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The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that w

• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• tootie 5mo ago
  I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
  • bilsbie 5mo ago
    Hey I’m in the same boat! (Except the grad school.) feel free to email (in profile) if you want to chat.
• breezybottom 5mo ago
  That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement.
  • bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives
    • CydeWeys 5mo ago
      Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
      • tensor 5mo ago
        That's not true. There were always different roles for older people. They didn't just keep doing the same job their whole lives.
        • pavel_lishin 5mo ago
          And people who were injured to the point where they couldn't "work" anymore were still cared for by their community.
          • weirdmantis69 5mo ago
            I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
            • DangitBobby 5mo ago
              Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
            • ryoshoe 5mo ago
              They're right. We've found remains that show how thousands of years ago people took care of people that would have died without external assistance. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disabled.html https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disa...
            • 5mo ago
  • the_gastropod 5mo ago
    Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness. 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.
    • ravenstine 5mo ago
      My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do.
      • ericd 5mo ago
        [dead]
    • jcgrillo 5mo ago
      I've been doing sort of a temporary version of that :). I quit working for the next year or maybe some more to focus on a big house renovation project, among other things (a few major car, truck, and tractor projects too.. some welding.. building some other machinery..). I figured why wait until some indefinite future to do work that is actually personally meaningful rather than what an employer tells me to do? I guess financially this year of negative income has some opportunity cost associated with it, but I'm building a bunch of stuff that cannot be bought, and I'd rather take the time now when it's definitely good than wait for a "maybe". And frankly the tech treadmill had pretty well erased the interest I used to have in computing. I'm also quite happy to be sitting out the current AI insanity. I've been working on some personal coding projects as well--as well as playing with local LLMs--to stay current and hopefully rekindle the interest in computing that the industry beat out of me. The work used to be fun, where did that go?
  • tensor 5mo ago
    Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.
• tensor 5mo ago
  You hit the nail squarely on the head. In days past when people retired they'd still help raise kids or look after households. When we moved past requiring that sort of thing, we left the elderly without engagement. 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.
  • whatever120 5mo ago
    They shouldn’t just feel useful, they need roles that actually are useful. They’re not dumb.
    • tardedmeme 5mo ago
      There are useful roles that could either be done by a human or a machine and the machine is usually more efficient.
    • tensor 5mo ago
      Of course, though I still think remembering that people need to feel useful is important. E.g. you don't want to force someone into a job that may be useful but the person is feeling "why am I doing this, it's not needed." The goal is also not to fill time or a money quota. It's to do something helpful such that the person actually feels helpful.
    • aidenn0 5mo ago
      Either: 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.
  • wing-_-nuts 5mo ago
    I mean, we're about to enter a demographic reversal and to hear economists talk of it, corporations are going to really struggle to find the workers they need. 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...
• MisterTea 5mo ago
  Every man I know that lived well into their 80's touching or breaking 90 were all active in some way. Once they stopped, they died shortly after. Though to be honest, they didn't stop by choice, usually from an injury or medical condition.
  • glouwbug 5mo ago
    I’m going to say there’s some mixup of causation and correlation here
    • georgeecollins 5mo ago
      Right, or possibly a third factor that people who work until they are older and people that have less cognitive decline older have in common. Like perhaps the kinds of jobs you can keep doing / or want to keep doing when you are older involve higher levels of education or more developed social networks that also correlate with longevity.
  • jandrese 5mo ago
    Very common story for a relatively minor injury or disease in an old person to snowball to their death when they lose mobility and independence. You gotta stay active if you want to keep living.
    • MisterTea 5mo ago
      I know two men who landed in that situation, both of whom worked until their unfortunate incidents. One suffered a head injury at 84, the other a stroke at 86. Both were left with low mobility and mental facilities and died in under two years. And they still enjoyed working at that age, not because they had to.
