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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.
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.
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.
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
As such single issues are often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.
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.
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 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”
They get together a few times a week for golf and tennis with their other idle rich friends. Skiing in the winter.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Let me write a memo to myself: Try flirting with wildlife to ensure longevity!
Flirting with the wildlife certainly does fall into the "loony" bucket in my book. Make sure to stay safe!
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.
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.
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
This was well known before this paper.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
People in the workforce are dumber than people outside, no doubt.
"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.
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.
Americans in particular tend to have a highly entitled and confused "time is money" view governing their existence that enables them to do nothing except when paid by employers, which obviously results in doing absolutely nothing in retirement.
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?
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.
Memory care is one of the most expensive types of eldercare.
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.
