I have seen it with my own parents and my wife's parents first hand. Frankly, I think the lack of social interaction is a big part of it.
When they're working, they're regularly talking to people outside their comfort zone about potentially challenging questions. That gets largely shutdown once you retire.
Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and now they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see the appeal.
I didn’t appreciate this until covid and wfh. I’m an introvert and am in my happy place sitting in front of a computer or with a book. But I was losing my mind and had to be actively social for the first time in my life. I can see a decade of living like it’s Covid turning my relatively healthy, relatively young brain into soup.
Leaning into stereotypes, the older women in my family did just fine in retirement because they just started doing social activities full time. If anything they retired and got busier. The older men sometimes did ok but usually did worse.
That is why volunteering when you are in retirement is a win-win. Very few others have the time for what is an absolutely necessary part of society, and it is great to keep your mind and heart active while you recall your life and use its lessons to give back to others. Any sort of volunteering will lend itself to that. For example, Jimmy Carter built houses, and it seems to have done him wonders.
Social interaction must be important, but also the fact that work doesn't ask you how tired you are, you have set of tasks and go. When being master of my own time, I can imagine I would veer towards more fun activities which may not have that forceful aspect and would be done mostly alone.
And super true for those parents, my goal is to travel massively as much as my budget and health will allow it. Backpacking all around south east asia, thats what keeps me pushing to work on earlier retirement. Sitting at home unless forced, no thank you thats a downward spiral
>>Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and now they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see the appeal.
My retirement plans look somewhat similar to how Knuth spends his time. Long hours of deep intellectually challenging work. Driving long distances and eating tasty food some where far away.
Most of retirement motivation comes from feeling the sun during weekdays. There is little point to be sitting whole day at home.
And from what I've heard on the grapevine, life expectancy drops among those who retire relative to those that don't. This makes sense: many people don't seem to know what to do with themselves if they're not "officially employed", so when they retire, they become aimless, and they sort of decay and disengage from living.
Though is that causation or correlation? I can imagine that people with all kinds of illnesses would also retire sooner than people who are still in peak health.
