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.
That is the biggest rock in the bucket. Smaller rocks include social media use, diet, exercise, whether the person is in a toxic home environment, mental health, or has children.
I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work. So I try to optimise my life to give me the most energy that I can have. I eat really healthy; high protein, high fibre, low saturated fat. I try to keep my social media use low, using ScreenZen. I meditate. I do resistance exercise a few times a week.
But even still, I find that my mind is exhausted part of a way through a workday, usually by 14:00-15:00. Maybe that's because I'm a software engineer.
I don't know how to fix it. But I'd really appreciate an extra day a week off, even at the cost of some remuneration. I love my work, but I don't want it to feel like it's the only thing I have going.
This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.
I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.
People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.
This is why I am so thankful that I grew up before the days of social media and devices. I have direct first hand knowledge that the world does not end because some feed hasn't been checked in the past 5 minutes. I am forced to hear others doom scrolling their feeds and listening to the disjointed audio from short clips looping or getting interrupted to get to the next one, and I am constantly reminded of those that would sit on the sofa with the remote constantly flipping channels. Nothing was on the screen long enough to really see what was on, but just enough they decided not what they wanted to see. It's like the exact same personality cranked to 11.
I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest.
I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks / etc...
There tends to be a decompression stage after leaving work environment that didn't suit the person, then a deconstruction / rebuilding / searching stage afterwards.
I think it's also common for large lottery winners to become depressed because they have trouble searching for what to do afterwards.
Giving employees 1 week of free time? That's nothing, and nothing will change too as a result. Give them a whole month of free time? I bet they will make some small, short term projects, even doing hobbies like gaming, fishing, cooking or golfing where it wasn't available before.
The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years.
There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients reported a marginally higher rate of thinking about maybe starting a business, but they weren't actually doing it.
- Low UBI, short term
- Low UBI, long term
- High UBI, short term
- High UBI, long term
Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.
High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.
High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.
I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.
Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.
edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.
I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can't do anything else with their lives, but if we changed that to 38% of their waking hours they'd be so bored that they be starting businesses and volunteering all over. That's not even consistent with your own experience of being exhausted halfway through the work day. Two extra hours per day isn't going to translate to launching a new business or volunteer effort.
You hinted at the real problem: Most people don't have the time management skills and motivation that they think they do. Remove a couple hours of work per week from most people's lives and those hours will get redistributed to mostly leisure time. Some of it more productive than other options (socializing with the community, working on hobbies).
I also don't see how your final paragraph really refutes rather than just restates their opinion. Hobbies produce projects and business ventures all the time. Someone also has to find some way or another to socialize with the community. Volunteering is a great way to do that.
If I have to do a job I hate for the rest of my life I would eternally be low energy. If I could do the thing I loved every day, the thing I truly wanted to do, I would get up excited every day and would have high energy throughout.
Having more free time, yes people would get bored. But the resulting things that they work on would be things that invigorate them.
Hourly employees have it even worse. When your schedule varies week to week and even on your "day off" your employer may be constantly reaching out trying to bully you into taking another shift, it's very hard to maintain regular non-work activities. Perhaps you have friends who work similar schedules to you, but good luck going to a sports team or club that meets Thursdays at 6 when you don't know if you'll be available then until 12 hours before if ever.
(I'm not thinking of a making-money-from-my-hobby side gig, but an actual business.)
You can do a side-hustle in spare time, but an actual business, one that pays salaries every month takes enormous effort.
Don't be fooled by tiredness. You can be mentally tired but not physically tired. These are not opposites. You can be physically tired in one aspect but not another.
You can be mentally tired but because you like to paint, then painting will regenerate you. It will make you less tired after you paint or even better: have you now appropriately tired that you properly sleep due to that tiredness.
Tired is not tired. You be tired in one way and not in another. This blanket use of the word isn't helpful and leaves a lot of potential left behind as you sit on the couch "tired".
The only way I can get anything meaningful done outside of work is to do it before work.
Those first few hours of the day are precious, as far as energy goes. Or attention, or will.
On a related note, I put Q2 of Eisenhower Matrix (important but not urgent, i.e. the stuff you want to get done "someday" but keep putting off indefinitely... i.e. your hopes and dreams) at the front of the day, because Q1 (urgent and important) basically forces you to do it and requires no special attention.
To put it bluntly, the long term stuff needs to be scheduled and consistently acted upon, or the default outcome will be very depressing.
I schedule it first thing, every morning.
Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.
We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.
Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering.
Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today...
Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.
For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor.
I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)
In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance.
All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".
“There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...
If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.
It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.
Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.
There are still social activities connecting people of different age groups although I agree with the above comment that structurally the society we have has been eroding non-labour market interactions.
In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.
There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.
This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.
> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.
I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.
No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.
No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.
> No time for being a governor at the local school
The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life.
Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs.
Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other.
> No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.
You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day?
This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work.
So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.
VFW membership has declined because even with continuous wars for decades, the end of conscription has meant a lot fewer veterans. And many VFW halls functioned more like dive bars than anything else: nothing wrong with that, but not particularly attractive to most younger veterans.
> What you are describing is working for someone else
That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.
But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.
None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening.
Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!
And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.
But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.
I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about.
Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.
Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics.
Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.
If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.
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.
Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.
There were a depressing number of people who would post something along the lines of “I just pulled the trigger! Now what am I supposed to do to fill the time?” Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.
As someone who pulled the trigger about a year ago, I feel like there’s not enough hours in the day to fill with personally enriching activities, both mentally and physically stimulating. And I feel increasingly lucky to have a life like that.
Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.
