention, but it feels like those activities have (unfortunately) disappeared largely naturally.
Take this question a step further and ask _why_ those activities disappeared. What are those people who would previously have been doing that, now doing instead? Usually, the answer is working. For the unions, decades of policy have systematically eliminated them, but for the other points, it's more of a "between the lines" thing.
> What you are describing is working for someone else
That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.
But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.
I emphatically disagree. Baking treats is working for yourself? Taking care of the neighbors kids in turns is working for yourself? Are you saying that spending time having hobbies and participating in the local community is "work" and thus must also be as soul crushing as a 9-5 pushing pointless word documents?
None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
I'm saying the community you envision in your head doesn't exist without the "crushing" 9-5. Every society ever has been people doing "crushing" work (albeit with some brief pockets of living comfortably on societal stockpile). Our comforts are the fruits of others "crushing" 9-5.
And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening.
Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!
It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid.
And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.
But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.
> "Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract."
I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about.
Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.
> that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about
Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics.
Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.
Low sample size but two sets of ancestors from agricultural societies that married in the 1920s weren't especially happy together from what I've been told. One of the marriages was definitely a result of adjacent land though in neither case was it child of wealthy person getting married off to child of another wealthy person.
I mean, your kids also just didn't travel much farther than your neighbor's plots for the vast majority of their life.
If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.
> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce
What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t do anything else, otherwise she’d have been working the fields and taking care of the animals.
They weren’t “economic entities” in the sense that they got a paycheck from an employer, but they were “economic entities” in that if they weren’t putting daily labor into the farm, they’d eventually freeze and starve.
Based on my grandmothers I’d say they mostly sat around and gossiped, went on walks together, ate meals together, did fun stuff together and then talked about stuff. Repeat until they die off.
Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.
There were a depressing number of people who would post something along the lines of “I just pulled the trigger! Now what am I supposed to do to fill the time?” Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.
As someone who pulled the trigger about a year ago, I feel like there’s not enough hours in the day to fill with personally enriching activities, both mentally and physically stimulating. And I feel increasingly lucky to have a life like that.
I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours.
Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.
You are talking about retirement, yet I was working with people who couldn't stand the 2-week long annual leave (which is mandatory for every under contract of employment where I live) because they had nothing to do. 30, 40 years old people. It's terrifying.
> not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do
They aren't conditioned for it. Learning to relax, enjoy nature, prioritise friends and family, et cetera aren't hard coded like walking and talking. We benefit from it. But if you never learned to do it while your brain was most plastic, you probably aren't going to change because a number added a zero.
> I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do.
It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement).
The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Even many hobbies start to require money. Then reading books, browsing the internet, and playing games starts to get boring when it's your entire life.
The people that make it work usually take RE to mean “recreationally employed”. They aren’t sitting on a beach. They have a challenging project they are personally obsessed with that also generates income, but the income is largely just a way to keep score for them.
It is one of my greatest hope for everyone to be able to achieve this. It would shift the workplace dynamic so much that employers would have to work harder (beyond pizza parties) to retain employees since no one would blink an eye at the thought of resigning on the spot.
> The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.
Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?
Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it.
Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.
The tragedy is that people who are most likely to successfully FIRE have spent so long being laser-focused on making money to FIRE, that they neglected their (hobbies, social circle, health - underline as needed), so they find themselves in such a predicament.
Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating into a shitty 2009 market and not having nepotism connections means I am unlikely to ever FIRE outside of some expat poverty FIRE in a cheap country.
FIRE isn't about job market, you can't control that. Though in tech most people are still making quite large incomes which does help.
Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while still banking 50k/an. Etc.
FIRE is definitely about income just as much as it is about being frugal and saving. Having a high income is what enables the RE part.
There is a base level beyond which you can't save much, so first order of business is maximizing your income (e.g. better job/raise/promotion) without going bananas and sacrificing your health for it.
I’ve noticed some people with seemingly fulfilling hobbies stop doing them after quitting their job as well. It’s entirely possible all those hobbies are valuable precisely as something powerful to latch onto and disconnect from the day job, and seem pointless the day after quitting. Seems like you had a strong sense of identity outside of your job already before quitting. Building that could be a lot of hard work for other people (and it sometimes comes as a surprise that it even needs to be built).
I honestly don't know how someone gets to the position of being able to retire without having thought long and hard about it. Even if you get an unexpected windfall, it's probably best to keep working until you know you're mentally prepared to retire.
I think the FIRE crowd is even more likely to fall into this trap than the average wage slave. In addition to finding meaning in their day job, they're also more likely to forego short-term costs (like recreation/socialization/travel/whatever). Plus the FIRE planning itself becomes a hobby. So when they retire, they "lose" even more than the average person who might have more side interests.
I really appreciate that perspective. There’s definitely an aspect of FIRE people being more inclined to sacrifice short-term meaning in order to retire earlier, that may contribute to not having spent time actually building the life they were wanting to live free of work in the first place. And it’s a great insight that FIRE itself is in many ways a hobby, and one that you somewhat inherently “lose” once you actually go through with it.
Every man I know that lived well into their 80's touching or breaking 90 were all active in some way. Once they stopped, they died shortly after. Though to be honest, they didn't stop by choice, usually from an injury or medical condition.
Very common story for a relatively minor injury or disease in an old person to snowball to their death when they lose mobility and independence. You gotta stay active if you want to keep living.
I know two men who landed in that situation, both of whom worked until their unfortunate incidents. One suffered a head injury at 84, the other a stroke at 86. Both were left with low mobility and mental facilities and died in under two years. And they still enjoyed working at that age, not because they had to.
Right, or possibly a third factor that people who work until they are older and people that have less cognitive decline older have in common. Like perhaps the kinds of jobs you can keep doing / or want to keep doing when you are older involve higher levels of education or more developed social networks that also correlate with longevity.
I think it is also more than that. In car-centric places like Brazil or the US, older people essentially need to drive or be driven around to have a social life. In pedestrian friendly cities like many in Europe, it is very common to see older people walking to meet their friends/relatives. I saw it all the time in Switzerland. Even those with severely limited mobility would prefer to actively walk or take the tram/bus somewhere (no matter how much time it took) than stay at home.
Can agree with this (to a certain extent). Spending time in both America and Ireland, there's a definite difference in the extent to which "I can only get there by car versus public transit/other types of transport" is incorporated into the culture. By far, more urban/suburban/rural density with appropriate public transportation support leads to more freedom to walk, bike, etc. Geographically, however, there are clear reasons why places like the US and Brazil have a strong incentive to rely on cars over anything else. Distance between cities and towns, poor public transport (esp. outside of urban areas in the US), etc. cause this to be an issue.
> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
What if people just really really like their jobs and didn't have enough initiative to make sure they had something to do outside of them? It isn't really wrong for people to like their work, like it isn't wrong for someone to have a hobby that they obsess over.
Considering fiction, even in the post scarcity society of Star Trek, people still like doing "jobs." Or consider a seeing eye dog after they retire, they enjoy occasionally putting the harness back on and feeling useful. It isn't simply a matter of human beings being reduced to economic entities.
My grandparents just bumped their volunteering from weekends to weekdays. Then my Boomer parents switched to leisure activities and travel (they stopped volunteering when they retired). I prefer my grandparent's retirement, but now that NGOs got professionalized and became extremely political that is a no-go for me. I didn't like to be bossed around by a 30yo narcissist driven by maxing out his EOY presentation (to keep their comfy job).
I'm considering to retire in a small town where distant relatives live and hopefully get busy by volunteering there somehow. But it's never that simple.
Not sure what the current food truck climate is, but that angle might be a way to get something compact and 1-2 person sized. You could get a small caravan/trailer or stand and hire out for parties purely on weekends or just Saturdays to get it started ahead of schedule.
I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
Work on some open source projects and dig into some bugs, become that crazy but fun neighborhood guy always building some contraption in his garage, volunteer as a mentor for advanced STEM programs like FIRST FRC, volunteer at/run a local computer reuse program where you help take used computers and get them into a state people in need of one can use, build those things you always thought sounded fun to work on at ${dayJob} but could never "justify" to management, build and operate a retro computing collection.
Some of these scratch the tinkering itch, some of these scratch the community itch, some of these scratch the meaning itch, and so on, but all allow you to have a goal, sense of purpose, and to love computers however much you want without having to make money doing it.
Getting initial momentum on this can seem tricky, same as for careers, but once you get going the time at ${dayJob} starts to feel like it gets in the way of loving computers instead of the other way around.
Hear me out: you would get to choose which problems to solve!
But I get you; a job finds well-scoped problems and spoon feeds them to you, it can be daunting to look for a worthy problem to solve on your own. Think of it as a new skill you'll have to develop.
There's a big ocean of problem solving on computers that doesn't require a day job! I find it very fun. I mean I started on computers for fun when I was young and it turned into a job so being retired means I can just go back to working on the stuff I like in particular.
Honestly when given downtime I generate more computer problems than I could ever hope to solve. I cant even fathom being bored with a computer. My mother used to accuse me of breaking the home PC just to keep myself busy and it was not far from the truth.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. In days past when people retired they'd still help raise kids or look after households. When we moved past requiring that sort of thing, we left the elderly without engagement.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but perhaps as a society we could be more intentional about creating roles where the elderly can still help and feel useful, but also have flexibility and a more relaxed lifestyle.
There's not necessarily money in it, but in the current era, parents still find the grandparents' availability for minding children incredibly useful. If they also cleaned my house free or cheap, I'd be thrilled!
I mean, we're about to enter a demographic reversal and to hear economists talk of it, corporations are going to really struggle to find the workers they need.
I guess we're about to find out if they're desperate enough to offer genuine flexibility or not.
If I could work 2d/wk remote as a software developer, I'd probably do it the rest of my life. Something tells me that most CEOs are still gonna insist on 50+hrs/wk RTO though...
Of course, though I still think remembering that people need to feel useful is important. E.g. you don't want to force someone into a job that may be useful but the person is feeling "why am I doing this, it's not needed." The goal is also not to fill time or a money quota. It's to do something helpful such that the person actually feels helpful.
>> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
Unless you own shares. A population dedicated to work, followed by a retirement dedicated to steady medical spending punctuated by occassional holiday travel, is ideal for sustained economic growth year on year.
I think this is a problem in perspective/framing. Or phrasing, if you will.
"Being economic entities in the workforce" could alternatively be phrased, "performing a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe."
That sounds much less sinister. It's something humans have been doing for millions of years. It feels good, it engages our brains, it's helpful to others, and it's helpful to ourselves. And I can't help but feel the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is unfair in its approach of disparaging it.
Of course, play and socializing are important, too! Life isn't all work and contribution. And there are many ways to work or contribute outside of having a formal job, anyway. So I do agree with you that it's a bit sad that people don't have ideas for how to do either of these things unless it's through their long-term career.
Multi-generation households - which also can keep older people active like you noted -are mostly gone. You can't do much for your tribe from a retirement home on a random Saturday afternoon every few months in summer, so work or hobbies are the remaining activity centers, but you now which of the 2 is lionized as a virtue in American culture. Some hobbies are unfortunately only discovered in retirement, so perhaps some criticism of the economic system as imperfect is due.
Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.
I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.
I don’t think being anti-capitalist necessitates being anti “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”. To me, that’s the big benefit- under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders.
I’m pretty sure the world overall and certainly “my tribe” would be better off if the job I’m working just never got done
> under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders
The first half of this sentence is false, but the second half is true.
I don't know about you, but when I look at my window every day, I see thousands of people working for their job: making delicious food that others can eat, stocking store shelves so others can shop, trimming trees so the city will look nice, driving trucks full of goods that others can have, designing good website UX for others to use better, repairing broken cars, etc. It's an intricate dance of millions of people waking up every day and doing selfless things for others in their tribe, in just the right amounts, because we've (miraculously) given them an incentive to do so.
To me what's depressing is that we can live in such a wonderful world, but with a cynical pessimistic culture in which it's commonplace to ignore the chief output of everyone's work.
But also: with age more and more doors are closed to you. Many hobbies become inaccessible. You may end up with a bunch of choices that all just sound outright depressing. Losing a job is losing one more choice, restricting yourself to the possibly more boring options that you can still physically pull off.
It’s not that depressing if you view it as her wanting to help society and sees a job as the main way of achieving that.
When nobody is paying you to do something it’s easy to lose the feedback loop of “I’m at least providing this one person enough value to keep getting paid”.
This is much older than capitalism too. Very old religions derive value from work
Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.
Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness.
I retired last year in my late 30’s and it’s just such a life upgrade. I study Mandarin, go to the gym, cook fun meals, volunteer at our community garden, volunteer at our food pantry, go to board game nights, brew beer, DIY house maintenance, write some software for myself for fun, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continuing to do a job I don’t particularly enjoy just because I’m too unimaginative to figure out what I’d do with the extra 40+ hours of weekly freedom.
My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do.
I've been doing sort of a temporary version of that :). I quit working for the next year or maybe some more to focus on a big house renovation project, among other things (a few major car, truck, and tractor projects too.. some welding.. building some other machinery..). I figured why wait until some indefinite future to do work that is actually personally meaningful rather than what an employer tells me to do? I guess financially this year of negative income has some opportunity cost associated with it, but I'm building a bunch of stuff that cannot be bought, and I'd rather take the time now when it's definitely good than wait for a "maybe". And frankly the tech treadmill had pretty well erased the interest I used to have in computing. I'm also quite happy to be sitting out the current AI insanity. I've been working on some personal coding projects as well--as well as playing with local LLMs--to stay current and hopefully rekindle the interest in computing that the industry beat out of me. The work used to be fun, where did that go?
Hyperbolic. Unless she has a second job she surely has other activities to occupy her 50-80 non working, non sleeping hours. She's making the much weaker statement that dropping from e.g. 40 hours of economically productive and legible work to zero would leave her worse off, and that's much more understandable.
Most of the people who get a lot out of retirement are still doing economically productive work, it's just illegible to the point they don't feel it's worth bothering to make a buck off it. Any serious hobby is basically a second job you don't get paid for, in other words.
We probably all have anecdotal evidence here, but my father is a perfect example of being no longer employed and a ton of stuff declining. Yes, cognitively, but a lot of health. We're talking not just your "career". He was a commercial real estate agent. But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker. And it kept him busy. Getting out of the house. Figuring things out. Meeting and talking to people. Walking. Talking. Scheduling things. He'd even tell us that if he stopped, things would just descend. And he was so right.
He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit.
Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)
As a general comment, I'd like to say that getting out of the house is a hell of a lot easier when you don't have to drive everywhere to participate in daily life. So and so family member sits at home and watches TV all day is a phenomenon caused primarily by our car-centric culture which, for the elderly, is a barrier to staying healthy both mentally and physically.
I do think that once an elderly person loses the ability to drive, it's often a big tipping point towards their decline. I would suspect that losing the ability to drive usually (but not necessarily) comes before losing the ability to navigate public transit.
But I don't immediately believe the link that 'car culture' -> 'earlier cognitive decline'. Car culture, for example, is usually associated with living on larger plots of land, which comes with its own set of tasks and chores that can keep someone older occupied. A smaller apartment requires much less ongoing work.
I think a lot depends on the individual and how they best stay active. More dense living probably provides easier opportunities to do things, whereas less dense living sort of forces you to perform ongoing tasks.
If the additional area is used for new hobbies, hosting guests, or something fulfilling and interesting, then sure it can help keep the mind active. But people don't usually retire so they have more time for vacuuming or dusting. Many elderly people simply don't have the energy or interest to maintain their homes, it slowly falls into disrepair.
I'm no fan of car culture but I think to say it's the primary cause of living a sedentary life at home is an overstatement. I deliberately moved somewhere where I could walk to everything I needed including a fantastic central train station, I no longer even own a car, and yet... over the years my habits changed and I now spend a ton of time at home. My motivation to go out has simply declined.
There is a relevant concept in psychology called activation energy, James Clear provides a good introduction to it. Certainly in recent years screens seem to be incentivizing more stay at home behavior. People used to not own a TV, many quite intentionally, before our other screens were invented. But it is a very complicated topic.
Of course our activity levels change and in some cases go down as we age, but I'd like to submit that is a given, and that car-only infrastructure is an additional barrier on top of those natural tendencies.
It's simply much easier to walk to a coffee shop, or park, or wherever for those who have maintained their mobility (probably in part by living in a walking-centric environment) than it is to hop in a car, sit in traffic, for small things. It's less of a barrier.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. I'll argue you don't have to be a victim and can choose where you live if you plan ahead a little.
There's plenty of places where a car is not necessary and even if people think a car's necessary I'm often the only one on a bicycle in many places.. It's doable if you're willing to put in the effort.
I think that suggesting that an octogenarian either uproot their life to a less car-centric place or start riding a bike everywhere is a bit unreasonable.
You can choose to live where you don't need a car, but those places become fewer and fewer because of the distances needed for cars. (as in parking space minimums mandated by the city).
"Not just bikes" on Youtube goes into this a lot. Car-centricism is self-reinforcing. Eventually you have no such thing as a mid-density neighbourhood.
As far as I’m aware, every US city where it’s at all common (let’s say 10%+ of households) to live without a car, it’s extremely expensive to live. Are there gems that I’m unaware of?
There are cities in the Midwest with a large carfree share by necessity (income) but as far as by choice/design, Philly and Baltimore appear to hover around 25-30%
It's hard to really say from anecdotes. My uncle retired early and was sharp as a whip until 86 or so. Then decline hit him hard. There was no change in life circumstances, he just got old.
Also, I think you'll find that taking care of someone who can't take care of themselves is a lot of work. I had to do it for my mom for 6 months and its a ton of stuff. Talking to doctors. Arranging appointments. Etc.
"I think you'll find that taking care of someone" => I know you were writing this generically. And I'm just replying to this for the sake of all of us who do actually know what it's like taking care of someone.
But yeah. Holy shit this is hard. I've been doing this too. Had to move my mom and dad to a place a block from me when my mom was going through her final few months with Alzheimers. That was so hard. So gross. And then now with this descent of my dads. You are catching me fresh from yet another aorta aneurism surgery of his last week. This is bananas. Just endless worry, driving, appointments, cleaning, pills, macgyvering the endless broken down things in his life: the tv, the remote, the blood pressure monitor.
OMG. I see you. I feel you. :) This is a rough part of life y'all.
Saw similar with my grandmothers. One had a busy social live and volunteer schedule for 20+ years, the other.. did not.
A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.
>A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.
Retiring TO something is important, but ideally it needs to involve a lot of in-person socializing, which many hobbies do not have. Golfing, for example, is pretty much the platonic ideal of a hobby that involves both socialization and old-person-friendly exercise.
I think it's good advice even if anecdotal. At least I do not think it hurts. My own observation is that almost everyone gets hit hard by the 80s. A lot of people in their 70s are spry, but it seems like damn near everyone gets significant decline in their 80s. A few people make it to the 90s, and some are even relatively spry, but my own anecdotal observations are that it is fairly rare. My grandparents both made it into their mid-90s before the decline really took hold (and then it was fast) but they were outliers. Both of my own parents made it to their mid-80s and that was it.
my mother's dementia diagnosis this year started as severe ADHD symptoms 4 years ago. but many years before that she enjoyed her retirement and pension as her last boss was abusive, and she was a bit traumatized by this that merely suggesting the idea of working again would make her anxious. the symptoms started from the stress of taking care of my dad, who suddenly found his workplace extremely stressful due to an incident with his boss snapping at him. this led to fainting incidents where he had to be rushed to ER and a after an extended disability leave he was let go. he has never been so relieved. however this just worsened my mom's condition, and the need to move out of their home of 20 years escalated it (moving stress syndrome as confounding catalyst). after only 1 year she forgot about this home and that she ever lived in it. She thinks she still lives in an earlier house. my father is much much happier, even when taking care of mom and they still get to travel. mom simply forgets what happened an hour ago, but my dad's happy just getting to travel the world with her while she can. So.. more of sample size of 2 abusive bosses in the workplace leading to significant mental and physical health improvements upon leaving such bosses. mom enjoyed kdramas, dad enjoyed reading more of world history, they regularly do everything together everywhere. they love the same music that my mom remembers every word and dance to.
> But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker.
> He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
It's a nice "just so" story, but when you're in your 80s, you are already in multiple stages of decline across the board. One small injury can cause a cascading failure of systems.
> The poor health came after being forced to quit.
I don't know how you can so authoritatively state this about a man in his 80s. (e.g. - past the average life expectancy). 80 is just really really old. How fast the decline gets you at that point is really mostly a genetic lottery.
But if the anecdote helps you be more active personally - more power to you.
"how you can so authoritatively state this" => because that is the exact order of events :) A happened. Then B happened. i didn't say A caused B. just like we're all discussing here in this thread. just another datapoint that we are sharing here where it seems like there could be a causation not just correlation. but i didn't authoritatively state anything other than I know what happened on one date, and then what happened on another date.
I believe there have been studies into how social life impacts longevity, and probably cognitive decline as well. For some people, like my great-grandmother who kept working well into her 80s by choice, jobs can be a big social outlet. For others a job can be very socially isolating. Those factors probably matter a lot.
Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.
Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it.
But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life.
But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
I used to think that working from home was the best thing since sliced bread, when I got to stop going to the office due to COVID.
But during the five years that I worked from home, I suffered a precipitous decline in overall health. It is too easy to stumble out of bed minutes before work starts, spend the day on Zoom calls, then spend more time behind the computer wrapping things up, and then veg out on the sofa after a long, long day. Too little exercise, no meaningful human contact.
I have been working from an office for the past year or so, and my health is improving, but it is a deep hole to climb out of.
Interesting, I've had basically the opposite experience working from home since COVID. I exercise more, cook more, sleep better, go for more walks.
Part of it is just time and energy freed up from my commute. I always felt wiped out after fighting through traffic to get home. But if I lived in a small apartment in a place that wasn't good for walking, I'd probably hate it.
