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Comment by thebooktocome | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a huge fan of this kind of essay.

> First there is the issue of vacations foreshadowing retirement, which is a partial death. By the age of retirement, your profession has become a big part of who you are, and the justification of your existence. So when you stop working, you end that pretty big and central part of you.

This is primarily a feature of Protestantism: if you don't do good work, you don't get in to Heaven. Other religions have nice little hacks for getting around this gamification of over-employment. I recommend finding one or two of them and incorporating them into your own life: after all, we should probably enjoy what little we have while we have it.

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My father started experiencing short to medium term memory problems about ten years ago. Then he found contract engineering work, and his brain started firing on all cylinders again.

My mom's dementia kicked in very shortly after retirement, after a brief period of very bad depression.

Work -- even (especially!) if it's fun work -- is a core part of human existence. Protestant work ethic or not, we don't do well with excessive idleness.

Individual examples notwithstanding, I don't think we have the data to support claims that humans need to work etc. They might need stimuli but those could come in many shapes and sizes that are not work in any traditional sense.

I don’t follow the relevance of your examples; of course retirees should still challenge themselves and stay mentally active. I didn’t say otherwise. The opposite of overwork isn’t “excessive idleness”.

My comment was in reference to someone who had trouble enjoying a vacation with their family because being away from work for even a short interval was “a partial death”. Is that not on its face absurd? It’s reminiscent of those biohackers who sometimes say sleep is like dying—no, sleep is an investment in improving the quality of your future awakeness.

In those terms, you’ve interpreted my suggestion to mean something like a culture of insomniacs should try out medically-induced coma for a few months. No, I’m saying we all need another hour of sleep every now and again.

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