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.
replyThat's not true. There were always different roles for older people. They didn't just keep doing the same job their whole lives.
replyAnd people who were injured to the point where they couldn't "work" anymore were still cared for by their community.
replyI 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.
replyUnspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
replyThey'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.
replyhttps://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disa...
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
replyModern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k
replyThere's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways
The US has one of the highest median incomes adjusted for cost of living in the world:
replyhttps://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
(You're welcome to complain. I'm just clarifying that insofar as this is a problem, it is very much not exclusive to the United States.)
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replyThat's literally every society
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