My main card game lately has been the Legendary system of games, in particular the Marvel version (although I did just order the James Bond version this morning too after playing the app version this past week). I like to play it with two players and alternate hands, but you can play it solo too.
Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy.
And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them).
All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.
Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job, and not nearly as fulfilling. You get to see smiles and frowns and everything in between in a job and there is no board game that can match the complexity and novelty of random humans asking you to solve their problems.
>Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job
I think one should optimize for 'most intrinsically rewarding' not 'most engaging'. I shudder to picture a retirement spent doing 'customer service' and if a retirement of working on projects, travel, reading and playing video games leads to 'more cognitive decline', well, so be it. I would rather be daft in my old age than miserable
The issue is using a single factor to push change does not mean that change is a net good. Nobody talks about windmills killing birds because that’s what they actually care about, instead there are so few downsides they needed to find something no matter how meaningless in context.
As such single issues are often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.
I doubt it would be a good decision for all individuals. Maybe the public at large, but I question if that would be what motivates the people who seek such changes the most.
I mean, it could be both good and bad depending on the person. My Dad worked physically demanding jobs, and would have been happy to retire and spend his time working on personal projects at age 60, and his health and well-being would have been better if he had not had to keep doing exhausting work for at least 8 more years for money reasons. So, I think people feel justifiably protective of our elders when people talk about raising the retirement age.
Honestly, the jobs where the benefits of stimulation and social interaction outweigh the physical and or mental stress of the job are not the kind of jobs most people have. So if you wanted to do what’s really best for most older people, it would be better to find ways to engage them other than financially forcing them to keep working whatever job they can get - which is what raising retirement age does.
What would be really killer would be finding more ways to enlist retirement-age professionals in training young people, in a variety of occupations from carpentry to programming. The young have the stamina and strength but lack wisdom; the older people have learned a lot and could share that knowledge and wisdom.
"Good for both individuals and the public at large" is one thing. "We found a club to beat you into doing what we want you to" looks very similar, but is quite different in how it feels and how it works out.
What’s so difficult to understand? The state or lobbying groups want to raise the retirement age which then correlates with studies on how raising the retirement age has “good effects”.[1] The goal isn’t to find out what is good for senior people. It’s to find reasons to enact the policy that they wanted.
Surprisingly, men ages 51–64 (this was specifically about men) “need” their jobs for their own health.
We could imagine studies done in more patriarchal cultures: unmarried women over the age of 40 suffer from psychological and physical health problems more than married women over the age of 40. We’ll just leave out the parts about how unmarried women are penalized socially, constantly. Policy recommendation: we should get women married, it’s just good for them.
[1] This was the hypothetical laid out in the original comment.
I think employment may set us up for rapid cognitive decline when we finally become unemployed. As in, working 40+ hours a week makes us over-value "vegging out", which sets us up for failure post-employment.
Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then?
I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”
Allegedly my great grandfather was building a deck at the age of 90.
This might also be survivorship bias.
I’d like to say people need purpose and challenges. This is probably why rates of depression tend to be much lower in “poor” countries where people have to depend on each other more.
In the west everything is an abstraction. If you would imagine a baker in a small town, if she doesn’t feel like baking that day, the town doesn’t get bread.
Therefore, everyone in the town has an incentive to actually check on her, and get her back on her feet.
In the modern west who cares, surely another bakery will provide.
I believe automation will reduce the need for human labor very very soon.
We can all find meaning in arts, dance and play. If not just the gift of this experience.
Or we can point fingers as no one has work or money
I haven't read the paper yet so forgive a bit of ignorance here, but I feel like when I'm unemployed, I actively spend all my time trying to learn new things. This is no small part because otherwise I get depressed because I am spending all my time on YouTube and there are only so many "documentaries" about Lolcows that I can stomach, so I dive head first into projects, usually buying a few cheap textbooks in the process to play with new things. The days are way too long if I don't have something interesting to occupy my time, and I feel less guilty if that time is spent doing something quasi-intellectual instead of playing Donkey Kong Country again.
I didn't think I was an outlier with this, but maybe I am?
I've heard that you can expect your retirement to look a lot like your average weekend. If your weekends naturally fill with your hobbies and interests, I don't think you have much to worry about.
My experience has been exactly that: retirement = uninterrupted weekend.
I can't understand people who can't conceive of a healthy fulfilling life that does not involve work or volunteering. There is more to life than laboring.
If I'm anything like my parents, I don't think that's something I have to worry about. My dad is constantly buying new textbooks and trying to teach himself different types of physics. Either that, or he's designing new things to be 3D printed.
He's not retired yet but I suspect that when he is he'll find a way to keep himself entertained with stuff that isn't terrible game shows.
Go and read the book or audiobook "Younger Next Year" great book. Explains the biology of aging, how to delay/reverse it and how to retire well. Good background and good advice.
I would hypothesize that this is strongly correlated to where a person's sense of purpose comes from. If someone gets most of their sense of purpose from their job then you would expect to see a decline once they leave their job if they can't replace it with something else. For those whose sense of purpose is derived mainly outside of work and can continue to derive that sense of purpose in retirement, I would expect less of a decline in retirement other than normal aging.
I feel like this is less about employment and more a factor of money and engagement.
You need some amount of money for good health insurance, healthier foods, lower stress, etc. You need engagement, but that could be found in volunteering and sufficiently complex hobbies.
The trend seen with employment cycles might just be picking up that many people lack these.
Thanks for saying that. My dad volunteers and gets involved with social clubs. I think he'll keep doing it as long as he's able to.
BUT: I don't think it's the work / volunteering that keeps his mind, I think it's that for people like him, they stop when their mind can no longer handle it.
As someone who recently retired early, you really need to have a solid game plan on what you want to do with all the time you have. Spend a solid 3-6 months planning and mocking your post retirement days while still working.
The more detailed the plan the better. If you want to go to the gym, what will you do there and for how long and how many days a week?
If you want to have a tech side project, how many hours do you plan on spending on this project? And be reasonable. Don't trade one burnout over another.
If you are planning to learn something new, what are those? and don't just learn one thing. 8 hours plus is a crazy amount of time.
One of those plan should include making new friends post retirement, revolving around activities that are not work related.
It is far too easy to lose track of time without a brand new schedule to fill the void.
I've been retired for about 5 years and I am just as loony now as I was when employed. HN, my own silly hobby sites, flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.
It reminds of my grandparents that refuse to stop working my grandma 65 and grandfather 73. My grandma has like a stand where she sells candies and coffee and for her is just a way for socializing. And my grandpa he's still trying businesses out he thinks that there is still time for him to become rich, he's still very sharp and active he currently sells car tools and he's walking everyday
I was under the impression that you delay cognitive decline (and keep brain plasticity) by learning new things.
So you need to be learning new skills, trying new sports, entering new circumstances continuously. If you’re good at something already, it’s not enough.
Employment is one of many ways of keeping things fresh because it’s easy but I see no reason why you can’t keep yourself busy too.
What many comments miss is that society is heavily structured around work.
If we didn't work, or simply worked far less, we wouldn't be atomized units not quite finding what to do.
There would be more structure of volunteering projects, cafés would be laid out for people having time, instead of for quick grab. Fastfood and drive through may end up being far less common.
Dementia, at least of Alzheimer's type, starts at least 20 years before symptom onset and is multifactorial, so much that no single factor plays a role ("explains the variability") more than 5%. Employment, as almost all other factors, like having family/kids, higher education, wealth etc etc, might be a correlative or a confounding variable, depending on the study design because the disease mechanisms are so long and convoluted.
In the egg and chicken dilemma, I believe that the cognitive decline causes the social inactivity and not the reverse. Get your retirement because that will not cause your dementia.
Retirement is an artificial modern construct to create jobs. People are supposed to be active until they die. Hobbies are just a replacement activity. I have no intention of retiring (over 60 already). I work in tech and learning new skills and my income feeds and houses my family and pays for my running shoes.
As other commenters have noted folk in some places don't have anything but work. That is a global social issue that needs addressing first.
Regardless of whether this is true I do think there is a risk of overdoing it.
My dad firmly believes in the "when people quit work they decline" theory. Which may be fair, but he's not in great health and still charging hard. Definitely think you can overdo that & end up working till you drop
I know I interact with people on the daily with my remote job, but would love to know if that's potentially an issue too. Decent reason to get back in the office. I also miss my daily office bike rides to a certain extent, at least it was healthy for me, now I do exercise by choice and I don't always keep up with it.
Is there any evidence in this paper or elsewhere that this is causation rather than correlation?
For example, it seems logical to me that people with worse health and failing mental faculties will already be feeling more motivation to retire earlier, as opposed to very healthy people who will keep on working forever. That would be pure correlation
This still smells like the kind of paper that a think tank would fund to justify their billionaire-backed policy that social security should be abandoned and the retirement age moved to 75.
Anecdata: My dad started experiencing memory problems in his early 70s. When he got back into engineering as a part time consultant, those memory problems went away.
Seems like a fairly conventional economics paper title.
Perhaps you're misparsing the second sentence? "Shocks" is not used as a verb here -- it's a noun, part of the phrase "labor market shocks," which refers to sudden events that disrupt the labor market.
I bet another reason women suffer less cognitive decline from early retirement than men is that women are less lonely and more integrated into their extended families and communities.
The primary argument of this NBER working paper is that "employment, particularly near retirement age, can slow the rate of cognitive decline."
Would this not depend on the type of work being done and type of working conditions? Doesn't working in a boring, unchallenging, repetitive, dead-end job, dull the senses? Also, now a day, people continue to work even into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, at least those that can find work. I don't see many people opting to retire when they have bills to pay.
Stan Lee used to say something along the lines of: “I’m not working, I’m playing!”
If the job feels like fun, then the primary argument makes more sense to me. Based on past experience, however, I can relate to the later as my senses definitely got dulled, add to that compounding age-related health problems which did not help.
I try to do some Sudoku & Mahjongg puzzles at least twice a day, in my Linux machine, just to keep my mind awake.
It's 48 pages and I haven't read it fully, but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
"Does Unemployment Make It More Likely for Late Middle-Aged People, Particularly Men, To Drink Alcohol? Evidence From We Obviously Should Have Considered This In The Paper, Perhaps We Are Too Sheltered"
To be clear I am not being pedantic. The paper explicitly endorses the policy of pushing back the retirement age specifically because doing so likely reduces cognitive decline. I agree with this, in the same sense that shooting car thieves in the street without a trial reduces automotive theft. "Reducing cognitive decline in people near retirement age" might be better met with psychiatric intervention, so that unemployed people also get some of the benefits. Ignoring this confounding variable and prattling about "causal explanation" - while endorsing the policy of snatching away people's pensions until they work a few more years - is evil born from ignorance.
>but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
I thought that's the reason why they used "Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"? The idea is that when "Labor Market Shocks" (ie. mass layoffs) happen, the people who lose their jobs are somewhat random, so there isn't the confounding variable of low performers/sick people.
