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Comment by AlexB138 | Hacker News Reader

Why would people want to work longer? As much as I enjoy technology, working is the least pleasant part of my life. Perhaps if I were self employed it would be better, but spending the vast majority of my time selling my time to a company is not something I would like to figure out a way to do more of.

I intend to do everything in my power to retire early, and something about the discussion of keeping the elderly working longer strikes me as perverse and crass. I think we, as a society, should be trying to figure out how to let the elderly enjoy their twilight years with some dignity, not how to wring every last cent of tax money and GDP out of them that we can.

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> Why would people want to work longer? As much as I enjoy technology, working is the least pleasant part of my life.

I think modern industrial civilization encourages a sort of compartmentalization of roles and terms that isn't actually real. Certainly, for many people, their job is not a pleasant part of their life. From that angle, sure, no one wants to keep doing that until the day they die.

But that doesn't mean the alternative—pure idle leisure—is that great either. Doing nothing sounds awesome when you're burnt out, but after a week or two of it, most people will start chewing on the wallpaper.

This dichotomy that "everything that you do for money is unpleasant and unsatisfying" and "everything that is recreational is easy and unchallenging" is false. There is a whole spectrum of difficulty, reward, and monetary compensation and jobs, hobbies, recreations and pastimes occupy all sorts of points on it.

For most people, they want to spend a good portion of their time doing things that are rewarding, and not necessarily easy. Being retired just means you can optimize for personal satisfaction without having to also optimize for monetary gain.

If I could retire today, sure, I'd get a bit more sleep. But I'd also hack more open source code, write more books, and volunteer. Those are difficult things (especially that middle one). Does that make them "work"? In the sense of "working on the book", "my life's work", etc. yes. But is it "work" in the sense of "thing I'd only do for money"? Certainly not.

> But that doesn't mean the alternative—pure idle leisure—is that great either. Doing nothing sounds awesome when you're burnt out, but after a week or two of it, most people will start chewing on the wallpaper.

Did you take a lesson from dogs there? They'll literally start chewing the wallpaper unless you give them "work". We're not all that much different.

Bob Black's essay, The Abolition of Work gives an alternative dichotomy to the "work versus idleness" dichotomy: work versus play. You can be paid for playing if your play produces value (and many forms of play do produce value).

Pursue a career you like and feels like play (DJing, skating, liberal arts, photography, music) and you wont have to work a day in your life (because nobody's hiring).

I realize you're joking, but in the context of this discussion, this shouldn't be mistaken for a valid point. We're talking about how to structure a society, and I think it makes sense to structure society in a way that allows people to play, maybe not all the time, but more and more as technology reduces the need to work. Continuing to push the idea that work is a value in itself as work provides less and less value is going to be a bigger and bigger problem as the need for work decreases.

>But that doesn't mean the alternative—pure idle leisure—is that great either. Doing nothing sounds awesome when you're burnt out, but after a week or two of it, most people will start chewing on the wallpaper.

That's because people have been conditioned to not do anything significant out of their jobs -- except maybe from some tame passtimes that get boring soon.

But there's a universe of things to do, and stuff to do with job-level concentration+personal freedom to do them as you like, if you don't have to work on some 9-5 job.

Raising the retirement age just seems like one more way in which the Silents and Boomers have pulled up the ladders behind themselves, reneging upon their social contracts after already benefiting from them.

If anything, with the advancement of technology, we should be lowering the retirement age. The Earth just doesn't need sexagenarians to be working, but it doesn't need them to exit the workforce, either.

When you raise the state pension age, you aren't affecting those with enough personal savings to retire earlier. You are only affecting those who could not stop working at that age without additional financial support of the state. So poor people with lower-paying jobs get to face down the possibility that they may eventually be fired after their first day of not being alive enough to come in to work. Great for morale, I'm sure.~

People with enough money will still be retiring at 50 or 60, or whenever they think they have enough to count down their death clock to zero and still have a little left over.

It seems a lot like micromanager Lumbergh from Office Space saying, "Yeah, we're running a little behind on the ol' pension plan here, so I'm gonna need you to come in when you're 65... and 66 too. So if you could go ahead and do that, it would be great. Mmmkay?" And then he retires at 55, while you're stuck filling out TPS report cover sheets.

If I make it to 65, and still can't afford to retire, I'm going to burn the seniors village down. You bastards shouldn't have taken my stapler.~

When Social Security was implemented, retirement age was 65, and if you reached 21, 54% of men and 60% of women would expect to live to see retirement age.

Then, if/once you reached retirement age, men would expect to live 12.7 and women 14.7 years in retirement.

All of those numbers have increased since the program was implemented and continue to increase as we make medical and other advances that prolong life.

If you state the social security benefit in terms of "years of life expected to be drawing social security", Silents and Boomers haven't been pulling the ladder up behind them at all. If anything, they need to pull it up a little bit farther, IMO.

If anything, they need to pull it up ahead of themselves. Silents and Boomers are living much longer than when Social Security was created, while subsequent generations are only projected to live slightly longer than Silents and Boomers.

That's only true if society is poorer and there is not enough young people for doing the necessary work. Is it the case?

Of course, I don't think is "silents and boomers" who is pushing for this, but I'm going to leave the class war debate for other day.

