[joules77]

Retirement is a stupid concept.

One of my Grandfathers just stopped taking medication and going to the docs. And died quite peacefully within a couple years of retiring. Death and decay is just natural and quick. While my other grandfather has been kept alive 30-35 years post retirement popping a tray full of pills everyday, having gone through dozens of surgeries and has had hopeless quality of life post retirement.

The med-industrial complex is a run-away train that is detached for any moral system. It can't even produce any morality anymore. Because its not efficient or rational to do so :)

[stetrain]

Perhaps it's the idea that we all must work full time with 10 days of annual leave until we reach the point of needing pills and medical assistance to live comfortably that is the issue.

[lo_zamoyski]

That depends. Retirement as passage into idleness? Sure. Many people who retire piss away the remainder of their lives because they don't know what to do with themselves. They get depressed, and they become lonely, because they become isolated. Children move away, spouses die, friends move away or die. Couple this with suburban planning where you can't do anything without a car (something the elderly are less likely to be able to operate) and where there is no town center, certainly not one congenial to the social life of the neighborhood or town. With the decline in church membership, you don't have that option anymore, one that also dealt with questions dealing with the end of life (if you view death as the absolute end, then your life was hopeless to begin with; retirement and old age simply strip distractions and illusions effectively).

But this is separate from the question of retirement as such, or the question of aging. Your grandfather, I presume, only refused to take medication and medical treatment, which falls under "extraordinary care", and this is morally licit. Had he refused food or offed himself intentionally (or with "assistance"), that would have been a different matter.

[dh2022]

Are you volunteering yourself and your kids to not taking medication and seeing doctors in your old age? Or are you volunteering "other people"?

[groggler]

Seems like a nasty interpretation to assume a grandfather is other people and make it a straw man argument..

We could just as well ask:

Are you volunteering yourself and your children for 30 years hooked up to tubes with partially effective pain medication?

[mikestew]

Are you volunteering yourself and your children for 30 years hooked up to tubes with partially effective pain medication?

No one spends 30 years hooked to tubes. Ask better questions, or at least dial back on the hyperbole if you'd like a reasonable discussion.

[groggler]

I don't think that is accurate.. but my point was the hyperbole of assuming the pathological case.

[dh2022]

Your point is very difficult to understand. I answered your question even though I did not understand its relevance.

[groggler]

It sounds like you have not had much off the record contact with members of the medical community. Perhaps a summary of the beliefs of the community I grew up in would help:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40494645/

[dh2022]

Huh? To answer your question: yes, I absolutely volunteer myself and my kid to be alive as long as possible.

If possible I would volunteer you and your family to stop getting medical care when all of you get old.

Fair?

[josefritzishere]

Some of us get old and tired. Retirement is a necessity. Your opinion will change with age on this one I expect. retirement has existed really since humans lived past their 40s. (1700s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement

[ceejayoz]

> retirement has existed really since humans lived past their 40s

We've always lived past our 40s. We just stopped having a bunch of people die in childhood (or birthing children).

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

"If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency."

"As a result, much of what we think we know about ancient Rome’s statistical life expectancy comes from life expectancies in comparable societies. Those tell us that as many as one-third of infants died before the age of one, and half of children before age 10. After that age your chances got significantly better. If you made it to 60, you’d probably live to be 70."

Neanderthal elders probably took on lighter-duty tasks as they aged just like today's elders do.

[OkayPhysicist]

Humans have always lived past their 40s. You've misunderstand life expectancy statistics, because human age-at-death forms a bimodal distribution: A lot of kids and infants die (especially historically), and then your body starts falling apart in your 50s. So while the average life expectancy at birth for a lot of history might have been in the 30-40 year span, it has never been common for people to die in their 30s. Because once you make it to ~15, your life expectancy is another 30-40 years. And if you make it to 30, your life expectancy was still another 25-30 years.