I'm not sure that completely addresses the GP's point, because "mass layoffs" are still somewhat selective. You're more likely to lay off the people that you think aren't worth their pay, which would include those who are already suffering cognitive decline, those who are drinking enough that it's affecting their job performance, and so on.
this paper uses a Bartik / shift-share instrument that looks at changes in sectors and the localized effects (exposure) due to concentration/reliance on that industry. It's an exogenous labor demand shock, not a mass layoff which frames the decision as made at the company level. Skills matter in this consideration but the point is to account for that statistically.
It's not about "low performers / sick people," it's unemployment itself (especially sudden layoffs) making people more susceptible to substance abuse, regardless of their health when they're unemployed.
Whilst that's a perfectly valid hypothesis, they explicitly did test for relationships with rises in opioid misuse and didn't find evidence to support it. There isn't even consistent empirical data to show unemployment as a causal factor in aggregate increased drinking, never mind it being concentrated among recently laid off early onset dementia patients. The reality is unemployment influences some people to drink more and others to drink less, the circumstances of the unemployment and the demographics of the individual matter as do the patterns of the drinking, and even the statistical relationship between drinking and dementia is complex as statistically the lowest risk behaviour tends to be "moderate" rather than zero alcohol consumption
I have to wonder how much of this is socialization and the valorization of having a job (and the detrimental health effects due to lack). We don't really paint a good picture of what else people could do with their time that's respected or interesting. So many people retire early but not to something - expressing feelings of loss, idle uses of time like TV watching because they haven't developed hobbies / interests due to hegemony of work. We've killed boredom with devices and work, now people can't deal with silence and the existential questions it raises - more comforting to just be told what to do.
> Nevertheless, our group-average findings, if replicated by others, would hold clear policy implications. Federal efforts to promote work at pre-retirement ages would not only reduce reliance on SSDI and enhance retirement security, but would also promote healthy aging through delaying cognitive decline.
Fuck you.
Christopher Lasch wrote that our “culture of narcissism” detests aging. Unsurprisingly we, the narcissists, are horrified when we ourselves become old. Because there is hardly anything left for us.
You can subtract pure biology, i.e. normal bodily degradation. But you can also subtract respect, esteem, wisdom (because who cares what grandpa has to say?), family (see care homes), and socializing.[1] You’re not an “asset” (to use familiar language[2]) to anyone. Just a burden.
What becomes the solution to any of that? No, no. We don’t need solutions to old people problems. We need solutions to them being burdens.
So how to make them less of a drag on our collective selves: encourage them to work at their shitty jobs for longer.
[1] See the old man who meets you again after six months and talks way too much about what he’s up to. Does he have any other outlets?
No, but the lake of activity and intellectual challenges will certainly accelerate it, even for someone middle age with an official employment! Wrote this just by reading the title, and past the summary it clearly lean into that direction.
Does slavery slow cognitive decline? Capitalist propaganda says being a wagie is good for us. That being said people are so indoctrinated that they have no idea what to do without an employer. pretty fucked up society and culture we now find ourselves in.
I voluntarily retired at age 55 after a startup I was a principal in for five years ran out of money (raising funds was not my responsibility). Having worked from home during most of that time, and having nobody to report to other than myself, I decided I couldn't go back to the grind. I was fortunate enough that my wife earns enough and has good enough benefits that I don't need to work. It took a lot of paying down debt and massaging our finances, but it's worked out swimmingly. We're doing far better on one income than we ever did on two. Obviously, at my age, there are no kids in the picture. Not only am I her personal assistant (she's a teacher), but I take care of the household, which takes a ton of stress off her plate.
I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged.
I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.
The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job.
We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. And then on retirement, people would still have their hobbies and passion projects they had been working on their entire life.
That is the biggest rock in the bucket. Smaller rocks include social media use, diet, exercise, whether the person is in a toxic home environment, mental health, or has children.
I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work. So I try to optimise my life to give me the most energy that I can have. I eat really healthy; high protein, high fibre, low saturated fat. I try to keep my social media use low, using ScreenZen. I meditate. I do resistance exercise a few times a week.
But even still, I find that my mind is exhausted part of a way through a workday, usually by 14:00-15:00. Maybe that's because I'm a software engineer.
I don't know how to fix it. But I'd really appreciate an extra day a week off, even at the cost of some remuneration. I love my work, but I don't want it to feel like it's the only thing I have going.
> they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering
This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.
> I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
This is why I am so thankful that I grew up before the days of social media and devices. I have direct first hand knowledge that the world does not end because some feed hasn't been checked in the past 5 minutes. I am forced to hear others doom scrolling their feeds and listening to the disjointed audio from short clips looping or getting interrupted to get to the next one, and I am constantly reminded of those that would sit on the sofa with the remote constantly flipping channels. Nothing was on the screen long enough to really see what was on, but just enough they decided not what they wanted to see. It's like the exact same personality cranked to 11.
> There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time.
I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest.
I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks / etc...
There tends to be a decompression stage after leaving work environment that didn't suit the person, then a deconstruction / rebuilding / searching stage afterwards.
I think it's also common for large lottery winners to become depressed because they have trouble searching for what to do afterwards.
Yep, the statement is so bad with a pattern of "because most won't, then all won't", which commonly used during birth rate issues too. It's either ignorant or malicious with hidden agenda behind.
Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
> I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants,
The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years.
There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients reported a marginally higher rate of thinking about maybe starting a business, but they weren't actually doing it.
As I remember it, there were four kinds of UBI trials:
- Low UBI, short term
- Low UBI, long term
- High UBI, short term
- High UBI, long term
Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.
High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.
High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.
I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.
Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.
This has been my experience as well. My stock advice to people who want to save money is to simply work more. Not because the marginal hours will be meaningfully worth it, but because it stops them from spending money by default.
> This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
Wrong.
> I know many people with a lot of free time...
Not a valid argument for, or against anything.
You probably mean to say you already know humans are just 'lazy' and the evidence for it is vibes, which is completely and totally sufficient for you but for anyone who thinks otherwise - they better come up with evidence that isn't just vibes.
i think people trying to argue that we would be more productive is a symptom of the productivity disease. where all we value is productivity and thats the only way we can justify more non-work time. i personally just think we should all have more time to do what we want, whether that is being productive on personal projects, talking to people, playing games, or doing nothing. happier people right? why should 10% of the richest people enslave the rest of us.
edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.
The 10% richest people create the jobs for you by cleverly investing you know
The people I know who have done it best are a friend's parents. They are both general practitioners and just gradually scaled back how many hours per week they worked, and gradually filled the time with various community and outdoor activities (church, choir, book clubs, hiking, biking, etc). My aim is to do the same, but I think I need to shift from being a tech employee to some kind of consulting to do that since scaling back is seen as weakness in corporate culture.
If there's a schedule to your tiredness then can probably reschedule it. This is a lesson I've discovered to good effect. [Side note: 2-3pm is probably due to food/glucose/insulin levels - its worth investigating]
Don't be fooled by tiredness. You can be mentally tired but not physically tired. These are not opposites. You can be physically tired in one aspect but not another.
You can be mentally tired but because you like to paint, then painting will regenerate you. It will make you less tired after you paint or even better: have you now appropriately tired that you properly sleep due to that tiredness.
Tired is not tired. You be tired in one way and not in another. This blanket use of the word isn't helpful and leaves a lot of potential left behind as you sit on the couch "tired".
It's hard for me to even contemplate having "nothing to do." I haven't had paid work for many, many years, yet I don't feel like I have any spare time at all.
Also ADHD here, I have the same problem.
The only way I can get anything meaningful done outside of work is to do it before work.
Those first few hours of the day are precious, as far as energy goes. Or attention, or will.
On a related note, I put Q2 of Eisenhower Matrix (important but not urgent, i.e. the stuff you want to get done "someday" but keep putting off indefinitely... i.e. your hopes and dreams) at the front of the day, because Q1 (urgent and important) basically forces you to do it and requires no special attention.
To put it bluntly, the long term stuff needs to be scheduled and consistently acted upon, or the default outcome will be very depressing.
I schedule it first thing, every morning.
never heard of the eisenhower matrix but my time management resonates with what you wrote. ill try forcing q2 stuff earlier as well as ive noticed it never gets done! yes, the default outcome is depressing.
> The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering.
I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can't do anything else with their lives, but if we changed that to 38% of their waking hours they'd be so bored that they be starting businesses and volunteering all over. That's not even consistent with your own experience of being exhausted halfway through the work day. Two extra hours per day isn't going to translate to launching a new business or volunteer effort.
You hinted at the real problem: Most people don't have the time management skills and motivation that they think they do. Remove a couple hours of work per week from most people's lives and those hours will get redistributed to mostly leisure time. Some of it more productive than other options (socializing with the community, working on hobbies).
Are you considering jobs that are extraordinarily demanding? What if you're an ER Doctor? Or an Air Traffic Controller? Or someone getting started in their career in their early 20s, when most of us possess the unique combination of a lack of life experience that would prevent exploitation and ambition? For these jobs, I can easily sympathize with the idea that after a workday they're too tired to develop personally. Moreover, it's a manager's job to sap every ounce of productivity out of a person. Modern technology increasingly makes this possible. Even seemingly mundane jobs like working in a call center can be so orchestrated that using the bathroom makes them fall behind. And productivity has done nothing but rise for decades!
I also don't see how your final paragraph really refutes rather than just restates their opinion. Hobbies produce projects and business ventures all the time. Someone also has to find some way or another to socialize with the community. Volunteering is a great way to do that.
Jobs that you want to do vs jobs that you have to do are entirely different levels of motivating and result in completely different energy levels for people.
If I have to do a job I hate for the rest of my life I would eternally be low energy. If I could do the thing I loved every day, the thing I truly wanted to do, I would get up excited every day and would have high energy throughout.
Having more free time, yes people would get bored. But the resulting things that they work on would be things that invigorate them.
"9-5" jobs in America are anything but. Since the popularity of smartphones people are reachable 24/7 and employers are taking full advantage.
Hourly employees have it even worse. When your schedule varies week to week and even on your "day off" your employer may be constantly reaching out trying to bully you into taking another shift, it's very hard to maintain regular non-work activities. Perhaps you have friends who work similar schedules to you, but good luck going to a sports team or club that meets Thursdays at 6 when you don't know if you'll be available then until 12 hours before if ever.
That's a 24% change which is well above the threshold of significance.
People sometimes underestimate how much work goes into a new business. The idea that you'll fill "spare time" with a business is laughable.
(I'm not thinking of a making-money-from-my-hobby side gig, but an actual business.)
You can do a side-hustle in spare time, but an actual business, one that pays salaries every month takes enormous effort.
I lay down and close my eyes (and sometimes nap) pretty much every day for like 20 min. When the mid afternoon slump hits, instead of trying to fight it or use caffeine I just lay down. Does wonders for my energy levels afterwards.
I've been doing a 4 day work week and it certainly helps quite a bit. I worry I have gotten too used to it now though.
Ever try waking up early and doing your work stuff before work?
Yes. I get my gym and novel writing done before work. But I lose steam at work very early. No bueno.
We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.
> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market
Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.
We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.
I think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off.
Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...
Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.
On the other hand, ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces for people to congregate, socialize, and otherwise involve themselves with their communities
> ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces
For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor.
