We're certainly making progress towards that goal.
Used be that people worked until they died. We chose to believe in silly fantasies like heaven as motivation to keep working, because eternal paradise would come after death.
Then we started creating schemes like social security, but those were planned such that the age you could start collecting was within a few years of the average age of death. You'd still work most of your life and then maybe have a few years of feeble freedom.
Now life expectancies have increased and people are even retiring earlier because we have secure ways to save and invest that plebs in our past never had. But most people still have to backload their freedom after they've lost most of the vitality of their youth.
One interesting question in my mind, is whether there is a causation between the belief in the afterlife and the amount of retirement people take in this life. Is the freedom to experience more years free from drudgery causing a decline in the need to believe in heaven, or is the decline in the belief in heaven causing people to check out of drudgery while they can and enjoy at least part of the only life we know we get to experience?
Also, people are joining workforce many years later than they did even 200 years before. So, effectively, people used to work from when they were 10-15 till they died, and now they work 22-65, if that. Effectively we already have an almost 50/50 split between working and non-working years.
The youth of a lot of people is also a grind of schooling to prepare for a career working. Youth are better off than in the past, but if you're stressing full time studying, that's basically the same thing as working.
Used be that people worked until they died. We chose to believe in silly fantasies like heaven as motivation to keep working, because eternal paradise would come after death.
Then we started creating schemes like social security, but those were planned such that the age you could start collecting was within a few years of the average age of death. You'd still work most of your life and then maybe have a few years of feeble freedom.
Now life expectancies have increased and people are even retiring earlier because we have secure ways to save and invest that plebs in our past never had. But most people still have to backload their freedom after they've lost most of the vitality of their youth.
One interesting question in my mind, is whether there is a causation between the belief in the afterlife and the amount of retirement people take in this life. Is the freedom to experience more years free from drudgery causing a decline in the need to believe in heaven, or is the decline in the belief in heaven causing people to check out of drudgery while they can and enjoy at least part of the only life we know we get to experience?