  • boogieknite 5mo ago
    we just took the keys from grandpa at 93. way way wayyyyy later than we should have. cant help but wonder how many years men breaking 90 and staying active have cost others in car accidents
• alecco 5mo ago
  My grandparents just bumped their volunteering from weekends to weekdays. Then my Boomer parents switched to leisure activities and travel (they stopped volunteering when they retired). I prefer my grandparent's retirement, but now that NGOs got professionalized and became extremely political that is a no-go for me. I didn't like to be bossed around by a 30yo narcissist driven by maxing out his EOY presentation (to keep their comfy job). 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.
  • bobthepanda 5mo ago
    My fantasy is maybe to start a one person cafe operation and manage overheads. Unfortunately most retail space in the US is way too oversized to make that kind of operation work.
    • prawn 5mo ago
      Not sure what the current food truck climate is, but that angle might be a way to get something compact and 1-2 person sized. You could get a small caravan/trailer or stand and hire out for parties purely on weekends or just Saturdays to get it started ahead of schedule.
• csallen 5mo ago
  I think this is a problem in perspective/framing. Or phrasing, if you will. "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.
  • tardedmeme 5mo ago
    They were specifically talking about a commercial labor-for-money transaction though. Not just any useful work.
  • pixelready 5mo ago
    Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online. 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. [1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
    • spencerflem 5mo ago
• hiAndrewQuinn 5mo ago
  Hyperbolic. Unless she has a second job she surely has other activities to occupy her 50-80 non working, non sleeping hours. She's making the much weaker statement that dropping from e.g. 40 hours of economically productive and legible work to zero would leave her worse off, and that's much more understandable. 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.
• ElevenLathe 5mo ago
  We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.
  • philipallstar 5mo ago
    This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised. 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.
    • WarmWash 5mo ago
      But it's all just work, all the ways down. 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.
      • strifey 5mo ago
        They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.
• stouset 5mo ago
  I used to follow FIRE-related communities. 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.
  • rconti 5mo ago
    I think the FIRE crowd is even more likely to fall into this trap than the average wage slave. In addition to finding meaning in their day job, they're also more likely to forego short-term costs (like recreation/socialization/travel/whatever). Plus the FIRE planning itself becomes a hobby. So when they retire, they "lose" even more than the average person who might have more side interests.
    • stouset 5mo ago
      I really appreciate that perspective. There’s definitely an aspect of FIRE people being more inclined to sacrifice short-term meaning in order to retire earlier, that may contribute to not having spent time actually building the life they were wanting to live free of work in the first place. And it’s a great insight that FIRE itself is in many ways a hobby, and one that you somewhat inherently “lose” once you actually go through with it.
  • piloto_ciego 5mo ago
    Those people are wildly un-creative.
  • qwerpy 5mo ago
    I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours. 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.
• calferreira 5mo ago
  I actually have the same fear. I love computers and I don't know what I'll do once I retire. Problem solving on computers is like oxygen to me.
  • djmips 5mo ago
    There's a big ocean of problem solving on computers that doesn't require a day job! I find it very fun. I mean I started on computers for fun when I was young and it turned into a job so being retired means I can just go back to working on the stuff I like in particular.
  • zamadatix 5mo ago
    Love computers outside of ${dayJob}! 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.
  • ASalazarMX 5mo ago
    Hear me out: you would get to choose which problems to solve! 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.
  • protocolture 5mo ago
    Honestly when given downtime I generate more computer problems than I could ever hope to solve. I cant even fathom being bored with a computer. My mother used to accuse me of breaking the home PC just to keep myself busy and it was not far from the truth.
• kortilla 5mo ago
  It’s not that depressing if you view it as her wanting to help society and sees a job as the main way of achieving that. 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
• mannanj 5mo ago
  For most, work in America seems inherently undignified.
  • vkou 5mo ago
    Authoritarian hierarchies (Which is precisely what your workplace is) rarely have dignity to spare for the people building the pharaoh's pyramid.
