[amag]

This is truly sad. As a Swede I fear my country may follow suite. The retirement age in Sweden used to be 65 and now it's 67.

Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe eight years and if we follow Denmark, five years.

I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

[jltsiren]

There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then.

You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.

[mchanson]

Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive?

Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.

[DanHulton]

Taxes pay these pensions. Taxes that citizens have paid for their whole working lives, with the understanding that they would benefit from that pension fund in their later years.

It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."

[timewizard]

> Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

Then why is it based on earnings? And why can't I opt out of this death pledge?

> Your health is probably not going to be as good

Ah, the old, "your life will suck anyways" play.

> you should have known for most of your adult life

That you are a slave to the state, until you cannot work anymore, and then you will be discarded brutally.

Hard to figure out why the younger generation doesn't want to buy into this.

[zilian]

This is such a sad comment. Indeed, the demographic situation was known and predictable in the 80's, and for instance in France we did nothing to plan around it.

So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.

[moktonar]

If pensions where not mandatory you would be almost right. But pensions are mandatory, the state will invest the money upfront and earn from those investments. It's just a way of making you pay more, and then give you back less. Another hidden tax to pay whatever operation their incommensurate ego want to pursue.

[interstice]

I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.

[wsatb]

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.

[mcv]

But what is the point of all of increases in productivity if not to let us enjoy life more? Longer life expectancy should be more than offset by the increases in productivity.

[js8]

"Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government"

Who are you talking for? I think plenty of people would prefer it to be that. We should respect our elderly, as a society.

[hoppp]

"which may never come"

But you pay for it all your life, so it's unfair.

It would be better to manage your own retirement funds, invest it and retire when you want, free from the government.

[lm28469]

> pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?

[monkeycantype]

pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be. Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.

[gessha]

Back when it was first introduced, it was based on life expectancy and few were expected to live beyond retirement age. [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-ret...

[toomuchtodo]

Turns out retirement is just an illusion to convince you to give your best years for the system.

[Affric]

Sure but the real problem is that we don’t know how to deal with bad quality of life for those suffering the effects of senescence and we have a society that is only just starting to come to grips with the perils of the sedentary lifestyle while allocating a lot of resources to people who haven’t done the work to live a good life past 60.

And we make it hard for younger adults to make time for this. Don’t work yourself half dead by the age of 30 and you will never have secure housing in any major city (where incomes are highest).

A huge part of it is cars. Most people over 70 shouldn’t be driving but we have had these people who have been driving everywhere for 55 years. They lose all ability to function independently in their community.

Give me sitting in a cafe living in an apartment with stairs and no car in Lisbon or Athens or similar any day of the week once I am old. Better than the old folks home.

[refurb]

Paywall.

But life expectancy at birth is not the same as life expectancy after hitting working age.

In 1900, if you made it to 10, on average you’d die at 63, meaning plenty lived well into their 70’s.

http://www.jbending.org.uk/stats3.htm

[tomp]

Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.

Retirement depends on having young workers. People approaching 60, 70 simply didn't have enough kids to have good retirement. It's not a problem that has easy and/or fast solutions. Yet, actions have consequences...

[timschmidt]

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.

You've created an impossible situation which will never exist and then offered it as an example of why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.

As Bill and Ted would say: Bogus!

[skissane]

I live in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement, and the government pension is intended just as a back-up for those who are too poor to do so. Everyone has an investment account ("superannuation", or "super" for short) which is taxed at at a reduced tax rate, and your employer is required to pay 12% of your salary into it. There are many providers of such accounts ("superannuation funds") to choose from (normally your employer has a recommended fund, but you aren't obliged to use the one they recommend) – and if you really want to you can set up your own superannuation fund (a Self-Managed Super Fund or SMSF) in which case you can make all the investment decisions yourself (subject to certain legal restrictions–you risk legal trouble if you make non-arms-length investments, like invest your superannuation into your own business, but other than that you can put the money in whatever you like.)

