I know many people in their sixties who choose and want to work, including my parents. They are lucky in being able to choose to work at a reduced level and not out of absolute necessity so that changes the implications, but they do not want to retire completely.

It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.

My grandpa is 89 and refuses not to work. He thinks he'll fall apart once he does.

My grandpa is 94 and still enjoys working. Drives to Home Depot every day to pick up supplies for our family company, and other errands around the city. His view is that he enjoys it and helps him stay active.

> It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.

You're essentially saying that not working may not be healthy. That's one of the strangest things I've read today.

You may not view it as "not particularly healthy" because of the frame of reference, not because of "a fact" that not working is unhealthy.

If people "retired" at the age of 25, could you reasonably argue that we'd have an unhealthy population?

> You're essentially saying that not working may not be healthy. That's one of the strangest things I've read today.

But it is true. An internal study at a megacorp I worked at showed that people who didn't retire ended up living longer.

It makes a ton of sense. Intellectual work keeps your mind stimulated and your body moving. Inaction ends up killing old people.

If anything that proves inactivity is unhealthy, not a life without work.

Not all activity has to be done in the service of providing value to a corporation. You can retire and take up fishing or rock climbing, play chess, write a book.

This idea that we've been conditioned to, that the only valid life is the life we trade for money, is insidious.

> Intellectual work keeps your mind stimulated and your body moving. Inaction ends up killing old people.

Nobody argues with this. But thinking that paid work is the only source of mind stimulation and body movement is just silly.

could it be explained as a generational gap?

that generation tied a lot of value to the ability to work.

the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.

If the current generation is looking for all possibilities to not work they're sure doing a crap job at it - the number of people working multiple jobs has shot up... Or did you mean that stereotypical millennials are lazy and thus all young people are lazy?

the people working multiple jobs is due to how the jobs have gotten 'securitized' - people have become specialists in low skill jobs, leading to no growth at all.

A person who is a Uber driver and a dog sitter is unable to display much skill addition after years on these jobs.

i can only quote anecdotal data about the attitude to work among generations. On the other hand, because of the changing nature of the work, it is completely understandable.

> the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.

You're getting downvoted for this statement, which is utterly ridiculous.

From what I see around me, the current generations work as much, if not way more, than previous generations (such as boomers).

i differentiated between between people working and people wanting to work.

it is also true that if a generation is chronically overworked, they will not be interested at all in working till their death.

Both my parents are 60+, my father is in his mid seventies, and they are as productive as ever.

Congratulations to them. My dad has worked manual labour since he left school aged 15 - first as a shipbuilder and then in the oil industry. My mum retired from teaching a year ago then developed lymphoma.

Both of these people are in their 60s and have earned their retirement - we need not extract any more "productivity" from them. Leave them be.

So instead we should extract a few more percent of productivity out of everybody who is pre-retirement age for every additional year of life expectancy?

The alternative seems to be keeping the young under employed

Are you referring to the "lump of labor" fallacy?

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-...

No, that refers to job openings across industries, specifically mentions agriculture jobs declining as other industries grow. Look at the median age of say politicians or tenured professors to see what I'm talking about.

We don't need to extract more productivity, sure, but it would lead to decreased medical costs.

Current 60 year olds aren’t relevant to the hypothetical of “what if we cure more stuff?”, rather “what will 60 year olds be like if we cure more stuff?”

Hell yes.

My parents are in their mid-60s. They are both full of energy, in great health, and very productive. As a teacher he's not allowed to work past 65, even when the classes he teaches have no suitable replacements.

We should differentiate between blue-collar and white-collar work in retirement age. I would never wish someone who's worked in a factory or doing manual labor to keep on working. But if you've been sitting in an air-conditioned office all your life there's still plenty to go.

I know a lot of people over 60 and almost all of them are still working.

Retirement age in Germany is 67, so you'd kind of expect that.