Retirement Was Invented: Work, Aging, and the Pension Cliff

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Sep 10, 2026 · 22m

Retirement feels like a natural life stage, but the funded, age-triggered exit from work is a twentieth-century invention — one built for industrial laborers whose bodies wore out, not for knowledge workers whose experience compounds. This episode traces how the household absorbed the decline of elders for millennia, why the factory invented the cliff-edge, and how Bismarck's actuarial age of 65 became a number that fits nobody. It's a conversation about work, identity, physical decline, and the gray zone between full employment and full stop that the modern binary can't see. Episode 5162 —…