So, lack of young workers is not an inherent problem – you can invest your superannuation overseas (most funds invest a certain percentage of the money overseas, but if you want to take the risk of putting 100% of your superannuation into international investments, that's allowed), so even if the Australian economy were struggling with lack of young workers, you could still live off the investment returns from other global economies which lack that problem. And the reality is that Australia is unlikely to run out of young workers, because even though we have similar problems with low fertility as many other Western countries (although significantly higher than most of Western Europe), we've also always had a relatively high immigration rate, so younger workers immigrating makes up for the insufficient births.

[timewizard]

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme.

It's most appropriately a shared investment scheme. Your pension money should not sit idle while you are building it. That money can earn a percentage in many ways and dividend reinvestment makes the fund grow massively.

> Retirement depends on having young workers.

Profits do. Retirement is going to happen regardless of how many young workers there are.

[oezi]

Pensions aren't a Ponzi scheme.

They just need to be calibrated that the years of pay-in and years of pay-out are balanced as to the ratio of the people in the age cohorts. If you have 10 people paying in for 40 years and only 2 people receiving pay out for 10 years then the system is cheap.

[throw0101d]

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.

Except if you take a portion of the contributions and investment in incoming-producing assets.

Kind of like what the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security) does.

Not all pensions are the same or created equal.

[wkat4242]

It depends on the system. In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing. Luckily there are still parties fighting the implementation.

I don't think ponzi scheme is justified, it is too negative, it just makes no sense to actually accumulate all that wealth for so long.

[newswangerd]

It feels like the problem is that we've drastically improved people's lifespans, but not their healthspans. Back when these systems started getting implemented, you could reasonably work up to the retirement age without too many issues. Nowadays, people may be living to 80 instead of 60, but our ability to work and willingness to hire people past 60 hasn't gone up with the increase in lifespan.

[csomar]

We did not improve people's lifespans. At least not that much. What happened is that young people die less due to less hazardous conditions which improved the average age. Also the average age is not the problem. The problem is that social security was setup as a ponzi scheme (younger pays for older) instead of a saving scheme (each one build a nest for himself). A ponzi scheme will eventually implode but if you manipulate the parameters you can make it go further.

[joshstrange]

> Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

Do that today. Tomorrow isn’t promised, let alone 10, 30, 50, 70 years. Don’t be one of those “When I retire”-people, do it now. _If_ you make it to retirement you may not be physically able or willing to do things you’ve been dreaming of for so long.

If you are waiting for retirement, then you are not living.

[alexey-salmin]

> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic.

On the plus side, if you did raise kids, you may negotiate your retirement with them even if the averaged government system stops working.

[arghwhat]

1. Denmark has a special retirement system for people who started work life earlier than normal, allowing them to indeed retire after some 45-48 years of work. All these rules are broken though.

2. These ages only affect a minimal government pension, and a massive tax saving on cashing out a specific, government approved retirement investment. If you wait to start receiving payments on that till retirement age, you avoid paying income tax of it. You can start earlier with worse taxation, or use regular investment types altogether. The overcomplicated tax system and its incentives are quite broken though.

3. Danish politicians still have a retirement age of 60 and a massive retirement package, so they can't deem retirement age and available funds to be that important...

[mcv]

But if you don't have kids, it's easier to save money to fund your own retirement. Kids are expensive.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Just let two immigrants in to replace me. Much cheaper and easier than raising kids.

[wyager]

> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.

Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.

[StopDisinfo910]

It is entirely arbitrary. Society heavily favours capital above labour. That’s why we have very rich inheritors never working and people toiling until they are 70. It’s entirely a choice. This issue has solutions we collectively decide not to put in place.

[amag]

Of course there is no guarantee that your 65-75 years will be good, but it's a lot more likely that your 65-75 years will be good than your 75-85 years.

[godelski]

  > This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself

No, it is a resource allocation problem.

