You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.
They are doing. When the pension system was created retirement age was roughly equal to life expectancy. Life expectancy went up but retirement age never did, creating these super-long retirements for healthy people who could easily still work. That is where a lot of the wealth newly created by technological progress went.
This is a nice outlook from a vacuum. The reality is those perfectly healthy elderly people are still going to struggle to compete with the younger workforce who will be anything from more physically/mentally apt to just simply cheaper. So they’re probably going to be forced into retirement without the means to actually do it.
Not to mention, from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong. This isn’t about enjoying a retirement which is near impossible at that age or shortly after, it’s about not screwing over people by putting them into poverty due to really no fault of their own.
I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
Older people can charge whatever price they want for their work. They can even undercut the young by exploiting their high rates of home ownership and receipt of pensions. Where I grew up there was a DIY supermarket famous for employing mostly retirees or older workers. And the elderly have the benefit of experience - there's a meme that employers don't want that, but it's not true. Employers love experience. What they don't want are bolshie activists who create trouble. Plenty of people out there who are willing to trade cooperation and experience for salary, and can thus easily outcompete youngsters who might be willing to do what's asked but don't have the experience to do it well.
> from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong
This is the sort of statement that clutters up all discussions of government benefits, but it's meaningless. There's no such thing as a "human view" or right/wrong in these contexts. Historically, people worked much harder than we do today. Was that "wrong"? Were people back then not fully human? If so, who was responsible for this "inhuman wrong"?
No. Poverty is the default state of humanity. People being poor isn't the result of someone screwing someone else over, it's the result of people not creating wealth.
> I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
I'm expecting that the state won't provide anything by the time I reach old age, not even a stable currency. The youth won't have had much to do with it either way.
Working means that you are providing value to others. As we advance as a society a single person is able to contribute more and more value to others. Why maintain the same amount of total value being added to society when we can push further and accelerate providing value to one another?
What we’re really talking about is freedom. Freedom to do what you want with your time whether it’s relaxation or work, but on your own terms.
When you have to work for an income that is a type of forced work, and generally speaking forced work is not going to be as effective as work done of your own volition.
It’s intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation. When I think about your point of view I see a lot of waste and misery. Instead of naively maximizing value production, I want to see a future of contentment and quality value production. Value produced because people are inspired to produce value, not because they have to.
Working just means that you get paid to do something.
What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful.
A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.
If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.
By value you mean furthering the individualization and alienation by technology, which destroys the planet and gives us what, AI data centers? And the AI agents won't even do our jobs?
I'm convinced there are a large number of people, mostly in tech, that are unknowingly in a death cult because they think complex human systems can be boiled down to simple metrics and logic. And they get attached to this libertarian-type thinking because it makes them feel smart and above it all.
Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.