I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)
Medieval serfs typically worked about 150 10 hour days a year.
In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance.
All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".
FWIW: That 150 hour estimate came from work by Gregory Clark at UC Davis who has since cast doubt on it.
“There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...
In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work.
If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.
It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
> Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.
> Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work
Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.
My claim is, that the market is encouraging segregation less than society. Jobs force people to work together. If nobody forces them, they often just don't work together, and stay in their bubble.
It's kind of a six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation IMO. Modern society does tend to have extreme social bubbles, but those are also a product of market forces, which in turn were influenced by previous states of society, etc etc back to the beginning of time.
Really? This just proves the point of the grandparent comment. I can think of at least three types of activities off the top of my head: sports (granted, not all of them, but definitely true for my sport - squash), music (playing an instrument in a group setting), and volunteering. I also know people who are in a bridge club with people twice their age.
There are still social activities connecting people of different age groups although I agree with the above comment that structurally the society we have has been eroding non-labour market interactions.
All three activities are hobbies. Things people mostly do when they feel good. It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.
I disagree quite strongly. I derive a lot of meaning from these types of activities (in addition to family and friends of course) and zero meaning from my job. It's the narrow focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life that is the problem - and that's what the comments above highlight.
I would suggest that it's the fact your job has no meaning to you that raises the meaning the other things have in your life. That's a good thing. When people really love their job, it lowers the meaning the other things have in their life (I won't say family, necessarily, though it can, but also things like hobbies or friends often suffer, because the job is all-encompassing).
There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.
I take your point that there is a limit on meaningful activities one can undertake but I disagree that it's some kind of zero-sum situation. I used to find my work more meaningful and I don't think it made any other things less meaningful - I just felt that I spent more of my day doing things that meant something to me. Life, on the whole, can feel more or less meaningful; we don't distribute a fixed amount of meaning across all the things we do.
> Things people mostly do when they feel good.
This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.
> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.
This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised.
No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.
No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.
> No time for baking treats
> No time for being a governor at the local school
The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life.
Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs.
Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other.
> No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day?
This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
But it's all just work, all the ways down.
What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work.
So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.
They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.
I think what we've shed are more things like chairing a committee for the VFW, selling snacks at little league games, or being active in a lowers voice, looks over shoulder union. These are things that would traditionally take up the social slack left by not punching a clock every day, and we've eliminated them systematically to make room for more marketized activities. Today's retirees are "richer" than their parents were, so they can take cruises, travel, pursue expensive hobbies, etc. but they largely don't have a social context to make those things satisfying, and there are fewer grandkids to take care of than ever.
Most unions pay their elected officers and administrative staff. Members might volunteer for some activities but the roles that come with a significant time commitment are jobs like any other.
VFW membership has declined because even with continuous wars for decades, the end of conscription has meant a lot fewer veterans. And many VFW halls functioned more like dive bars than anything else: nothing wrong with that, but not particularly attractive to most younger veterans.
In what way have we "eliminated them systematically"? Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention, but it feels like those activities have (unfortunately) disappeared largely naturally.
Take this question a step further and ask _why_ those activities disappeared. What are those people who would previously have been doing that, now doing instead? Usually, the answer is working. For the unions, decades of policy have systematically eliminated them, but for the other points, it's more of a "between the lines" thing.
> But it's all just work, all the ways down.
> What you are describing is working for someone else
That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.
But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.
I emphatically disagree. Baking treats is working for yourself? Taking care of the neighbors kids in turns is working for yourself? Are you saying that spending time having hobbies and participating in the local community is "work" and thus must also be as soul crushing as a 9-5 pushing pointless word documents?
None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
I'm saying the community you envision in your head doesn't exist without the "crushing" 9-5. Every society ever has been people doing "crushing" work (albeit with some brief pockets of living comfortably on societal stockpile). Our comforts are the fruits of others "crushing" 9-5.
And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening.
Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!
It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid.
And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.
But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.
> "Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract."
I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about.
Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.
> that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about
Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics.
Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.
Low sample size but two sets of ancestors from agricultural societies that married in the 1920s weren't especially happy together from what I've been told. One of the marriages was definitely a result of adjacent land though in neither case was it child of wealthy person getting married off to child of another wealthy person.
I mean, your kids also just didn't travel much farther than your neighbor's plots for the vast majority of their life.
If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.
> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce
What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t do anything else, otherwise she’d have been working the fields and taking care of the animals.
They weren’t “economic entities” in the sense that they got a paycheck from an employer, but they were “economic entities” in that if they weren’t putting daily labor into the farm, they’d eventually freeze and starve.
Based on my grandmothers I’d say they mostly sat around and gossiped, went on walks together, ate meals together, did fun stuff together and then talked about stuff. Repeat until they die off.
Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.
People don’t post about their daily 9-5 on instagram either.
I used to follow FIRE-related communities.
There were a depressing number of people who would post something along the lines of “I just pulled the trigger! Now what am I supposed to do to fill the time?” Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.
As someone who pulled the trigger about a year ago, I feel like there’s not enough hours in the day to fill with personally enriching activities, both mentally and physically stimulating. And I feel increasingly lucky to have a life like that.
I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours.
Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.
You are talking about retirement, yet I was working with people who couldn't stand the 2-week long annual leave (which is mandatory for every under contract of employment where I live) because they had nothing to do. 30, 40 years old people. It's terrifying.
> not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do
They aren't conditioned for it. Learning to relax, enjoy nature, prioritise friends and family, et cetera aren't hard coded like walking and talking. We benefit from it. But if you never learned to do it while your brain was most plastic, you probably aren't going to change because a number added a zero.
> I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do.
It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement).
The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Even many hobbies start to require money. Then reading books, browsing the internet, and playing games starts to get boring when it's your entire life.
The people that make it work usually take RE to mean “recreationally employed”. They aren’t sitting on a beach. They have a challenging project they are personally obsessed with that also generates income, but the income is largely just a way to keep score for them.
> recreationally employed
It is one of my greatest hope for everyone to be able to achieve this. It would shift the workplace dynamic so much that employers would have to work harder (beyond pizza parties) to retain employees since no one would blink an eye at the thought of resigning on the spot.
> The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.
Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?
> Even many hobbies start to require money.
Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it.
Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.
The tragedy is that people who are most likely to successfully FIRE have spent so long being laser-focused on making money to FIRE, that they neglected their (hobbies, social circle, health - underline as needed), so they find themselves in such a predicament.
Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating into a shitty 2009 market and not having nepotism connections means I am unlikely to ever FIRE outside of some expat poverty FIRE in a cheap country.
FIRE isn't about job market, you can't control that. Though in tech most people are still making quite large incomes which does help.
Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while still banking 50k/an. Etc.
FIRE is definitely about income just as much as it is about being frugal and saving. Having a high income is what enables the RE part.
There is a base level beyond which you can't save much, so first order of business is maximizing your income (e.g. better job/raise/promotion) without going bananas and sacrificing your health for it.
I’ve noticed some people with seemingly fulfilling hobbies stop doing them after quitting their job as well. It’s entirely possible all those hobbies are valuable precisely as something powerful to latch onto and disconnect from the day job, and seem pointless the day after quitting. Seems like you had a strong sense of identity outside of your job already before quitting. Building that could be a lot of hard work for other people (and it sometimes comes as a surprise that it even needs to be built).
The largest FIRE sub on reddit is aptly named 'financial independence' because FI is much, much more important than RE.
The first post they link to on the sidebar is 'Build the life you want and save for it'
https://old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/58j8...
I honestly don't know how someone gets to the position of being able to retire without having thought long and hard about it. Even if you get an unexpected windfall, it's probably best to keep working until you know you're mentally prepared to retire.
I think the FIRE crowd is even more likely to fall into this trap than the average wage slave. In addition to finding meaning in their day job, they're also more likely to forego short-term costs (like recreation/socialization/travel/whatever). Plus the FIRE planning itself becomes a hobby. So when they retire, they "lose" even more than the average person who might have more side interests.
I really appreciate that perspective. There’s definitely an aspect of FIRE people being more inclined to sacrifice short-term meaning in order to retire earlier, that may contribute to not having spent time actually building the life they were wanting to live free of work in the first place. And it’s a great insight that FIRE itself is in many ways a hobby, and one that you somewhat inherently “lose” once you actually go through with it.
Those people are wildly un-creative.
Every man I know that lived well into their 80's touching or breaking 90 were all active in some way. Once they stopped, they died shortly after. Though to be honest, they didn't stop by choice, usually from an injury or medical condition.
Very common story for a relatively minor injury or disease in an old person to snowball to their death when they lose mobility and independence. You gotta stay active if you want to keep living.
I know two men who landed in that situation, both of whom worked until their unfortunate incidents. One suffered a head injury at 84, the other a stroke at 86. Both were left with low mobility and mental facilities and died in under two years. And they still enjoyed working at that age, not because they had to.
I’m going to say there’s some mixup of causation and correlation here
Right, or possibly a third factor that people who work until they are older and people that have less cognitive decline older have in common. Like perhaps the kinds of jobs you can keep doing / or want to keep doing when you are older involve higher levels of education or more developed social networks that also correlate with longevity.
I think it is also more than that. In car-centric places like Brazil or the US, older people essentially need to drive or be driven around to have a social life. In pedestrian friendly cities like many in Europe, it is very common to see older people walking to meet their friends/relatives. I saw it all the time in Switzerland. Even those with severely limited mobility would prefer to actively walk or take the tram/bus somewhere (no matter how much time it took) than stay at home.
Can agree with this (to a certain extent). Spending time in both America and Ireland, there's a definite difference in the extent to which "I can only get there by car versus public transit/other types of transport" is incorporated into the culture. By far, more urban/suburban/rural density with appropriate public transportation support leads to more freedom to walk, bike, etc. Geographically, however, there are clear reasons why places like the US and Brazil have a strong incentive to rely on cars over anything else. Distance between cities and towns, poor public transport (esp. outside of urban areas in the US), etc. cause this to be an issue.
> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
What if people just really really like their jobs and didn't have enough initiative to make sure they had something to do outside of them? It isn't really wrong for people to like their work, like it isn't wrong for someone to have a hobby that they obsess over.
Considering fiction, even in the post scarcity society of Star Trek, people still like doing "jobs." Or consider a seeing eye dog after they retire, they enjoy occasionally putting the harness back on and feeling useful. It isn't simply a matter of human beings being reduced to economic entities.
My grandparents just bumped their volunteering from weekends to weekdays. Then my Boomer parents switched to leisure activities and travel (they stopped volunteering when they retired). I prefer my grandparent's retirement, but now that NGOs got professionalized and became extremely political that is a no-go for me. I didn't like to be bossed around by a 30yo narcissist driven by maxing out his EOY presentation (to keep their comfy job).
I'm considering to retire in a small town where distant relatives live and hopefully get busy by volunteering there somehow. But it's never that simple.
My fantasy is maybe to start a one person cafe operation and manage overheads.
Unfortunately most retail space in the US is way too oversized to make that kind of operation work.
