"Retirement Will Kill You"

[Optimal_Solution]

Thanks to the media, we already know that American's can't save for retirement. But it's OK because retirement would kill you anyway! Good Grief.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-1 ... l-you.html
A delicious nugget of false dichotomy from the article:
"Most of us seem to think that we would be in better health if we won the lottery and spent our days on the beach, rather than struggling with sometimes stressful jobs. Yet the next time you think your job is killing you, just remember that the evidence, if anything, suggests the opposite. Your job may be saving your life."
American's are presented a picture of their future in which they can't save enough for retirement and in which retirement is bad for their health. What a bleak future that is.
It underscores the power of looking away from the traditional American career of working and spending. Let us find health and fulfillment that is not dependent on endless work.

[champ0608]

The average American is overweight, sedentary, on his way to being diabetic, his high blood pressure and cholesterol, and works a meaningless white collar job where he stresses daily to make someone else money. Somehow, that recipe for disaster is considered healthier than retirement? I just can't imagine it.
I'm self-employed as an author, so essentially I am retired. Yes, I have to work to make a living, but that work has been a hobby I've enjoyed as long as I can remember, so I don't consider it work (especially since I dedicate no more than a couple hours a day to it, and only when I get the fancy to do so.) I know I wouldn't be nearly as healthy as I am if I stilled worked in the corporate sector. Those guys stress over every detail, regardless of how trivial (and every detail is trivial.)
Its a sad world we live in where people are constantly being pressured to work so much. I've lived in Europe a few times, and the slower life I found in the small towns in England, Scotland, Sweden, and Belgium is precisely what America needs. Unfortunately, the consumer machine can't be fueled 24/7 if everyone were to take a break to enjoy the day.

[Monkey Master]

I define retirement as the ability to not work for a salary. You can retire and do charity work (that's our plan). That still requires a lot of effort but you just don't get paid for it.
I also believe the system is made such that we need to keep working all our life, to fuel the system with tax and consumerism spending (http://www.monkeyism.com/65-retirement/). Our Western societies are built this way. But luckily we have the choice, we don't have to be locked in the system if we don't want to.

[bike_the_world]

Tony McMichael more than adequately described the basis of this sort of ignorance in 1976 by addressing the inherent biases associated with the age-adjusted standardized mortality ratio (often used to compare mortality experience among occupational cohorts - can just as easily apply to the employed/semi-retired/retired scenario). The basic problem: those that can, do; those that cannot, don't. Using basic vital statistics or census data without access to the 'reasons' why people are in retirement versus the workforce (e.g., voluntary versus involuntary versus early retirement extreme) plays loose with the basic premise of causation: knowing the temporal order of risk factors and outcomes.
http://journals.lww.com/joem/Citation/1 ... thy.9.aspx

[brian]

@ BIW, could elaborate on your point, so I can understand it better?

[DutchGirl]

@MB, I'm not BIW, but I think part of the answer is that you should know why people are retiring to make a fair comparison on how long retired people live versus how long people who keep working, live.
Probably a lot of people retiring in the US are retiring because they can't work anymore, due to health reasons. (Think having a heart attack causing physical strength and condition to be lost, dementia setting in, diabetes causing vision problems etc). Those health reasons will also influence these people's risks of dying.
So you're comparing apples to pears: the people who keep working are mostly healthy enough to keep working. And the people who have retired are not all healthy (sure, some are).
So if you want a fair comparison, you should somehow account for people's health status.

[bike_the_world]

@MB: Sorry for being obtuse. Dutch girl has stated it very well. The essence of the comparison problem of workforce versus non-workforce will always be some form of survivorship bias. Certainly, there will be the voluntary retirees who can legitimately be compared to the voluntary workforce (of same age, race, gender). However, in the retiree group of any age group there will be those who withdrew from work for health reasons and whose survivor experience is not 'caused' by retiring but rather whose health was the reason for retirement.
In occupational studies, even on a single worksite (think a large industrial complex like an oil refinery), workers will be shifted around the facility on the basis of ability to perform work (which might reflect illness) and so even comparisons of mortality among vocations/professions on a single work site can be biased by the 'healthy worker effect'. Those working the hardest, most labor intensive and dangerous jobs are the healthiest, because they have to be! On TV shows at least, policemen injured on the job often end up on desk assignments... and so it goes.
These bias problems are mostly seen with larger population-based studies where individuals are not matched on basis of health at outset and where follow-up over time is lacking.

[Felix]

Hehe, retirement will kill you. Yes, and ignorance is strength, war is peace and freedom is slavery.

[jzt83]

I don't want to live much longer beyond 40 anyhow.