They aren't conditioned for it. Learning to relax, enjoy nature, prioritise friends and family, et cetera aren't hard coded like walking and talking. We benefit from it. But if you never learned to do it while your brain was most plastic, you probably aren't going to change because a number added a zero.
It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement).
The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Even many hobbies start to require money. Then reading books, browsing the internet, and playing games starts to get boring when it's your entire life.
Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.
Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?
It is one of my greatest hope for everyone to be able to achieve this. It would shift the workplace dynamic so much that employers would have to work harder (beyond pizza parties) to retain employees since no one would blink an eye at the thought of resigning on the spot.
Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it.
Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.
Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating into a shitty 2009 market and not having nepotism connections means I am unlikely to ever FIRE outside of some expat poverty FIRE in a cheap country.
Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while still banking 50k/an. Etc.
There is a base level beyond which you can't save much, so first order of business is maximizing your income (e.g. better job/raise/promotion) without going bananas and sacrificing your health for it.
The first post they link to on the sidebar is 'Build the life you want and save for it'
https://old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/58j8...
I honestly don't know how someone gets to the position of being able to retire without having thought long and hard about it. Even if you get an unexpected windfall, it's probably best to keep working until you know you're mentally prepared to retire.
What if people just really really like their jobs and didn't have enough initiative to make sure they had something to do outside of them? It isn't really wrong for people to like their work, like it isn't wrong for someone to have a hobby that they obsess over.
Considering fiction, even in the post scarcity society of Star Trek, people still like doing "jobs." Or consider a seeing eye dog after they retire, they enjoy occasionally putting the harness back on and feeling useful. It isn't simply a matter of human beings being reduced to economic entities.
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.
Unfortunately most retail space in the US is way too oversized to make that kind of operation work.
Work on some open source projects and dig into some bugs, become that crazy but fun neighborhood guy always building some contraption in his garage, volunteer as a mentor for advanced STEM programs like FIRST FRC, volunteer at/run a local computer reuse program where you help take used computers and get them into a state people in need of one can use, build those things you always thought sounded fun to work on at ${dayJob} but could never "justify" to management, build and operate a retro computing collection.
Some of these scratch the tinkering itch, some of these scratch the community itch, some of these scratch the meaning itch, and so on, but all allow you to have a goal, sense of purpose, and to love computers however much you want without having to make money doing it.
Getting initial momentum on this can seem tricky, same as for careers, but once you get going the time at ${dayJob} starts to feel like it gets in the way of loving computers instead of the other way around.
But I get you; a job finds well-scoped problems and spoon feeds them to you, it can be daunting to look for a worthy problem to solve on your own. Think of it as a new skill you'll have to develop.
If you were an ER doctor and loved saving lives it would be a little harder.
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.
I guess we're about to find out if they're desperate enough to offer genuine flexibility or not.
If I could work 2d/wk remote as a software developer, I'd probably do it the rest of my life. Something tells me that most CEOs are still gonna insist on 50+hrs/wk RTO though...
1. They are "dumb" and the original statement stands
2. They are not "dumb" and a role that is actually useful is a necessary condition for them feeling useful and the original statement stands.
Unless you own shares. A population dedicated to work, followed by a retirement dedicated to steady medical spending punctuated by occassional holiday travel, is ideal for sustained economic growth year on year.
"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’m pretty sure the world overall and certainly “my tribe” would be better off if the job I’m working just never got done
The first half of this sentence is false, but the second half is true.
I don't know about you, but when I look at my window every day, I see thousands of people working for their job: making delicious food that others can eat, stocking store shelves so others can shop, trimming trees so the city will look nice, driving trucks full of goods that others can have, designing good website UX for others to use better, repairing broken cars, etc. It's an intricate dance of millions of people waking up every day and doing selfless things for others in their tribe, in just the right amounts, because we've (miraculously) given them an incentive to do so.
To me what's depressing is that we can live in such a wonderful world, but with a cynical pessimistic culture in which it's commonplace to ignore the chief output of everyone's work.
But also: with age more and more doors are closed to you. Many hobbies become inaccessible. You may end up with a bunch of choices that all just sound outright depressing. Losing a job is losing one more choice, restricting yourself to the possibly more boring options that you can still physically pull off.
It's just not fun being old.
When nobody is paying you to do something it’s easy to lose the feedback loop of “I’m at least providing this one person enough value to keep getting paid”.
This is much older than capitalism too. Very old religions derive value from work
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disa...
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
(You're welcome to complain. I'm just clarifying that insofar as this is a problem, it is very much not exclusive to the United States.)
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.
It is. But looking ahead, knowing what we know now, choosing to age in a car-centric place comes with known health effects.
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.
> 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.
It's a nice "just so" story, but when you're in your 80s, you are already in multiple stages of decline across the board. One small injury can cause a cascading failure of systems.
> The poor health came after being forced to quit.
I don't know how you can so authoritatively state this about a man in his 80s. (e.g. - past the average life expectancy). 80 is just really really old. How fast the decline gets you at that point is really mostly a genetic lottery.
But if the anecdote helps you be more active personally - more power to you.
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.
Part of it is just time and energy freed up from my commute. I always felt wiped out after fighting through traffic to get home. But if I lived in a small apartment in a place that wasn't good for walking, I'd probably hate it.
It's good to have options, I suppose.
Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy.
And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them).
All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.
any suggestions?
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'm sure you could do that just with basic math today.
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.
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
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?
I can't understand people who can't conceive of a healthy fulfilling life that does not involve work or volunteering. There is more to life than laboring.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Memory care is one of the most expensive types of eldercare.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.