Most people are not, I'd say. Remember, you don't have to hate your job to be miserable. You merely need to not "40 hours a week + commute for decades" love it. That's love.
It's simply logistically impossible for the majority of people to manage to match themselves with a job like that.
Furthermore, who is this article for? People deciding whether to retire, but who weren't around for Seinfeld?
Well, it's an author's column. Very much reflective.
I agree, but I know a whole lot of people who are no longer working but who struggle to fill the gaping void in their lives once filled by a job and ameliorated by a paycheck.
So they do often turn to the shiny objects, and are doubly disappointed when the expensive things they do or buy fail to produce lasting satisfaction.
Sadly, I can report that more than one person in my life who retired at the top of their field is usually to be found bent over their phone, playing weird videos from Facebook at full volume.
There may be a correlation between excellence in a highly competitive career and failure to connect with other seniors at the community kitchen, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for growing old _contentedly_.
Best damn thing that ever happened to me.
I had enough to retire, when I did, but had no intention of doing so, for another ten years.
That was a bit over six years ago, and I am wondering what all the fuss was about.
The "retired" was in quotes, because I never stopped working. I just stopped writing code on someone else's orders, and started writing the code that I always wanted to write. It's a lot more professional, high-Quality, documented, and bug-free, than anything I ever did, when I was being paid to do it.
And I really enjoy it.
I have no intention of ever stopping. The coroner is gonna have to rub "YTЯƎWϘ" off my cheek.
I know three chaps that retired from my old company. They had worked there for 30+ years, and moved out of state, to relax. They were all in their sixties.
They are all dead, and achieved this transcendental state, before they reached 70.
I think that's the point. Actually retiring as in not doing any work is statistically speaking a steep slippery slope to death.
The whole "omg, I'm 40 - no tech will hire me" is a bit overblown...
My employees were close to my age, and got jobs, but it took years. These were top-shelf C++ geeks.
I was treated pretty badly, and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I have noticed over the years that interviewing has gotten more onerous and ghosting has gotten more common. There's never any reason to treat people badly/ghost them. Even a thanks-but-no-thanks is better then radio silence.
In another 20-30 years, Java might be a lot less popular then Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, etc? So lots of Java that needs maintenance and not many people left to do it??
PHP is actually a good bet.
[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
Those could be good bets too. Always fun to speculate whats still gonna be around in 20-30 years :-D
That's A LOT of websites...
This is a point I wish the article leaned into more. I disagree with your position, but it's a discussion that needs to be had. Our existing social safety nets, like you said, are incompatible with the direction society's going.
My opinion is that we're in a place where high levels of automation mean that we have the tools to start moving towards a post-scarcity, or at least reduced-scarcity society. It won't happen overnight, and maybe not even this century, but the idea that we've replaced many lower-paying jobs with automated solutions which are much cheaper (typically a fraction of the price for similar or better throughput) in the long run, while an affordability crisis is in full swing, seems like we're missing some clear ways to pump more money into social services while letting those companies using this automation get away with really harmful behaviours.
And yeah, I'm an optimist about post-scarcity, but I'll die on the hill that it's worth the effort to at least try and direct ourselves towards that.
I really like the "Manna" series because I'm increasingly of the opinion that this is where our society is going with automation -- the computer thinks for me and if I'm not a suitable candidate to be automated by a computer, then I'm shoved in a box somewhere to live out my days with almost no comforts.
Just because automation could be used to eliminate scarcity it doesn't necessarily follow that that's the only way it will be used. It's far more likely to be used to further entrench the already existing structure of our society.
In many industries, automation also leads to higher reliability. Aircraft with flight envelope protection are a direct result of automation, and while poor design (like the original set of MCAS-related issues on the 737 MAX) or bad crew doctrine (like AA965 in 1995) can still lead to bad outcomes, automation, on the whole, has saved countless lives.
These tools exist, we just need to keep improving them, and use them in a strategic, smart, and forward-looking way.
_Lots_ of people dream of retirement, and _lots_ of people retire happy. Not everyone's lucky enough to love their jobs, or have stimulating positions at companies, or work with people they get along with.
Lots of people work in customer-facing jobs in industries where customers are rude, entitled, and just generally disrespectful.
Many of those people don't have the option to retire because the venn diagram of those jobs, and jobs that pay too little to afford retirement, is pretty close to being a circle.
There's also the issue of there only being so many work opportunities, and whether or not it's correct for someone of traditional retirement age to hang on to a job, possibly at the expense of someone new to the workforce having one fewer opportunity.
I would give this article a bit easier of a time if it didn't conspicuously dance around the issue of having an aging population combined with (in many countries) social insurance-type systems not geared to support an age pyramid that top-heavy, but lines like this are just... bad.
> But can anything truly replace the framework and buzz of being part of the action?
Yeah, lots of things. Travel. Hobbies. Going dancing with your partner. Gardening. Hell, using your retirement and pension to kick off a startup of your own. For many people, above all, not being under constant pressure to perform at a certain level.
I say all of that as a millennial who both (a) loves my job, and (b) is unlikely to ever be able to afford to (comfortably) retire, barring major shifts in the economy.