I think employment may set us up for rapid cognitive decline when we finally become unemployed. As in, working 40+ hours a week makes us over-value "vegging out", which sets us up for failure post-employment.

Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then?

I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”