A lot of people who say they’re looking to get out of retirement as soon as they can are optimising for it very poorly, as the early retirement community will argue and in many cases demonstrate. If you’re in a sufficiently high-earning job OR are sufficiently frugal that you can save two thirds of what you earn or more and still enjoy your life with expenses at that level, you can retire in about ten to fifteen years. Social effects dominate—if you earn three times the median salary or more, probably most of your peers earn comparable amounts and spend ~90% of what they earn, so trying to live on what’s actually a perfectly normal amount to live on seems like extreme deprivation. And what the social effects do is keep the age of retirement at the age it was set at by governments enacting the first pension schemes a hundred years ago when everyone was a factory worker. And that age was decided upon based on health deteriorating.
A lot of people who say they’re looking to get out of retirement as soon as they can are optimising for it very poorly, as the early retirement community will argue and in many cases demonstrate. If you’re in a sufficiently high-earning job OR are sufficiently frugal that you can save two thirds of what you earn or more and still enjoy your life with expenses at that level, you can retire in about ten to fifteen years. Social effects dominate—if you earn three times the median salary or more, probably most of your peers earn comparable amounts and spend ~90% of what they earn, so trying to live on what’s actually a perfectly normal amount to live on seems like extreme deprivation. And what the social effects do is keep the age of retirement at the age it was set at by governments enacting the first pension schemes a hundred years ago when everyone was a factory worker. And that age was decided upon based on health deteriorating.
No arguments. My comment isn’t that all people are perfectly rational, it’s that many people dislike their jobs.