I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they're asleep[1]. These levels of wealth are so large that they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to spend within several generations, not just one lifetime.

This is only a problem, because the floor is lowering while the number of people in these groups are growing, especially the shit group.

If we have to make trades between ceiling and floor, I'd rather sacrifice ceiling for floor than floor for ceiling. Because the latter is simply greed.

Importantly, we can have both. This isn't a zero sum game, we produce more wealth and resources as time goes on. It is only zero sum at a single point in time. We can simultaneously raise the ceiling and the floor. But currently, we are shifting what percent of these gains go to which groups.

It would be insane to build extravagant and ornate Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor. It would be dangerous to build those ceilings without ensuring there is a strong foundation and forgetting to build the pillars to support them. Without that, the ceilings fall and it all becomes dirt and rubble.

It is an allocation problem, not an amount problem.

[0] If you have $100bn, are able to make a conservative 0.05 yearly interest and take 5min to shit, you've made ~$50k during that time.

[1] You only need $1bn given the same statistics, but closer to $45k. There's over 3k billionaires.

[deadbabe]

This is why it’s better to have a higher salary vs relying on government to provide a better standard of living at the trade off of a lower salary.

With the high salary, even if the cost of living around you is high, you can still make choices to save and invest money to eventually become financially independent and retire when you want, where as if you have a low salary, you don’t have that flexibility, you are at the mercy of the systems around you.

[RestlessMind]

"Investing money" is insufficient. You still need kids and the newer generations at the end of the day.

Think where you are going to invest and how that investment is going to provide returns. Stocks? Those companies actually need to produce and hence need workers. There also needs to be a broad consumer class to purchase those products. Without younger generations, you have no workers and no consumers which means your stocks have no value. Same with bonds. Same with real estate.

[Retric]

I’d rather a robust pension starting at 70 than an anemic one starting at 55 or an underfunded one starting at 65.

You can fill a gap before that pension starts with part time work etc. It’s much harder to make up a shortfall when you’re 85.

[maratc]

But for an individual that would die at 71, which pension would they rather have, in your opinion?

[account42]

Most people won't get to 85.

[smeeger]

consider what humans did before society. they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives. but at night they would spend a few hours looking at the stars. what we have now is pretty similar. except instead of stars we have screens. i would say life is ok if you can read something interesting every day and have a job that you enjoy. i would say you should prioritize having impact or having a job you love. everyone accumulates as much money as possible at the expense of everything else… there are people with millions saved up at the age of 60… who then die shortly after and did a bunch of work for nothing. keep enough saved to cover modest expenses for a year. beyond that, priotize other things

[AngryData]

I take issue with the idea that pre-modern humans were working 90% of the time. We know medieval peasants didn't, we know bronze age societies didn't, and we have no real evidence to support hunting based societies doing it either, especially when we consider the lower nutritional health of past humans that made physical labor far more difficult to maintain consistently without just dieing from pushing the body beyond its limits. It is far more TV trope than reality going by historical sources. Medieval peasants spent most winters doing mostly random home tasks and small crafts while they sat around a fire. And farming based societies generally put in the vast majority over their work in a two months in spring and in the fall. You don't plant fields in July, you just complain about the weather not being ideal for plant growth and did basic living chores that you always do like washing and mending your single pair of clothes or patching up your roof or milking your cow. But there is only so much mending and washing and milking to do.

Or look at ancient egyptions, they very clearly didn't need to work 90% of the time if they got time to build massive pyramids, and there is considerable evidence that pyramid workers were not forced to work, but simply offered extra booze and food for doing so. If you didn't work on those projects you weren't starved to death, you just didn't get to drink as much alcohol with your buddies or brag about how you helped build a wonder that will stand for hundreds or thousands of years.

[jinjin2]

> they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives.

