Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
Yes, humanity is full of various societies that do things differently. These ideas aren't disney-fied - they're just accurate representations of the fact that people care for each other, most of the time.
I appreciate your anecdote, but here's a few counter-examples:
Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
That's not true. There were always different roles for older people. They didn't just keep doing the same job their whole lives.
And people who were injured to the point where they couldn't "work" anymore were still cared for by their community.
I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
Yes, humanity is full of various societies that do things differently. These ideas aren't disney-fied - they're just accurate representations of the fact that people care for each other, most of the time.
I appreciate your anecdote, but here's a few counter-examples:
- Neanderthals took care of their elderly: https://theconversation.com/neanderthals-cared-for-each-othe...
- Neanderthals took care of a child that likely had a developmental condition: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn9310
- other Hominids also did this at some point in the last few million years: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/deformed-...
- 2500 year old woman had a jaw prosthetic made: https://www.vice.com/en/article/mummified-skull-reveals-iron...
- 15k years ago, someone with a broken femur was cared for well enough to heal: https://www.forbes.com/sites/remyblumenfeld/2020/03/21/how-a...
- Neanderthals pre-chewed food or provided soft foods for someone who lost their teeth: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/care-worn-fossils
- 4000 years ago, a man who was almost certainly a quadraplegic was still being cared for: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/8788963...
They're right. We've found remains that show how thousands of years ago people took care of people that would have died without external assistance.
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-patagonian-hunter-disa...
Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k
There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways
The US has one of the highest median incomes adjusted for cost of living in the world:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
(You're welcome to complain. I'm just clarifying that insofar as this is a problem, it is very much not exclusive to the United States.)
That's literally every society