> The Earth just doesn't need sexagenarians to be working

The Earth doesn't, but the math to make Social Security work sure does.

How convenient it is that the math was determined in part by septuagenarians, octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians.

I'd very much like the math to work out such that I don't end up spending my whole working life supporting retirees in a socially responsible way, only to get the shaft right before becoming one of them.

It doesn't help that every danged one of us knows at least one way to make the math work [without even pulling a horrendously appalling dick-move on the entire voting workforce], and no one with a speck of the republic's authority over the matter ever even talks about trying one of those ideas.

>If I make it to 65, and still can't afford to retire, I'm going to burn the seniors village down.

You should read this:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene...

> Why would people want to work longer?

Why would anyone want to work at all?

Just as it'd be absurd to imagine a world in which no-one works and yet we all have food, clothing, new computers, entertainment &c., it's absurd to imagine that people capable of being productive members of society (which is what old-but-not-debilitated people are) should not be working.

> I think we, as a society, should be trying to figure out how to let the elderly enjoy their twilight years with some dignity

Work is dignified!

Depends on how you define work, I guess. If you're in the lucky 5% and in control of your career and doing something you like, it's awesome. I for example don't want to retire as long as my body can take it.

That's not always true for the rest of the 95%. For them, dignified, yes, but fun, not always. That 95% is generally very interested in retiring so they have more time to themselves.

I am in control of my career and run my own business which I find a lot of enjoyment out of, but I wouldn't say that it is always fun.

There are plenty of headaches that come up that suck (customers not renewing), things I don't want to (tagging thousands of photos manually), or things that get in the way of family (not being able to turn my brain off from work mode when I am home).

There are some also great benefits though like feeling more free in terms of hours and vacation time. However, all of the customers and people I interact with don't have that luxury so I pretty much end up working the same ~8-5 day everyone else does so I can get things done.

Sure, me too. I guess what I meant is, you and I are doing what we do, because it's what we want to do as a whole. For us, life is work, and work is life, for the most part, and we're okay with a blurry boundary between the two.

That's not always true of, say, a line chef or a street sweeper, whose job is equally important to society, but they aren't doing it because it's their life or because they get a sense of enjoyment from it. They're doing it because it pays the bills. For a lot of them, they sure as hell want to live a life outside of work, and draw a clear line.

Yeah that makes sense. I like to consider work as being a more of a means to an end as opposed to an end itself so it isn't the work itself that brings fulfillment but rather the things it allows me to do that bring fulfillment (help provide for my family, have customers that are happy, etc).

Work is dignified!

There are people well past the age of 65 working at Walmart! There are even people in their 80s and 90s working there and at many other retail jobs. For the most part, they are not there by choice. They are selling their remaining years to faceless corporations just so they can eat and pay rent.

> eat and pay rent

The retiree homeowners in my life also need it for medical coverage. Feels like this country is a pyramid scheme that's falling apart.

Is Medicare not covering their healthcare needs? Sidenote: Its a fucking travesty that Congress prohibits Medicare for negotiating drug prices with pharma companies.

>Just as it'd be absurd to imagine a world in which no-one works and yet we all have food, clothing, new computers, entertainment

Ever heard of automation? We might not get a world in which "no-one works and yet we all have ...", but we sure can get a world in which no-one works more than a small number of hours per day, and maybe even 2-3 times a week, and we still all have food, clothing, new computers, entertainment and co.

Most work done in modern societies (especially outside of Chinese factories, African sweatshops and Latin American farms) is busywork. And even most work done in those places is to get us 2000 varieties of t-shirts, sneakers and mobile phones, when we could do with 100 or 20 just as well (and even better).

The problem is the increasingly long span of life when people are not working but still consuming, possibly requiring expensive personal and medical care. The goods and services consumed have to come from someone working somewhere.

What we could really do with is establishing some new norms for short-week working for older people (and the not so old). There are plenty of people who'd be happy to do a few hours a week to top up their income and stay in contact with the world, but are starting to be physically incapable of the 40 hour + commute week.

How does this differ from any other part-time job (which a lot of retired folks have, even those with plenty of money).

>The problem is the increasingly long span of life when people are not working but still consuming, possibly requiring expensive personal and medical care. The goods and services consumed have to come from someone working somewhere.

This seems like a Lump of Labor Fallacy. Productivity-per-worker-hour has been growing for decades, while we've kept work-weeks and retirement ages the same (or even, in some countries, increased the retirement age). If people work the same amount and productivity keeps growing, there ought to be more goods and services to distribute to the retired as they live longer. And indeed, the per-capita GDP has been growing.

Of course, the generation ratio (retirees to workers) is rapidly becoming problematic, but given the sky-high youth unemployment rates, I don't really trust that's driving the supposed inability to fund pensions either.

indeed, per capita GDP is increasing, and the proceeds have not flowed proportionately to the workers...so it is a fallacy that we don't have enough goods to distribute, but it's a truth that those goods are relatively scarce/expensive to the workers......sucks.

> The goods and services consumed have to come from someone working somewhere.

Like your former self? Retirement fund contribution is compulsory in Australia (as a %age of income), and probably elsewhere.

Because you are married and too old to do adventure outside. And work place is less troublesome than being married :p

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