Not sure what the current food truck climate is, but that angle might be a way to get something compact and 1-2 person sized. You could get a small caravan/trailer or stand and hire out for parties purely on weekends or just Saturdays to get it started ahead of schedule.
I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
Hey I’m in the same boat! (Except the grad school.) feel free to email (in profile) if you want to chat.
I actually have the same fear. I love computers and I don't know what I'll do once I retire. Problem solving on computers is like oxygen to me.
Love computers outside of ${dayJob}!
Work on some open source projects and dig into some bugs, become that crazy but fun neighborhood guy always building some contraption in his garage, volunteer as a mentor for advanced STEM programs like FIRST FRC, volunteer at/run a local computer reuse program where you help take used computers and get them into a state people in need of one can use, build those things you always thought sounded fun to work on at ${dayJob} but could never "justify" to management, build and operate a retro computing collection.
Some of these scratch the tinkering itch, some of these scratch the community itch, some of these scratch the meaning itch, and so on, but all allow you to have a goal, sense of purpose, and to love computers however much you want without having to make money doing it.
Getting initial momentum on this can seem tricky, same as for careers, but once you get going the time at ${dayJob} starts to feel like it gets in the way of loving computers instead of the other way around.
You literally have one of the easiest things to retire to. You can do whatever you want with computers when you retire and for the rest of your life.
If you were an ER doctor and loved saving lives it would be a little harder.
Agreed! I love programming and have a bunch of side projects that realistically will only ever get anywhere close to completion once I'm retired.
Hear me out: you would get to choose which problems to solve!
But I get you; a job finds well-scoped problems and spoon feeds them to you, it can be daunting to look for a worthy problem to solve on your own. Think of it as a new skill you'll have to develop.
There's a big ocean of problem solving on computers that doesn't require a day job! I find it very fun. I mean I started on computers for fun when I was young and it turned into a job so being retired means I can just go back to working on the stuff I like in particular.
Honestly when given downtime I generate more computer problems than I could ever hope to solve. I cant even fathom being bored with a computer. My mother used to accuse me of breaking the home PC just to keep myself busy and it was not far from the truth.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. In days past when people retired they'd still help raise kids or look after households. When we moved past requiring that sort of thing, we left the elderly without engagement.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but perhaps as a society we could be more intentional about creating roles where the elderly can still help and feel useful, but also have flexibility and a more relaxed lifestyle.
There's not necessarily money in it, but in the current era, parents still find the grandparents' availability for minding children incredibly useful. If they also cleaned my house free or cheap, I'd be thrilled!
I mean, we're about to enter a demographic reversal and to hear economists talk of it, corporations are going to really struggle to find the workers they need.
I guess we're about to find out if they're desperate enough to offer genuine flexibility or not.
If I could work 2d/wk remote as a software developer, I'd probably do it the rest of my life. Something tells me that most CEOs are still gonna insist on 50+hrs/wk RTO though...
They shouldn’t just feel useful, they need roles that actually are useful. They’re not dumb.
Of course, though I still think remembering that people need to feel useful is important. E.g. you don't want to force someone into a job that may be useful but the person is feeling "why am I doing this, it's not needed." The goal is also not to fill time or a money quota. It's to do something helpful such that the person actually feels helpful.
Either:
1. They are "dumb" and the original statement stands
2. They are not "dumb" and a role that is actually useful is a necessary condition for them feeling useful and the original statement stands.
There are useful roles that could either be done by a human or a machine and the machine is usually more efficient.
>> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
Unless you own shares. A population dedicated to work, followed by a retirement dedicated to steady medical spending punctuated by occassional holiday travel, is ideal for sustained economic growth year on year.
I think this is a problem in perspective/framing. Or phrasing, if you will.
"Being economic entities in the workforce" could alternatively be phrased, "performing a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe."
That sounds much less sinister. It's something humans have been doing for millions of years. It feels good, it engages our brains, it's helpful to others, and it's helpful to ourselves. And I can't help but feel the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is unfair in its approach of disparaging it.
Of course, play and socializing are important, too! Life isn't all work and contribution. And there are many ways to work or contribute outside of having a formal job, anyway. So I do agree with you that it's a bit sad that people don't have ideas for how to do either of these things unless it's through their long-term career.
They were specifically talking about a commercial labor-for-money transaction though. Not just any useful work.
Multi-generation households - which also can keep older people active like you noted -are mostly gone. You can't do much for your tribe from a retirement home on a random Saturday afternoon every few months in summer, so work or hobbies are the remaining activity centers, but you now which of the 2 is lionized as a virtue in American culture. Some hobbies are unfortunately only discovered in retirement, so perhaps some criticism of the economic system as imperfect is due.
Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.
I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.
[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
I don’t think being anti-capitalist necessitates being anti “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”. To me, that’s the big benefit- under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders.
I’m pretty sure the world overall and certainly “my tribe” would be better off if the job I’m working just never got done
> under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders
The first half of this sentence is false, but the second half is true.
I don't know about you, but when I look at my window every day, I see thousands of people working for their job: making delicious food that others can eat, stocking store shelves so others can shop, trimming trees so the city will look nice, driving trucks full of goods that others can have, designing good website UX for others to use better, repairing broken cars, etc. It's an intricate dance of millions of people waking up every day and doing selfless things for others in their tribe, in just the right amounts, because we've (miraculously) given them an incentive to do so.
To me what's depressing is that we can live in such a wonderful world, but with a cynical pessimistic culture in which it's commonplace to ignore the chief output of everyone's work.
Absolutely!
But also: with age more and more doors are closed to you. Many hobbies become inaccessible. You may end up with a bunch of choices that all just sound outright depressing. Losing a job is losing one more choice, restricting yourself to the possibly more boring options that you can still physically pull off.
It's just not fun being old.
For most, work in America seems inherently undignified.
It's definitely polarizing, I think a lot of people feel that work is your life's purpose.
Authoritarian hierarchies (Which is precisely what your workplace is) rarely have dignity to spare for the people building the pharaoh's pyramid.
It’s not that depressing if you view it as her wanting to help society and sees a job as the main way of achieving that.
When nobody is paying you to do something it’s easy to lose the feedback loop of “I’m at least providing this one person enough value to keep getting paid”.
This is much older than capitalism too. Very old religions derive value from work
That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement.
Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.
It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives
Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
That's not true. There were always different roles for older people. They didn't just keep doing the same job their whole lives.
And people who were injured to the point where they couldn't "work" anymore were still cared for by their community.
I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
They're right. We've found remains that show how thousands of years ago people took care of people that would have died without external assistance.
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disa...
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k
There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways
The US has one of the highest median incomes adjusted for cost of living in the world:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
(You're welcome to complain. I'm just clarifying that insofar as this is a problem, it is very much not exclusive to the United States.)
That's literally every society
Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness.
I retired last year in my late 30’s and it’s just such a life upgrade. I study Mandarin, go to the gym, cook fun meals, volunteer at our community garden, volunteer at our food pantry, go to board game nights, brew beer, DIY house maintenance, write some software for myself for fun, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continuing to do a job I don’t particularly enjoy just because I’m too unimaginative to figure out what I’d do with the extra 40+ hours of weekly freedom.
My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do.
I've been doing sort of a temporary version of that :). I quit working for the next year or maybe some more to focus on a big house renovation project, among other things (a few major car, truck, and tractor projects too.. some welding.. building some other machinery..). I figured why wait until some indefinite future to do work that is actually personally meaningful rather than what an employer tells me to do? I guess financially this year of negative income has some opportunity cost associated with it, but I'm building a bunch of stuff that cannot be bought, and I'd rather take the time now when it's definitely good than wait for a "maybe". And frankly the tech treadmill had pretty well erased the interest I used to have in computing. I'm also quite happy to be sitting out the current AI insanity. I've been working on some personal coding projects as well--as well as playing with local LLMs--to stay current and hopefully rekindle the interest in computing that the industry beat out of me. The work used to be fun, where did that go?
Hyperbolic. Unless she has a second job she surely has other activities to occupy her 50-80 non working, non sleeping hours. She's making the much weaker statement that dropping from e.g. 40 hours of economically productive and legible work to zero would leave her worse off, and that's much more understandable.
Most of the people who get a lot out of retirement are still doing economically productive work, it's just illegible to the point they don't feel it's worth bothering to make a buck off it. Any serious hobby is basically a second job you don't get paid for, in other words.
We probably all have anecdotal evidence here, but my father is a perfect example of being no longer employed and a ton of stuff declining. Yes, cognitively, but a lot of health. We're talking not just your "career". He was a commercial real estate agent. But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker. And it kept him busy. Getting out of the house. Figuring things out. Meeting and talking to people. Walking. Talking. Scheduling things. He'd even tell us that if he stopped, things would just descend. And he was so right.
He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit.
Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)
As a general comment, I'd like to say that getting out of the house is a hell of a lot easier when you don't have to drive everywhere to participate in daily life. So and so family member sits at home and watches TV all day is a phenomenon caused primarily by our car-centric culture which, for the elderly, is a barrier to staying healthy both mentally and physically.
I do think that once an elderly person loses the ability to drive, it's often a big tipping point towards their decline. I would suspect that losing the ability to drive usually (but not necessarily) comes before losing the ability to navigate public transit.
But I don't immediately believe the link that 'car culture' -> 'earlier cognitive decline'. Car culture, for example, is usually associated with living on larger plots of land, which comes with its own set of tasks and chores that can keep someone older occupied. A smaller apartment requires much less ongoing work.
I think a lot depends on the individual and how they best stay active. More dense living probably provides easier opportunities to do things, whereas less dense living sort of forces you to perform ongoing tasks.
If the additional area is used for new hobbies, hosting guests, or something fulfilling and interesting, then sure it can help keep the mind active. But people don't usually retire so they have more time for vacuuming or dusting. Many elderly people simply don't have the energy or interest to maintain their homes, it slowly falls into disrepair.
There is a specific smell for old person homes.
I'm no fan of car culture but I think to say it's the primary cause of living a sedentary life at home is an overstatement. I deliberately moved somewhere where I could walk to everything I needed including a fantastic central train station, I no longer even own a car, and yet... over the years my habits changed and I now spend a ton of time at home. My motivation to go out has simply declined.
There is a relevant concept in psychology called activation energy, James Clear provides a good introduction to it. Certainly in recent years screens seem to be incentivizing more stay at home behavior. People used to not own a TV, many quite intentionally, before our other screens were invented. But it is a very complicated topic.
Of course our activity levels change and in some cases go down as we age, but I'd like to submit that is a given, and that car-only infrastructure is an additional barrier on top of those natural tendencies.
It's simply much easier to walk to a coffee shop, or park, or wherever for those who have maintained their mobility (probably in part by living in a walking-centric environment) than it is to hop in a car, sit in traffic, for small things. It's less of a barrier.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. I'll argue you don't have to be a victim and can choose where you live if you plan ahead a little.
There's plenty of places where a car is not necessary and even if people think a car's necessary I'm often the only one on a bicycle in many places.. It's doable if you're willing to put in the effort.
I think that suggesting that an octogenarian either uproot their life to a less car-centric place or start riding a bike everywhere is a bit unreasonable.
