
Retiring Retirement - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/retiring-retirement-rp
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ekianjo
> After controlling for confounding factors such as demographics and poor
> health, the researchers made a startling find: People who worked at least a
> year past retirement age had an 11 percent lower risk of dying during the
> study period.

No source? That's a shame because such an extraordinary claim requires
scrutiny (to see if the study was properly designed to be able to reach such
conclusions).

~~~
EADGBE
I’m not sure about such a quantifiable metric, but anecdotally, it’s quite
obvious that those who still maintain some work after “retirement” live a
longer and healthier life.

Source: my retired grandfather who took up farming and lived another 30 years,
my grandfather-in-law who retired after teaching and took to looking after
cattle well into his 80’s. Maintaining the forced social interaction and mold
exercise always help out in the long run.

~~~
gedy
Sure, but I'm guessing your examples and the examples I've seen are people who
have a pension, etc and can optionally work if they choose to.

The current crop of people mostly don't have that, and with the low interest
rates even saving for your own retirement is difficult. Work will likely be
only option to survive above poverty in older years.

~~~
ekianjo
Thats is already the case in Japan where you see quite a few elderly people
(in their 70s or more) working in convenience stores since their retirement
pension is probably too low to live on it.

~~~
EADGBE
This isn’t an issue just in Japan.

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sigi45
It still depresses me to read stuff like 'still wanna work'. Our society still
is unable to create something besides work and don't get me wrong, i'm falling
for this as well.

I see people, i go out for lunch and my hobby (CS) is just a little bit
interesting if you don't have access to AWS/GCP etc. accounts your company is
paying or some metrics without services behind it.

When i'm 60 or 70, i will have worked for so long, that it probably feels
right :-|

~~~
rtz12
Gee, I wonder how people did software development as a hobby before AWS was a
thing. Totally impossible, way to hard!

~~~
sigi45
I don't think someone did a grafana, prometheus and elastic stack setup at
home with relevant data.

Softwaredevelopment is a wide field.

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Accujack
Our society isn't ready for workers to function longer at their jobs and still
maintain the pace of innovation and opportunity for younger workers with new
ideas. Human nature resists change, and often the only thing that allows
dominant ideas to be supplanted is that their powerful supporters retire or
die. Imagine what our government would be like if Strom Thurman or Joseph
McCarthy were still dominant politicians.

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chadAnon69
Their seems to be a concerted effort to propagandize the population into
believing that lowered living standards is a GOOD thing

Not being able to get a full time job with benefits isn't bad, it's the Gig
Economy!

Not being able to afford a house or car isn't bad, it's the future!

Not being able to afford to have kids isn't bad, it's more freedom to do what
you want!

Not being able to afford to retire isn't bad, it's empowering!

All the while the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. Globalism is
neo-feudalism, offshoring and massive immigration lowers the cost of labor for
the rich and the result is death of the middle class and the creation of a
global equilibrium for wages.

Riots like the Yellow Vests in France are going to become common if nothing
changes, people aren't going to just sit back for much longer

~~~
anticensor
Those are all bad, however, if you turn them around to read "being able to not
...", they become good things. Being able to not retire or being able to not
have kids are good things.

~~~
chadAnon69
But the difference here is there's not choice. There's plenty of people who
want kids or want to retire, but can't because the job market is garbage due
to artificially increased labor supply and thus they are forced to live hand
to mouth

~~~
sokoloff
What's artificial about the labor supply?

~~~
anticensor
Unneeded worker spots and/or burocratic procedures are created to create an
illusion of extra labour. This hampers technological advancement.

~~~
sokoloff
> Unneeded worker spots and/or burocratic procedures are created to create an
> illusion of extra labour.

Aren't both of those serving to increase the _demand_ for labor, not the
supply?

~~~
anticensor
No, demand can only be controlled indirectly in free market, no-UBI economies.
You are creating a supply to fill already existing demand in this case.

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reasonattlm
The article falls a little far on the side of saying there is nothing wrong
with a 60-something year old. There is a lot wrong with a 60-something year
old. It might not yet rise to the level of constant debilitating pain and loss
of basic function, but it is there, and accelerating. The high-functioning
60-something doesn't have great odds of becoming a high-functioning
70-something, or of continuing to evade cancer.

If a 20-year old had the skin and cardiovascular system of a high functioning
60 year old, they would be in and out of the hospital, and undergoing serious
therapy to prevent a predicted death in their 30s.

Rejuvenation therapies are best applied in advance, when the damage of aging
is low. Don't play the game of saying that a 60-something who can walk around
without a cane is just fine. They are not just fine. They are candidates for
every form of therapy we can build that repairs the molecular damage of aging.

Every 60-year should be taking senolytics today, right now, for example. Their
good-for-a-60-year-old metrics would be greatly improved by doing so.

~~~
ekianjo
> Every 60-year should be taking senolytics today, right now, for example.
> Their good-for-a-60-year-old metrics would be greatly improved by doing so.

Are you joking? Senolytics have not been proven to work in humans yet. Only in
mice. And there's a large, very large literature of drugs that don't work at
all the same way in mice and humans.

It reminds me of the DHEA that was touted as a miracle drug for seniors back
in the 90s, and the completely failed to meet any expectation.

