Raising the Retirement Age

🇫🇷 Raising the retirement age is causing massive demonstrations in France. They are raising it just two years, and the French are furious about it.

I'm from a generation that doesn't even think about retirement. For me the point of life is to find a job or career path that you love so much that you never want to retire. Also having several small businesses makes retirement meaningless. I'll retire when my life ends, not before then.

I think helping people find their passion, and then helping them turn their passion into a career or trade or business is one way to end the disputes over retirement. If people are doing what they love, they will not want to retire.

Not all jobs are loveable, but those jobs should not be considered lifelong career paths, but only temporary stepping stones. Eventually many of the unloved jobs will be automated. So no one spends their time doing work they don't enjoy. We will work on solutions to some of these issues in our little village in Como, WV.

Teachers, nurses, police officers are all positions that can not really be automated, and currently require a retirement age. But I think it's wrong to make these jobs lifelong careers. That is part of the problem with corruption in the police force, poor performance among teachers, and poor healthcare service. People begin to hate their jobs after doing them for so long. How can you learn and grow when you do the same thing over and over again everyday?

Also, if people have more control over their retirement funds, then they will have the ability to decide for themselves if and when they want to retire. Why are there retirement rules in the first place? Are we saying workers aren't intelligent enough to manage their own money, prepare for their own retirement, and make their own decisions? We're giving the government too much control over people's lives, and they obviously don't like it. This idea that one retirement age works for everyone is absurd. Every individual is unique, and they should make their own choices, based on their own circumstances.

I think that's what the French workers are really angry about even if they don't articulate it. It's not the retirement age being raised two years that makes them so furious, but the fact that the government, or a union leader, or someone other than themselves, has control over their retirement age.

I think Western governments should work on retirement plan strategies that give the workers more control over all of these decisions. And then present the new policy proposals as a solution to give workers more control over their lives.

Our president is 80 years old, and he has no plans to retire. He still made a trip to a war zone in Ukraine, despite being an octogenarian. Retirement is not for everyone.