  • scottyah 5mo ago
    It's definitely polarizing, I think a lot of people feel that work is your life's purpose.
• devilsdata 5mo ago
  The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. And then on retirement, people would still have their hobbies and passion projects they had been working on their entire life. 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.
  • jandrewrogers 5mo ago
    > they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering 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.
    • koolba 5mo ago
      This has been my experience as well. My stock advice to people who want to save money is to simply work more. Not because the marginal hours will be meaningfully worth it, but because it stops them from spending money by default.
• seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
  > 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. 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.
• gyomu 5mo ago
  > We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce 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.
  • deadbabe 5mo ago
    Based on my grandmothers I’d say they mostly sat around and gossiped, went on walks together, ate meals together, did fun stuff together and then talked about stuff. Repeat until they die off. Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.
    • kevmo314 5mo ago
      People don’t post about their daily 9-5 on instagram either.
  • wraptile 5mo ago
    This can be extended even further - hunter-gatherers never retired either. However in both cases people did actually _retire_ from direct activity. Elders would often become advisors and community nurturers rather than actively milking cows, hunting deer and whatnot. I think here what becomes apparent is that it's not loss of specific activity (work) that causes the decline but activity in general which is very much duuuh - obviously.
• sandworm101 5mo ago
  >> 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. 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.
• dkga 5mo ago
  I think it is also more than that. In car-centric places like Brazil or the US, older people essentially need to drive or be driven around to have a social life. In pedestrian friendly cities like many in Europe, it is very common to see older people walking to meet their friends/relatives. I saw it all the time in Switzerland. Even those with severely limited mobility would prefer to actively walk or take the tram/bus somewhere (no matter how much time it took) than stay at home.
  • benchwright 5mo ago
    Can agree with this (to a certain extent). Spending time in both America and Ireland, there's a definite difference in the extent to which "I can only get there by car versus public transit/other types of transport" is incorporated into the culture. By far, more urban/suburban/rural density with appropriate public transportation support leads to more freedom to walk, bike, etc. Geographically, however, there are clear reasons why places like the US and Brazil have a strong incentive to rely on cars over anything else. Distance between cities and towns, poor public transport (esp. outside of urban areas in the US), etc. cause this to be an issue.
    • rsynnott 5mo ago
      Ireland actually arguably has a bit of a crisis coming up there; over the last 40 years or so one-off housing (ie rural housing completely in the middle of nowhere, rather than in villages) became more and more common, until the planners clamped down on it. The people living in those houses, which are completely impossible to serve with public transport and utterly dependent on cars, are going to age, and sooner or later it is going to become a serious problem, because once they're unable to drive they'll be trapped in their homes. It's not a big proportion of housing on a national scale, but still enough that people living in completely isolated houses in more common in Ireland than in most places, and enough that it could become a serious wellbeing problem as the residents age.
• globular-toast 5mo ago
  Has society "created" those people? Or are some people just naturally subservient and need structure to come from somewhere else? I always assumed it was the latter.
• nicbou 5mo ago
  Leasure is a skill! It must be trained like any other. You should ideally have some hobbies lined up. I had a few years of relaxed work, and I had to learn to fill the extra time. It was not so hard for me, but it was lonelier than I expected at first.
• ctb_ 5mo ago
  This
• jiriknesl 5mo ago
  Oh yes, absolutely. For hundreds of thousands of years, every elderly person had something like 8 children, 40 grandchildren and was busy with them. Now, people fill this time with TV, because if they have kids, they live 5000 km away.
• analog8374 5mo ago
  Hard-working children. Uncultivated. No taste. Masters within their professional shoebox but otherwise brutally shallow. And the higher the skill level the worse it is. I see it every day.
• ericmcer 5mo ago
  I still play Starcraft 2 & some other games with my friends 1-2x a week when we have time. We do not fear cognitive decline during retirement.