[otakucode]

This sounds to me like a disappearing problem. Increasingly, people do not need an employer to be useful. Technology enables an individual to accomplish amazing things of great value with minimal cost. When a software engineer retires, what would prevent him from continuing to be a useful member of a software team? A software team is only handicapped by the presence of a centralized corporate structure that requires the team to live in the same geographic area, to be productive enough and lowly paid enough to compensate for the monumental inefficiency of maintaining an office building, multiple layers of management, open floor plan offices in spite of mountains of research showing how detrimental it is to productivity, retention of a 40 hour work week even when 40 hours of productive knowledge work is neither possible nor necessary, etc.

[superuser2]

Retirement is the state of discontinuing employment and living off one's investments/Social Security instead. What's to stop him is that if he continues to be productive towards the ends of some business he is by definition not retired.

[fredkbloggs]

There are modes of living other than just employment and idleness. Entrepreneurship is one, but even if you consider that employment by another name, it's not the only one.

[superuser2]

Yes, and those which involve working for money are not retirement.

[fredkbloggs]

But the essay, such as it is, was about usefulness or uselessness, not money. And in any case, there are hundreds of millions (more probably billions) of humans on this planet who neither have nor need money. Your concept of retirement is narrow and necessarily bound to a particular mode of living, as well as largely unrelated to whether someone is useful. The idea that the three phases of life are childhood (idleness), employment (saving money), and retirement (spending money) is both historically and culturally anomalous. It's more constructive to think about the many modes of living and their relationship to one's personal utility and sense of worth than to dwell on labels, especially since so many people live in ways that are hybrids or entirely outside the system your labels assume.

[wslh]

I think for the average person it's easier to be an employee than an independent worker. Working independently requires much more skills (e.g. permanent negotiation).