This is not true at all. A quick google for “hunter gatherer work hours” would tell you that they worked far less than we do today. 2-5 hours of what we would define as work a day, with the rest being mainly leisure.

[jodrellblank]

> "they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours"

Idk if you've ever seen sheep in person, but "standing near some sheep while they eat grass" is not work in the sense of effort, concentration, labour. There's a reason the Boy Who Cried Wolf was bored out of his skull, and why shepherding was a task given to a boy while the village adults were doing other things.

[throwaway2037]

Why do you think Sweden decided to raise the retirement age instead of raising taxes to keep the current retirement age?

Another idea: Allow people to retire early, but they receive lower monthly payments from national pension. Most national pensions have the reverse: You can retire later and receive higher monthly payments.

    > I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.

The problem is that huge number of people live way longer than 75, like to 85 or 95 and such, which imposes a huge financial burden on the state (pension and healthcare costs).

[YZF]

Isn't this more about letting people who want to keep working do that? What's stopping people in Sweden and Denmark from retiring earlier? I would imagine there are some pensions plan withdrawal requirements or criteria for government assistance but can't you just save money to bridge that gap?

Maybe we need to start thinking about these things differently. I would love to have more time off but still have a job and not need to make this so binary.

[prawn]

Can't speak for those countries in particular, but generally you can work past retirement age, or retire earlier if you have funded/planned for that. A retirement age is usually just the point at which you can receive government assistance as part of a safety net. I assume if it's not pegged to life expectancy, the cost to the public grows.

Here in Australia, and I imagine elsewhere, there are strong systems (e.g., superannuation) to encourage personal savings towards retirement.

[SoftTalker]

It’s not as easy to save individually when you’re also taxed heavily.

[intothemild]

There's only one issue I can think of with your idea that someone who is 75 now leads a life as you're describing.

The generation they belong to are predicted to live to what 80-85 years? Whilst we (assuming you're in your 40's now) are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?

Average lifespans are increasing, and on top of that the mobility of someone who's 75 now, won't be the same of someone who's 75 in another 35+ years.

[Amezarak]

At least in the US, the SSA projects current 30 year old men to live another 48 years, putting them dead around 78. 30 year old women are expected to die around 82. [1] A quick Google shows life expectancy is about three years higher in Denmark, not an extraordinary difference, and some of that number is probably lower infant mortality.

Barring some revolutionary technological breakthrough, we aren't going to be living, on average, into our 90s.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_10.html

[duttish]

Does anyone know if there's any kind of metrics for healthspans? Meaning the "good" part of life before it's just doctors, medicine and retirement homes.

My impression so far is that we've done a lot of work at the lifespan, less at the healthspan. What's the point of living until 90 if the last 15 years isn't that fun at all.

[jongjong]

Poorer individuals, who need retirement most, don't tend to live as long. Millennials and Gen Z are already victims of old, no-longer-applicable narratives (e.g. save cash, avoid debt, go to college...) and these ones about life expectancy will likely be added to the pile and used to disenfranchise us more while having no connection to reality.

[arexxbifs]

With an aging population and increasingly long work lives, individual stressors will increase and societal capacity for healthcare (and overall prosperity) will dwindle. Baby boomers, having lived through some of the most incredible growth in human history, will perhaps turn out to be an anomalous blip in the life expectancy stats.

Also, people age differently. There's a difference between living and being alive.

Not that it's an easy problem to solve, what with the demographics being what they are. I think we'll have to get used to the thought - and reality - of sinking living standards in the west.

[amag]

> are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?

That may be true, but will we (who are in our 40's now) have the same quality of life at 90-95 as a now 75-year old will have at 80-85?

[nobodyandproud]

I’m so sorry to see this American mindset infect Europe.

As an American, I can’t realistically retire until 65.

65 is when Medicare is available.

I’d prefer Medicare started from 21 paying out-of-pocket as an option; then the payment starts slowly phasing out at 65. Not this abrupt, all-or-nothing.

