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Sounds more like people retire somewhat early - for 25-54yo labor force participation near all time high: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

And here is one for 55+yo: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230

All is fine

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I suppose it’s in how you word it. I’ve given up on trying to get a job because there is no point in trying. I can’t afford to pay my rent, but I guess you could call that early retirement.

Point of labor participation is that it's independent of whether you want to be employed or not.

You and gp agree that characterizing non-paticipation as (voluntary) "early retirement" is unsupported.

That sounds kinda pointless unless the point of the stats is to make the State and Enterprise look good and justify cuts to non-corporate WELFARE

Ding ding ding!

If you can stomach it, the seafood canning and fishing industry in Alaska will usually (IDK what the situation is this year) hire anyone off the street, work them 16 hours a day for several months, and give them "free housing." You'll get dumped back in Seattle in several months with at least $10k in your pocket.

Edit: genuinely perplexed on the response. This saved my ass one winter when I had nothing for rent.

I thought the fishing industry paid … way more than 10k / 3 months. Color me surprised o.O

That's net after housing, perhaps a good deal depending on what your rent would've been otherwise.

It is a seasonal low skilled work. How much should it pay? Overall it is comparable to a seasonal farm work: mostly done by immigrants

my brother did that 20 years ago; I didn't realize it was still a thing today

Surely it's not actually 16 hours a day, that would leave maybe 6 hours for sleep after other needs are taken care of.

People who have been aged out of tech aren't going to be able to physically pull off 16 hour days in Alaska.

If you are working 16 hours a day, you won't even go to your "free housing", you will sleep next to your workplace on a mat and then try and finish toilet/bath in office restroom in 1hour, so you can at-least get some restful hours of sleep before the next day.

You can’t pay your rent? But then where will you live?

A question that roughly 500,000 people in America find themselves asking. So far, the answer seems to be “in a pup tent in the woods behind Walmart”, because there’s not a ton of great options otherwise.

> Sounds more like people retire somewhat early

I know many ex-colleagues who have been retired early -- they face age discrimination and cannot find work.

> However, in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as “prime age” workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023.

It's great how two sources can tell a completely different story about the same numbers.

>>its lowest since December 2023.

That should already make you skeptical, and after looking at the chart, I'm more on side "all is fine" than the doom narrative the article is pushing.

In other news, June worst full month since May.

Additionally these number aren't trust worthy. Many time these number don't include full data like NEET and are manipulated so much etc..

The first FRED link shows how noisy that subgroup is. It’s bounced around with 83-84% during that time. It was 83.8% in March and 83.5% through much of 2024.

> All is fine

An aging population means 25-54 represent less workers and people "retiring" from the labor force before social security age is likely to be deeply negative for their finances into old age and not just a decision from the relative luxury of being able to select jobs with quick vesting pensions like in past decades.

If pension ages were going down over the years and the average worker were well vested by 55 then in that reality all would be fine.

I did retire somewhat early but also somewhat involuntarily and only after a somewhat fruitless search.

I consider myself to have retired at age 41 in hindsight, because a job never materialized and I also found that apparently I didn’t really need one.

Its so important to know your outcome (in financial terms)

I think you are grossly overestimating the number of people >55 years old who free willingly retire early because of having enough new worth. Already millenials' CVs are written off in recruitment pipelines.

> millenials' CVs are written off in recruitment pipelines

I think you've got something wrong here, "millennials" refers to people currently between 30 and 45 and are surely the least likely to be discriminated based on either age or inexperience.

Yes I mean this age group.

So you’re saying that even millennials are being rejected? Rather than this age group in particular being more likely to be rejected?

you're too old to apply already starting at the age around 35

Or they hit that sweet spot of being old enough to have commitments so they can't be a fresh grad slave and young enough to not have benefitted when the getting was good and easy and so they are discriminated against.

Yeah, hiring managers seem to think they can hire people who have no life outside of work.

This guarantees you will only get people who are young or childless or single

Only if you view jobs as fungible, which they are obviously not.

Let them eat Gpu's

Prime age is meant to filter college kids and retirees which makes sense but it is likely hiding the minor crisis in hiring for college grads. But I agree it's not disastrous just a yellow flag. The 20 year bull market has minted a lot of millionaires amongst the upper middle class and a lot of them are retiring early.

There's nothing wrong with retiring a few years early if you're comfortable doing so. I sorta did. On the other hand, I didn't really want to hang around too long after either.

The 20-24 year olds seem to be at roughly the same point as since the great recession. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300036

Worth noting this is people who have a job, it includes the under-employed.

55+ crushing it on the asset inflation mania they got at ~zero interest, the youngins left holding the bag of the inflationary cost renting out houses their seniors got negative real interest mortgages for.

> 55+ crushing it on the asset inflation mania

Not all of them, some of them have just been pushed out of the workforce unwillingly due to ageism while still financially insecure.

I'm all about people being angry with the current situation and pushing for class war, but blanket assumptions about any demographic, including those of a certain age, is not helpful.

Sure, 55+ and on the fringes are welcome in the tent. We need more people angry and vocal about it.

It's likely not even people retiring early, just demographics shifting up the ages. The youngest baby boomers are 61. The percentage of Americans over the age of 60 increased from 22.8% in 2020 to 25% in 2025. Also the younger cohorts moving into the labor force are smaller as well.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

"retired" at 25-30 is also pretty common, or at minimum self employed and fully sustainable while putting in only 10-20 hours a week usually for 2-3 days a week.

Citation very much needed. Actually, it's not because we have the employment statistics to show that this isn't common at all.

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