People who retire earlier die sooner; for each year earlier that one retires, life expectancy is shortened by two months (and the results are robust against different assumptions).[1] This would lead one to believe that working is good for your health.

[1] http://freakonomics.com/2012/05/17/retirement-kills-a-new-ma...

Obligatory: causation, correlation mention - surely people who are sicker retire sooner?

They accounted for that. It boils down to males adopting unhealthy life patterns in retirement (drinking, sitting around and so forth).

Obligatory: RTDA. Surely people who read citations before posting won't ask these questions?

You said: People who retire earlier die sooner

It's actually true only for men.

Men are people too.

I never said all people would suffer early deaths from retirement. For all I know, some people's lives may be prolonged.

Two months per year? To me that's worth it. I want to live as long as possible, but that is strongly based on how much I enjoy life. If the things people enjoy happen to be a little unhealthy, it may be worth it.

For me, quantity of life is secondary to quality of life.

But if you hate working, you want to retire as early as possible to have as much non-working time as possible.

>People who retire earlier die sooner

some people. Do not generalize.

I think the "on average" was clearly implied.

Mathematically, it might be close to average but I don't think that's a great way of putting it either. If you click through to the study, it was actually only men that died earlier. The lifespan of women was unchanged.

Damn, this is not good news, but thanks for sharing that.

I would hope that this is not relevant to people who just want to be financially independent at an early age, and never really "retire". Maybe a lot of people just don't know what to do with their time, so they turn to unhealthy activities like drinking and sitting on the couch all day watching TV.

And busy is relative.

Some stay busy napping. Some stay busy zoning on TV/internet. Some stay busy actually creating stuff.

All of them may believe themselves to be "busy"

> Some stay busy zoning on TV/internet.

That's a big part of what I wish I had more time for. My list of things I want to watch is long and growing all the time. If I were retired, I would love to be able to sit down and finally watch The Wire or Sopranos.

Someone's got to read/watch/read/play/hear/use all that stuff the people who love to make things are going to produce.