How long will baby boomers keep working? For some, the answer is forever.
To grossly paraphrase Kim Kardashian, nobody stops working anymore. Just look at who’s in the running for the top job in the nation: a 77-year-old against an 81-year-old, both vying to keep working for another four years. Yet they’re in lockstep with a national trend — older Americans are working longer, into their 60s and even their 70s and beyond. Among Americans 65 and older, 19 percent were still working last year, which is almost a twofold increase from the late 1980s.
Last year, the average retirement age was 62, according to a Gallup survey, up from 59 in the early 2000s. Older people aren’t just delaying retirement, but working longer hours: On average, this group’s annual work hours are almost 30 percent higher than they were in 1987.
The question of why is hard to answer. People keep working because they want to and because they have to, and sometimes a mix of both. “You can think of it as both a reflection of empowered preferences to go work more and longer — versus curtailed savings that force you into the labor force. They’re both happening,” says economist Kathryn Edwards.
My worst nightmare is not engaging my mind and turning into a reactive mush pile that yells at a TV screen out of manipulated fear. I see what’s happened to my mother and how my father has maintained his sanity.
I plan to “work” until I can’t. However, at some point, I plan on retiring from my career and getting into re-wilding and offering my services and knowledge at a steeply discounted rate so I can work with and train people in a field our planet needs. Hopefully doing some field work and manual labor alongside younger people that can out pace me and teach me their knowledge & skills about the natural world that I didn’t learn. That, or starting some sort of no-til organic community farm/ranch or something else that engages my brain & body that provides greenspace.
I don’t want to take jobs away from those that need them and I figure this will be a good way to avoid my worst fears, keeping positions open for those that need them, and to pass my knowledge along to the specialists that are growing in the knowledge space I excelled in in my carerr (software data science & engineering).
That’s a wonderful plan, but not what’s being discussed.
People are being forced to work until death, just to survive.
It sounds like you enjoy teaching others, which is awesome, but you aren’t at risk of dying hungry on the streets if you stop.