> suggesting that an octogenarian either uproot their life to a less car-centric place or start riding a bike everywhere is a bit unreasonable
It is. But looking ahead, knowing what we know now, choosing to age in a car-centric place comes with known health effects.
It's a cart and horse problem.
You can choose to live where you don't need a car, but those places become fewer and fewer because of the distances needed for cars. (as in parking space minimums mandated by the city).
"Not just bikes" on Youtube goes into this a lot. Car-centricism is self-reinforcing. Eventually you have no such thing as a mid-density neighbourhood.
Please dont minimize disasterous societal policies, it is not respectful
As far as I’m aware, every US city where it’s at all common (let’s say 10%+ of households) to live without a car, it’s extremely expensive to live. Are there gems that I’m unaware of?
There are cities in the Midwest with a large carfree share by necessity (income) but as far as by choice/design, Philly and Baltimore appear to hover around 25-30%
New Orleans
Philly
It's hard to really say from anecdotes. My uncle retired early and was sharp as a whip until 86 or so. Then decline hit him hard. There was no change in life circumstances, he just got old.
Also, I think you'll find that taking care of someone who can't take care of themselves is a lot of work. I had to do it for my mom for 6 months and its a ton of stuff. Talking to doctors. Arranging appointments. Etc.
"I think you'll find that taking care of someone" => I know you were writing this generically. And I'm just replying to this for the sake of all of us who do actually know what it's like taking care of someone.
But yeah. Holy shit this is hard. I've been doing this too. Had to move my mom and dad to a place a block from me when my mom was going through her final few months with Alzheimers. That was so hard. So gross. And then now with this descent of my dads. You are catching me fresh from yet another aorta aneurism surgery of his last week. This is bananas. Just endless worry, driving, appointments, cleaning, pills, macgyvering the endless broken down things in his life: the tv, the remote, the blood pressure monitor.
OMG. I see you. I feel you. :) This is a rough part of life y'all.
Saw similar with my grandmothers. One had a busy social live and volunteer schedule for 20+ years, the other.. did not.
A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.
>A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.
Retiring TO something is important, but ideally it needs to involve a lot of in-person socializing, which many hobbies do not have. Golfing, for example, is pretty much the platonic ideal of a hobby that involves both socialization and old-person-friendly exercise.
I think it's good advice even if anecdotal. At least I do not think it hurts. My own observation is that almost everyone gets hit hard by the 80s. A lot of people in their 70s are spry, but it seems like damn near everyone gets significant decline in their 80s. A few people make it to the 90s, and some are even relatively spry, but my own anecdotal observations are that it is fairly rare. My grandparents both made it into their mid-90s before the decline really took hold (and then it was fast) but they were outliers. Both of my own parents made it to their mid-80s and that was it.
my mother's dementia diagnosis this year started as severe ADHD symptoms 4 years ago. but many years before that she enjoyed her retirement and pension as her last boss was abusive, and she was a bit traumatized by this that merely suggesting the idea of working again would make her anxious. the symptoms started from the stress of taking care of my dad, who suddenly found his workplace extremely stressful due to an incident with his boss snapping at him. this led to fainting incidents where he had to be rushed to ER and a after an extended disability leave he was let go. he has never been so relieved. however this just worsened my mom's condition, and the need to move out of their home of 20 years escalated it (moving stress syndrome as confounding catalyst). after only 1 year she forgot about this home and that she ever lived in it. She thinks she still lives in an earlier house. my father is much much happier, even when taking care of mom and they still get to travel. mom simply forgets what happened an hour ago, but my dad's happy just getting to travel the world with her while she can. So.. more of sample size of 2 abusive bosses in the workplace leading to significant mental and physical health improvements upon leaving such bosses. mom enjoyed kdramas, dad enjoyed reading more of world history, they regularly do everything together everywhere. they love the same music that my mom remembers every word and dance to.
> But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker.
> He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
It's a nice "just so" story, but when you're in your 80s, you are already in multiple stages of decline across the board. One small injury can cause a cascading failure of systems.
> The poor health came after being forced to quit.
I don't know how you can so authoritatively state this about a man in his 80s. (e.g. - past the average life expectancy). 80 is just really really old. How fast the decline gets you at that point is really mostly a genetic lottery.
But if the anecdote helps you be more active personally - more power to you.
"how you can so authoritatively state this" => because that is the exact order of events :) A happened. Then B happened. i didn't say A caused B. just like we're all discussing here in this thread. just another datapoint that we are sharing here where it seems like there could be a causation not just correlation. but i didn't authoritatively state anything other than I know what happened on one date, and then what happened on another date.
I believe there have been studies into how social life impacts longevity, and probably cognitive decline as well. For some people, like my great-grandmother who kept working well into her 80s by choice, jobs can be a big social outlet. For others a job can be very socially isolating. Those factors probably matter a lot.
Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.
Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it.
But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life.
But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
I used to think that working from home was the best thing since sliced bread, when I got to stop going to the office due to COVID.
But during the five years that I worked from home, I suffered a precipitous decline in overall health. It is too easy to stumble out of bed minutes before work starts, spend the day on Zoom calls, then spend more time behind the computer wrapping things up, and then veg out on the sofa after a long, long day. Too little exercise, no meaningful human contact.
I have been working from an office for the past year or so, and my health is improving, but it is a deep hole to climb out of.
Interesting, I've had basically the opposite experience working from home since COVID. I exercise more, cook more, sleep better, go for more walks.
Part of it is just time and energy freed up from my commute. I always felt wiped out after fighting through traffic to get home. But if I lived in a small apartment in a place that wasn't good for walking, I'd probably hate it.
It's good to have options, I suppose.
What card games do you play? Do you have any recommendations?
My main card game lately has been the Legendary system of games, in particular the Marvel version (although I did just order the James Bond version this morning too after playing the app version this past week). I like to play it with two players and alternate hands, but you can play it solo too.
Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy.
And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them).
All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.
> including somewhat complicated solo card games
any suggestions?
Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job, and not nearly as fulfilling. You get to see smiles and frowns and everything in between in a job and there is no board game that can match the complexity and novelty of random humans asking you to solve their problems.
>Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job
I think one should optimize for 'most intrinsically rewarding' not 'most engaging'. I shudder to picture a retirement spent doing 'customer service' and if a retirement of working on projects, travel, reading and playing video games leads to 'more cognitive decline', well, so be it. I would rather be daft in my old age than miserable
Your side note implies this would be a bad or nefarious thing? What if it's actually a good decision for both individuals and the public at large?
The issue is using a single factor to push change does not mean that change is a net good. Nobody talks about windmills killing birds because that’s what they actually care about, instead there are so few downsides they needed to find something no matter how meaningless in context.
As such single issues are often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.
I doubt it would be a good decision for all individuals. Maybe the public at large, but I question if that would be what motivates the people who seek such changes the most.
I mean, it could be both good and bad depending on the person. My Dad worked physically demanding jobs, and would have been happy to retire and spend his time working on personal projects at age 60, and his health and well-being would have been better if he had not had to keep doing exhausting work for at least 8 more years for money reasons. So, I think people feel justifiably protective of our elders when people talk about raising the retirement age.
Honestly, the jobs where the benefits of stimulation and social interaction outweigh the physical and or mental stress of the job are not the kind of jobs most people have. So if you wanted to do what’s really best for most older people, it would be better to find ways to engage them other than financially forcing them to keep working whatever job they can get - which is what raising retirement age does.
What would be really killer would be finding more ways to enlist retirement-age professionals in training young people, in a variety of occupations from carpentry to programming. The young have the stamina and strength but lack wisdom; the older people have learned a lot and could share that knowledge and wisdom.
"Good for both individuals and the public at large" is one thing. "We found a club to beat you into doing what we want you to" looks very similar, but is quite different in how it feels and how it works out.
What’s so difficult to understand? The state or lobbying groups want to raise the retirement age which then correlates with studies on how raising the retirement age has “good effects”.[1] The goal isn’t to find out what is good for senior people. It’s to find reasons to enact the policy that they wanted.
Surprisingly, men ages 51–64 (this was specifically about men) “need” their jobs for their own health.
We could imagine studies done in more patriarchal cultures: unmarried women over the age of 40 suffer from psychological and physical health problems more than married women over the age of 40. We’ll just leave out the parts about how unmarried women are penalized socially, constantly. Policy recommendation: we should get women married, it’s just good for them.
[1] This was the hypothetical laid out in the original comment.
> Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.
I'm sure you could do that just with basic math today.
I think employment may set us up for rapid cognitive decline when we finally become unemployed. As in, working 40+ hours a week makes us over-value "vegging out", which sets us up for failure post-employment.
Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then?
I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”
> so how about, you know, the idle rich?
They get together a few times a week for golf and tennis with their other idle rich friends. Skiing in the winter.
Allegedly my great grandfather was building a deck at the age of 90.
This might also be survivorship bias.
I’d like to say people need purpose and challenges. This is probably why rates of depression tend to be much lower in “poor” countries where people have to depend on each other more.
In the west everything is an abstraction. If you would imagine a baker in a small town, if she doesn’t feel like baking that day, the town doesn’t get bread.
Therefore, everyone in the town has an incentive to actually check on her, and get her back on her feet.
In the modern west who cares, surely another bakery will provide.
I believe automation will reduce the need for human labor very very soon.
We can all find meaning in arts, dance and play. If not just the gift of this experience.
Or we can point fingers as no one has work or money
Interesting.
I haven't read the paper yet so forgive a bit of ignorance here, but I feel like when I'm unemployed, I actively spend all my time trying to learn new things. This is no small part because otherwise I get depressed because I am spending all my time on YouTube and there are only so many "documentaries" about Lolcows that I can stomach, so I dive head first into projects, usually buying a few cheap textbooks in the process to play with new things. The days are way too long if I don't have something interesting to occupy my time, and I feel less guilty if that time is spent doing something quasi-intellectual instead of playing Donkey Kong Country again.
I didn't think I was an outlier with this, but maybe I am?
I'm the same. Free Time = Things to explore and learn.
I think you might be. Most retired folks I know just end up watching TV all day. Not even "good" TV-- it's mostly game-shows and 24-hour news cycles.
I've heard that you can expect your retirement to look a lot like your average weekend. If your weekends naturally fill with your hobbies and interests, I don't think you have much to worry about.
My experience has been exactly that: retirement = uninterrupted weekend.
I can't understand people who can't conceive of a healthy fulfilling life that does not involve work or volunteering. There is more to life than laboring.
If I'm anything like my parents, I don't think that's something I have to worry about. My dad is constantly buying new textbooks and trying to teach himself different types of physics. Either that, or he's designing new things to be 3D printed.
He's not retired yet but I suspect that when he is he'll find a way to keep himself entertained with stuff that isn't terrible game shows.
Go and read the book or audiobook "Younger Next Year" great book. Explains the biology of aging, how to delay/reverse it and how to retire well. Good background and good advice.
I would hypothesize that this is strongly correlated to where a person's sense of purpose comes from. If someone gets most of their sense of purpose from their job then you would expect to see a decline once they leave their job if they can't replace it with something else. For those whose sense of purpose is derived mainly outside of work and can continue to derive that sense of purpose in retirement, I would expect less of a decline in retirement other than normal aging.
