Everybody knows that guy that spent his whole life working, then got to 62/65/whatever age you and I might get to retire, then sat in a chair watching TV and died of a heart-attack a year later.
A lot of people don't have enough to fill their lives with after they get done working. God help you if you don't have family, friends, interests, or some higher purpose to sustain you outside of work. For all the talk of work-life balance, I worry about this - work seems to be expanding to take up an even bigger chunk of our lives all the time.
Oh well, with my family history, I won't have to worry about living to retirement age, and without some major changes to demographics or policy, Social Security won't either.
My dad always talks about how his dad worked his ass off all his life, saved for retirement, and never got to enjoy it because the second he retired he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
"He worked all his life, and for what? He didn't even get to enjoy what he worked for. Fuck that." Dad shuts down business to live a simpler lifestyle
I'm sure this sounds very strange, but I retired at the age of 39... without much money in the bank. I quit my job and went to Japan to teach English. If you ever interview me for a job, the narrative goes, "I wanted to improve my people skills, especially my presentation skills because I was doing more coaching than programming. But I also wanted to learn Japanese". This is not untrue, but to be honest I knew at the time that making such a radical change might mean that it was impossible to return to my programming career. So I retired.
I worked for 5 years teaching English and enjoyed every second of it. I got married in Japan and my wife wanted to learn English, so we moved to the UK. At that point, I got a programming job again. However, in my mind, I'm still retired.
You have to do something with your life. I suppose some people dream of the ability to lie on a beach every day and get drunk, or whatever. I've never been that way. I want interesting challenges. My "job" furnishes me with those.
I don't really treat my "career" seriously any more. I like programming. I program. People give me money. I'm happy. I don't show up for my 9-6 (or 8am-12pm as I used to do when I was young) and push bits for money. I just write code for fun because I'm retired. My "employers" give me money because they like my code.
I think the only thing that gets me down is interacting with people in difficult situations. If your personalities don't mesh, or if the person is going through one of those times as a programmer where they are as annoying as hell (and everyone has times like that)... But that's life, isn't it. Even when you are retired, it's not like all the ass-hats of the world will suddenly disappear.
So if you feel like it, I highly recommend retiring as well. What do you want to do in your retirement? I want to write code.
They don't want to. They have to. The whole system will collapse when the Boomers retire. I'm pretty sure I'll never see a dime of social security, myself.
The definition of "retirement" is subjective, but what I've observed is that the quality of retirement and of work has a large influence.
First, I know retirees who start smoking and drinking because they don't want to outlive their money. It's an awful thought, but most people can't get back into career jobs, especially not in their 70s, after some time out. If you don't have enough savings (this will be a common problem for our generation) to set up an annuity, and realize that you're at risk of outliving your money, why put so much effort into staying healthy?
Second, I think that retirement is often involuntary. Retirement doesn't exist because society is nice and loves older people. It exists because at some point, people get too old to get jobs. You can't force companies to hire 70-year-olds, so you end up needing a national retirement policy.
The market actually sets the age at which people can work in capability-appropriate jobs-- with the band widening in times of high demand and shrinking when demand is low-- and some combination of public and private funds (in the US, often private and parental in the "before working age" case) schools people until they're at the minimum age, and provides "retirement" for those who've outlived the maximum age.
I find it rather obvious that working is health-positive while having to work is health-negative. I'd guess that the involuntary retirements contribute to a large amount of retirement's health penalty. At that point, it's not a finish line but an irreversible loss of options, and that's just damn depressing.
Yep. The correlation/causation problem is strong with this one. It's not that old Mr Smith is alive because he still comes to the office. He still comes to the office because he's alive.
The mechanism of the correlation may be subtle. There is the obvious example of the person diagnosed with cancer who then retires. But there may be another pattern: I lead a no-audition church band with musicians in their 70's. Twice, players have quit the band, saying that it "isn't fun anymore." It was hard to play their instrument. Everything was annoying. They were then diagnosed with their cancer several months later. So another pattern may be that the worker feels chronically crappy before their illness is diagnosed, and considers retirement just because getting up the morning is very unpleasant.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadA lot of people don't have enough to fill their lives with after they get done working. God help you if you don't have family, friends, interests, or some higher purpose to sustain you outside of work. For all the talk of work-life balance, I worry about this - work seems to be expanding to take up an even bigger chunk of our lives all the time.
Oh well, with my family history, I won't have to worry about living to retirement age, and without some major changes to demographics or policy, Social Security won't either.
So true!
"He worked all his life, and for what? He didn't even get to enjoy what he worked for. Fuck that." Dad shuts down business to live a simpler lifestyle
I worked for 5 years teaching English and enjoyed every second of it. I got married in Japan and my wife wanted to learn English, so we moved to the UK. At that point, I got a programming job again. However, in my mind, I'm still retired.
You have to do something with your life. I suppose some people dream of the ability to lie on a beach every day and get drunk, or whatever. I've never been that way. I want interesting challenges. My "job" furnishes me with those.
I don't really treat my "career" seriously any more. I like programming. I program. People give me money. I'm happy. I don't show up for my 9-6 (or 8am-12pm as I used to do when I was young) and push bits for money. I just write code for fun because I'm retired. My "employers" give me money because they like my code.
I think the only thing that gets me down is interacting with people in difficult situations. If your personalities don't mesh, or if the person is going through one of those times as a programmer where they are as annoying as hell (and everyone has times like that)... But that's life, isn't it. Even when you are retired, it's not like all the ass-hats of the world will suddenly disappear.
So if you feel like it, I highly recommend retiring as well. What do you want to do in your retirement? I want to write code.
First, I know retirees who start smoking and drinking because they don't want to outlive their money. It's an awful thought, but most people can't get back into career jobs, especially not in their 70s, after some time out. If you don't have enough savings (this will be a common problem for our generation) to set up an annuity, and realize that you're at risk of outliving your money, why put so much effort into staying healthy?
Second, I think that retirement is often involuntary. Retirement doesn't exist because society is nice and loves older people. It exists because at some point, people get too old to get jobs. You can't force companies to hire 70-year-olds, so you end up needing a national retirement policy.
The market actually sets the age at which people can work in capability-appropriate jobs-- with the band widening in times of high demand and shrinking when demand is low-- and some combination of public and private funds (in the US, often private and parental in the "before working age" case) schools people until they're at the minimum age, and provides "retirement" for those who've outlived the maximum age.
I find it rather obvious that working is health-positive while having to work is health-negative. I'd guess that the involuntary retirements contribute to a large amount of retirement's health penalty. At that point, it's not a finish line but an irreversible loss of options, and that's just damn depressing.