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.