I feel like this is less about employment and more a factor of money and engagement.
You need some amount of money for good health insurance, healthier foods, lower stress, etc. You need engagement, but that could be found in volunteering and sufficiently complex hobbies.
The trend seen with employment cycles might just be picking up that many people lack these.
Thanks for saying that. My dad volunteers and gets involved with social clubs. I think he'll keep doing it as long as he's able to.
BUT: I don't think it's the work / volunteering that keeps his mind, I think it's that for people like him, they stop when their mind can no longer handle it.
As someone who recently retired early, you really need to have a solid game plan on what you want to do with all the time you have. Spend a solid 3-6 months planning and mocking your post retirement days while still working.
The more detailed the plan the better. If you want to go to the gym, what will you do there and for how long and how many days a week?
If you want to have a tech side project, how many hours do you plan on spending on this project? And be reasonable. Don't trade one burnout over another.
If you are planning to learn something new, what are those? and don't just learn one thing. 8 hours plus is a crazy amount of time.
One of those plan should include making new friends post retirement, revolving around activities that are not work related.
It is far too easy to lose track of time without a brand new schedule to fill the void.
I've been retired for about 5 years and I am just as loony now as I was when employed. HN, my own silly hobby sites, flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.
> flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.
Let me write a memo to myself: Try flirting with wildlife to ensure longevity!
Taking my companies EER package in a few months - you give me cause for cheer.
> I am just as loony now as I was when employed ... flirting with the gals in town and wildlife
Flirting with the wildlife certainly does fall into the "loony" bucket in my book. Make sure to stay safe!
It reminds of my grandparents that refuse to stop working my grandma 65 and grandfather 73. My grandma has like a stand where she sells candies and coffee and for her is just a way for socializing. And my grandpa he's still trying businesses out he thinks that there is still time for him to become rich, he's still very sharp and active he currently sells car tools and he's walking everyday
I was under the impression that you delay cognitive decline (and keep brain plasticity) by learning new things.
So you need to be learning new skills, trying new sports, entering new circumstances continuously. If you’re good at something already, it’s not enough.
Employment is one of many ways of keeping things fresh because it’s easy but I see no reason why you can’t keep yourself busy too.
What many comments miss is that society is heavily structured around work.
If we didn't work, or simply worked far less, we wouldn't be atomized units not quite finding what to do.
There would be more structure of volunteering projects, cafés would be laid out for people having time, instead of for quick grab. Fastfood and drive through may end up being far less common.
Dementia, at least of Alzheimer's type, starts at least 20 years before symptom onset and is multifactorial, so much that no single factor plays a role ("explains the variability") more than 5%. Employment, as almost all other factors, like having family/kids, higher education, wealth etc etc, might be a correlative or a confounding variable, depending on the study design because the disease mechanisms are so long and convoluted.
In the egg and chicken dilemma, I believe that the cognitive decline causes the social inactivity and not the reverse. Get your retirement because that will not cause your dementia.
Averages make sense only when the distribution looks like a normal.
But after 60ish the health of people has such a high variance that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the average retiree.
Some of them are healthy and sharp. Others have disabling health problems
Retirement is an artificial modern construct to create jobs. People are supposed to be active until they die. Hobbies are just a replacement activity. I have no intention of retiring (over 60 already). I work in tech and learning new skills and my income feeds and houses my family and pays for my running shoes.
As other commenters have noted folk in some places don't have anything but work. That is a global social issue that needs addressing first.
Regardless of whether this is true I do think there is a risk of overdoing it.
My dad firmly believes in the "when people quit work they decline" theory. Which may be fair, but he's not in great health and still charging hard. Definitely think you can overdo that & end up working till you drop
I know I interact with people on the daily with my remote job, but would love to know if that's potentially an issue too. Decent reason to get back in the office. I also miss my daily office bike rides to a certain extent, at least it was healthy for me, now I do exercise by choice and I don't always keep up with it.
Or people who have cognitive issues have trouble staying employed...
I don't think this is "work is medicine." It's that too much of normal life depends on having a job, so policy lands on working longer.
There have been studies that show that elderly who interact with children are cognitively healthier compared to their counter parts.
Is there any evidence in this paper or elsewhere that this is causation rather than correlation?
For example, it seems logical to me that people with worse health and failing mental faculties will already be feeling more motivation to retire earlier, as opposed to very healthy people who will keep on working forever. That would be pure correlation
Yes - very roughly, they find that regions with lots of layoffs show an increase in subsequent cognitive decline:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35117/w351...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable
Not perfect, but less vulnerable to the correlation issue you mentioned.
This still smells like the kind of paper that a think tank would fund to justify their billionaire-backed policy that social security should be abandoned and the retirement age moved to 75.
More evidence that the US desperately needs to raise the retirement benefits age to 70 or 75.
Memory care is one of the most expensive types of eldercare.
I finally found the reason why my cognitive function feels like that of a 7years old child.
Anecdata: My dad started experiencing memory problems in his early 70s. When he got back into engineering as a part time consultant, those memory problems went away.
A strangely click-baity title for an academic paper. What's next? "Four crazy macroeconomic predictions. You won't believe what's number four!"
Seems like a fairly conventional economics paper title.
Perhaps you're misparsing the second sentence? "Shocks" is not used as a verb here -- it's a noun, part of the phrase "labor market shocks," which refers to sudden events that disrupt the labor market.
I bet another reason women suffer less cognitive decline from early retirement than men is that women are less lonely and more integrated into their extended families and communities.
brain is the same as a muscle: if you don't use it he will deteriorate
How much of this article is written by ai?
The primary argument of this NBER working paper is that "employment, particularly near retirement age, can slow the rate of cognitive decline."
Would this not depend on the type of work being done and type of working conditions? Doesn't working in a boring, unchallenging, repetitive, dead-end job, dull the senses? Also, now a day, people continue to work even into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, at least those that can find work. I don't see many people opting to retire when they have bills to pay.
Stan Lee used to say something along the lines of: “I’m not working, I’m playing!” If the job feels like fun, then the primary argument makes more sense to me. Based on past experience, however, I can relate to the later as my senses definitely got dulled, add to that compounding age-related health problems which did not help.
I try to do some Sudoku & Mahjongg puzzles at least twice a day, in my Linux machine, just to keep my mind awake.
It's 48 pages and I haven't read it fully, but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
"Does Unemployment Make It More Likely for Late Middle-Aged People, Particularly Men, To Drink Alcohol? Evidence From We Obviously Should Have Considered This In The Paper, Perhaps We Are Too Sheltered"
To be clear I am not being pedantic. The paper explicitly endorses the policy of pushing back the retirement age specifically because doing so likely reduces cognitive decline. I agree with this, in the same sense that shooting car thieves in the street without a trial reduces automotive theft. "Reducing cognitive decline in people near retirement age" might be better met with psychiatric intervention, so that unemployed people also get some of the benefits. Ignoring this confounding variable and prattling about "causal explanation" - while endorsing the policy of snatching away people's pensions until they work a few more years - is evil born from ignorance.
>but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
I thought that's the reason why they used "Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"? The idea is that when "Labor Market Shocks" (ie. mass layoffs) happen, the people who lose their jobs are somewhat random, so there isn't the confounding variable of low performers/sick people.
I'm not sure that completely addresses the GP's point, because "mass layoffs" are still somewhat selective. You're more likely to lay off the people that you think aren't worth their pay, which would include those who are already suffering cognitive decline, those who are drinking enough that it's affecting their job performance, and so on.
this paper uses a Bartik / shift-share instrument that looks at changes in sectors and the localized effects (exposure) due to concentration/reliance on that industry. It's an exogenous labor demand shock, not a mass layoff which frames the decision as made at the company level. Skills matter in this consideration but the point is to account for that statistically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_J._Bartik
It's not about "low performers / sick people," it's unemployment itself (especially sudden layoffs) making people more susceptible to substance abuse, regardless of their health when they're unemployed.
Whilst that's a perfectly valid hypothesis, they explicitly did test for relationships with rises in opioid misuse and didn't find evidence to support it. There isn't even consistent empirical data to show unemployment as a causal factor in aggregate increased drinking, never mind it being concentrated among recently laid off early onset dementia patients. The reality is unemployment influences some people to drink more and others to drink less, the circumstances of the unemployment and the demographics of the individual matter as do the patterns of the drinking, and even the statistical relationship between drinking and dementia is complex as statistically the lowest risk behaviour tends to be "moderate" rather than zero alcohol consumption
I have to wonder how much of this is socialization and the valorization of having a job (and the detrimental health effects due to lack). We don't really paint a good picture of what else people could do with their time that's respected or interesting. So many people retire early but not to something - expressing feelings of loss, idle uses of time like TV watching because they haven't developed hobbies / interests due to hegemony of work. We've killed boredom with devices and work, now people can't deal with silence and the existential questions it raises - more comforting to just be told what to do.
> Nevertheless, our group-average findings, if replicated by others, would hold clear policy implications. Federal efforts to promote work at pre-retirement ages would not only reduce reliance on SSDI and enhance retirement security, but would also promote healthy aging through delaying cognitive decline.
Fuck you.
Christopher Lasch wrote that our “culture of narcissism” detests aging. Unsurprisingly we, the narcissists, are horrified when we ourselves become old. Because there is hardly anything left for us.
You can subtract pure biology, i.e. normal bodily degradation. But you can also subtract respect, esteem, wisdom (because who cares what grandpa has to say?), family (see care homes), and socializing.[1] You’re not an “asset” (to use familiar language[2]) to anyone. Just a burden.
What becomes the solution to any of that? No, no. We don’t need solutions to old people problems. We need solutions to them being burdens.
So how to make them less of a drag on our collective selves: encourage them to work at their shitty jobs for longer.
[1] See the old man who meets you again after six months and talks way too much about what he’s up to. Does he have any other outlets?
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873477
No, but the lake of activity and intellectual challenges will certainly accelerate it, even for someone middle age with an official employment! Wrote this just by reading the title, and past the summary it clearly lean into that direction.
Classic "use it or lose it". No big surprise here.
This feels like propaganda, like a peice from the Economist.
Propaganda to what end, the global cabal to...encourage people to stay busy in retirement?
no to work for someone else forever
Does slavery slow cognitive decline? Capitalist propaganda says being a wagie is good for us. That being said people are so indoctrinated that they have no idea what to do without an employer. pretty fucked up society and culture we now find ourselves in.
I voluntarily retired at age 55 after a startup I was a principal in for five years ran out of money (raising funds was not my responsibility). Having worked from home during most of that time, and having nobody to report to other than myself, I decided I couldn't go back to the grind. I was fortunate enough that my wife earns enough and has good enough benefits that I don't need to work. It took a lot of paying down debt and massaging our finances, but it's worked out swimmingly. We're doing far better on one income than we ever did on two. Obviously, at my age, there are no kids in the picture. Not only am I her personal assistant (she's a teacher), but I take care of the household, which takes a ton of stress off her plate.
I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged.
I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.