Canadians’ views on retirement are shifting dramatically, with the idea of retiring at age 65 being one of the early casualties. Read more.
“Outdated”, or “impossible”?
No we don’t we think retiring at 65 is unattainable.
I am so freaking glad I got myself a union job in my mid to late 30s. At least it gives me hope of being able to retire with a pension. Unions need to become a thing across all jobs.
They haven’t had a 65 year old for a colleague yet. Just wait until they’ve helped their 60+ y/o colleagues disable Caps Lock for the 50th time.
WHY DISABLE IT? ITS CUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
Hello 1998. I’ve missed you.
In nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.
I’m kind of curious how late gen X and millennials will be at that age in regards to tech.
I work in software dev. I’ve interviewed 2 CS grads who did their whole degree on an iPad while acting as if its an accomplishment.
My engineers also religiously use ChatGPT. It has a tell in that all its code comments start with a capital letter without punctuation. All their merge requests where coding conventions were not followed and “help I’m stuck” non-working code has these comments.
They are super smart and hard workers. They just lack the experience of needing to figure shit out without aide because it didn’t exist.
As long as their isn’t some mass cognitive decline for that generation, I think there might be a dip in general technical knowledge when millennials that had to figure things out check out and all that’s left are those who want to understand the tech they use.
Google releasing cheap ebooks that parents could buy instead of laptops or a desktop was one of the most devastating things to happened to us as a society. Impoverished a generation.
In all fairness, there are Boomers out there who are tech-literate. Thing is, they only call for help when they have a real problem, so it’s the other ones we remember.
There is a really easy fix for that. A proper training program instead of just expecting that people are born with the necessary skills. Having worked IT in a variety of capacities, including training and end-user support, I’m pretty sure cluelessness is a function of training and experience, not age.
These old dogs just need some new tricks!
Just wait until they’ve helped their 60+ y/o colleagues disable Caps Lock for the 50th time.
You have no idea how much rage you just unlocked.
I wouldn’t blame that on old age. I work with tards in their 20s and 30s who I’ve personally witnessed use caps lock instead of shift to capitalize one single letter at the beginning of a sentence. They also use the mouse to click in the text box that already has a blinking cursor to enter their username and then use the mouse again to select the password box instead of just using the tab key.
*Young Canadians think retiring at 65 is
an outdated conceptunaffordable and impossible in this current corporate controlled worldProductivity has gone up, wages have been stagnant, but retirement age gets pushed upwards, never downwards.
This is patently false. Younger Canadians want to retire at an age where they’re still healthy. But can’t.
My cousin retired at 48.
Astounding, right? A little luck, a little wisdom and careful spending, and also a union job he slid into at 23 and worked 25 years at in various cities until he’d built his time and could retire out.
He’s not perfect; his hands are trashed, but he can still steer his bike and climb rocks. His back is rough but he doesn’t need to lift much, now. So even he’s on the border of health.
He’s living the best life we could hope for, the life this trickle-down myth from the conservatives took from the rest of us.
We need so many unions that the labour rights they claim to fight for become almost a standard; then it will become one. They’re not in the business of helping non-members anymore, but we can use them to our benefit.
And maybe give those cons the boot.
My favourite part of this is that the financial post is clearly trying to make this sound like “…so they’ll retire later.”
But then:
The survey said 41 per cent of 25-to-44-year-olds say they are motivated to retire well before age 55.
The respondents said this is so they can can chase bigger ambitions related to small business, consulting, not-for-profit work, passion projects or creative pursuits. The ambitions reflect a growing desire to “work to live” — rather than “live to work,” especially when it is for someone else.
Only 19 per cent of 25-to-44-year-olds hope to grow their family, while 41 per cent of them are still saving to purchase a home.
But then:
The survey said 41 per cent of 25-to-44-year-olds say they are motivated to retire well before age 55.
Desire to and ability to are very different things.
Because we don’t think we’ll be allowed to retire.
What these guys would consider my retirement savings are actually my shit-hits-the-fan savings that’s supposed to get me through the next financial collapse.
