Retirement used to be a different game altogether. It didn’t mean so much an end of work as it mean an end of work for other people. Families used to stick together with “retired” elders taking on a lot of the light duty.
Yesterday my grandmother was telling me that the grandparents on The Waltons was actually a petty fair representation of the way retirement used to be. In fact when my great great grandfather retired in the 1930s, his daughter and her family lived with him and my great great grandmother on the farm and the son in law took over running the farm.
It was better then.
People with wisdom should not be put out to pasture. And they should be near their families - not in some “retirement home” put there to die. Their kids selfishness puts them there, unless there are significant health issues.
Once read an article by a reporter from Boston, most likely liberal, and she went back to Italy to see how a cousin lived. She stayed in the small town with the cousin and the rest of the family, who all lived together. The cousin, a young woman, lived a sheltered and safe life. The liberal from Boston came to the conclusion that the so called advancements for women in this country weren’t so great after all. They cost us a lot - in so many ways.