It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives

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CydeWeys 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.

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tensor 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That's not true. There were always different roles for older people. They didn't just keep doing the same job their whole lives.

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pavel_lishin 5 hours ago | parent [-]

And people who were injured to the point where they couldn't "work" anymore were still cared for by their community.

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weirdmantis69 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.

	▲	DangitBobby 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
	▲	ryoshoe 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They're right. We've found remains that show how thousands of years ago people took care of people that would have died without external assistance. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disa...

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus

Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.

	▲	bluefirebrand an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways

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breezybottom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's literally every society