[formerly_proven]

What's sad about it? Even with raising retirement age, the average duration people receive pensions has increased A LOT over the last few decades simply because life expectancies have increased so much. Someone who retired in the 1970s would receive a pension for less than 10 years on average - someone retiring now will receive a 20+ year pension.

[SarahC_]

https://web.archive.org/web/20250525195310/https://www.teleg...

[cgeier]

IMO retirement isn't a long holiday but it's for people who cannot contribute to society anymore.

That point might be reached earlier for some people, e.g. those who have a hard physical job, than others and a general retirement age is an approximation for when that point is reached for the general population.

[xedrac]

Retirement doesn't mean I won't contribute to society anymore. It'll mean that I can contribute in ways that I am most interested in, without having to make money doing it.

[hoppp]

I am in Denmark right now, I feel similar.

But my solution is to be an entrepreneur and also avoid working whenever possible.

So If I stay here and I need to work in my 70's, at least I will be happy I didn't work in my 30's like a slave.

[slyall]

Well if you have enough money to do all that then you probably have enough to retire a little early. Why not stop working at 60 and fund the first few years of your retirement out of your savings?

[ggregoire]

From what I understand if you retire early you must fund your retirement until the end. So you either work until the requested age and get something, or you don't and don't get anything. You can't just stop at 60, fund your retirement from 60 to 70, and then expect the gov to pay for your retirement from 70 to the end. Maybe I'm wrong tho.

[KPGv2]

> we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted

Don't you get a whole month of vacation every year while you are in your working years?

[Jyaif]

The earlier they increase retirement age, the less painful it's going to be.

[jdkee]

They have to pay for the immigrant who leaches off the system.

[jmyeet]

Part of me wonders if capitalism is the solution to the Fermi Paradox because the endless chase of profits is driving us to extinction.

In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may be costing $3000/month or more per child.

For many people, pets are proxy children, and yet capitalism (private equity in particular) is ruining that too as all the vet clinics are being bought up so people can be gouged on that front too.

I'm someone who views the Labor Theory of Value [1] to be trivially true. After decades of Red Scare propaganda, Americans in particular dismiss Marx but they don't realize that Marx's most famous work (Das Kapital [2]) is primarily a framework for economic analysis, regardless of your political beliefs. I guess the problem is that as soon as you accept the axiom "there is no value without labor", there is no other conclusion than to see capitalism as the exploitation of surplus labor value.

The US corporate sector produces something like $4 trillion per year in corporate profits [3]. There are over ~210M working age people in the US [4] (about ~262M adults total). So that's ~$20k per worker in surplus labor value at a time when we spend ~2x per-capita on healthcare for worse outcomes and less coverage [5], housing is artifically expensive because we allow people to hoard it and education is unjustifiably expensive.

None of this has to be this way. We've simply chosen to prioritize the interests of fewer than 10,000 people at the expense of everyone else. People need hope. They need their basic necessities taken care of. They need something to live for. We're rapidly heading towards a future where only the rich survive but there's no one left to work in their sprawling estates.

It's also wild that we're seeing the rise of fascism in the West while there are still survivors of the Holocaust still alive. This is absolutely true in Europe too (eg AfD, Reform, National Front, whatever Hungary is). I also think we've passed the point of being able to resolve this with electroal politics. Now it only ends in tyranny or revolution.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

[3]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/apr/whats-dri...

[4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

[5]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...

[CooCooCaCha]

This is one of the more rational comments. I’m really surprised there aren’t more comments expressing how insane this topic is.

It’s absolutely insane that technology and productivity are increasing so rapidly, yet we’re talking about raising the retirement age and people being increasingly unable to afford children.

Something is incredibly wrong here.

[downrightmike]

Capitalism would be a great filter, like nukes and never evolving past single celled life

[LtWorf]

This presumes that people over 60 are effective at working. Which they are not. Mostly they waste everyone's time.