As a millennial with a not-amazing but decent paying job, the notion of retirement at all is laughable. What incentive do people like me have to save, when inflation and cost of living are on the trajectory that they’re currently on? Putting money away at this point just means less money for groceries, rent, and enjoyable things. And in 5 years, that saved money will be worth less than it is today.
That’s why they pay us the medium bucks!
What incentive do people like me have to save, when inflation and cost of living are on the trajectory that they’re currently on? […] And in 5 years, that saved money will be worth less than it is today.
Saving shouldn’t mean hoarding money, it should mean investing. You should be able to find some cheap index funds out there that will help you beat inflation.
A lot of bits in that article sound weird but on the whole the traditional retire-at-65 concept is definitely fading away. I think it underplays how much of that is affordability (how many people even think they’ll be able to retire at 65?) but even then I’m seeing friends take long breaks from work regardless of retirement, I’m seeing people work less traditional jobs that they can find different fulfillment in, and I know a rare few who are past retirement age and asked if it was okay to keep working because they love what they do.
I’m personally planning on retiring at 55 when my pension hits the point that it can easily support me, even if another decade of work would grow it further. Who needs money when you have another decade of healthy life? As we learn more about longevity and aging it’s looking more like I’ll have more healthy years ahead of me than any of my grandparents did and I may as well use them.
The article sounds weird because it’s the Financial Post and they’re desperately trying to ignore the elephant in the room: that we stole the future from the young to pay for tax cuts for the old and rich in the now.
They can’t say it. They can’t say “Millenials and younger have pretty much given up on the possibility of retiring, what with inflation, education costs and housing unaffordability having killed their ability to build equity. Defined-benefit pensions are long-gone, and even defined-contribution ones are vanishing in favour of stock schemes designed to enrich today’s investors. They aren’t planning to retirement because they don’t see much of a future”.
You’re goddamn right the article undersells the affordability issue, because the fucking Financial Post is owned and run by the people that caused the problem in the first place, and continue to profit off it to this day.
It’s already 67 down here in Australia. I suspect in another 30ish years when I’m even entertaining the possibility of retirement it’ll be in the 80s.
It will just be like a battlefield tontine: only if you become the oldest person alive in Australia will you be allowed to retire.
I don’t think these people work with enough people. I’m working with a few 60+ people and a few of them should’ve retired at 60.
I work in IT. The reduced neuroplasticity is a thing we noticed, especially as they approach new IT processes.
- we need our elders to show us why some new products (like the one we call Lennart’s Cancer) is wrong-headed
- they still need to work
- learning is slower, but they leverage their 40 years of meta-experience to great effect.
Maybe they should retire, if they can. Maybe we recognize where their strengths have changed and make use of them accordingly.
I know mentorship and working-lead posts are few, but that’s kinda how we got where we are now. If you think we should ditch the one group who will champion fair labour and bring the proverbial receipts, then you may need to check your limbs for puppet-strings.
I’ve noticed older works really struggle with anything that involves writing. They’re great as long as everything is a phone call or a meeting, but the moment they need to sit down and write something it’s like they suffer brain damage and the keyboard burns them to touch it.
Probably because they know no one will read it anyway, so why bother.
I am reading it, and I struggle with verbal communication because I have to shift through the social chit chat to find what they actually want me to do for them, and I also have to take notes during the interaction. All things solved by writing it down in an email instead.
My partner and I have reached a point where we hired a financial planner. I told her that I don’t expect to retire either because it won’t be possible or the world will be so fucked that whatever we might plan today will be massively different. I told her my outlook is bleak and please don’t push things that aren’t interesting to me. Essentially, I look to her to help make life more comfortable until the day that I die. A comfortable retirement and life of leisure isn’t even on the map.
How old are you?
Old enough to have had my older brother buy me adult magazine when I was twelve. Young enough to have been the right age to be online during my teens.
Younger Gen-X? Sounds like me…
It’s an outdated expectation but shouldn’t be an outdated goal.
No one should need to work after 65 years of age if they don’t want to.
There’s hardly any chance of that happening nowadays though.
