The End of Retirement (2014)
The real problem here is poverty and a lack of social security in the US. That&#x27;s a solvable problem. It just requires the will to solve it and for whatever reason that is actually controversial in the US.<p>I live in Europe. Retirement is very much on my mind but more in the sense that I need to secure a little more than just the state pension. You can live on that but only barely. A lot of European countries are lot poorer than the US. Yet retirement is a thing in those countries and not really under any threat.<p>The need to work and the reality that a lot of work is just busy work that isn&#x27;t really that critical because all the critical work is increasingly automated does not help with this. No offense but I work doing CTO work in startups and technically it&#x27;s been a long time since I did anything close to producing critical goods or services. It&#x27;s nice what I do and I live on it but I can&#x27;t say with a straight face that it is all that critical or important. A lot of our jobs are like that. We keep ourselves busy doing things for each other or ourselves and try to monetize that. I can probably do that beyond retirement if I stay healthy. I might even enjoy that.<p>Post scarcity society is not that different from where we are today (at least us privileged people working tech jobs). Poverty is increasingly having to do actual work to feed yourself. In most countries that at least gets you to retirement. The US is kind of unique in that it is very wealthy and yet does not take care of its people in the same way that much poorer countries have been doing for the last century.