Here's a fun question for you: how long before death would you fancy some time off?
See, there's a still-entirely-live plan to raise the retirement age to 70 for anyone born after 1966, which is touted as a way to ensure that people maintain their independence and keep contributing to our great shared future - oh, and coincidentally reduce the amount the pension is costing the federal budget.
![Look, those leaves aren't going to rake themselves, you know.](http://web.archive.org./web/20180426135935im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/f/x/v/3/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwu2z8.png/1515050191293.jpg)
And that's lovely, except there are a few big problems for our still-mortal population.
One is that ageism is alive and well in the Australian workplace, with a recent study by the University of South Australia's Centre for Workplace Excellence concluding that "almost a third of Australians perceived some form of age-related discrimination while employed or looking for work in the last 12 months - starting as early as 45 years of age". When it comes to the Australian workforce it appears that the older you are, the more desirable you ain't.
At the same time that older workers are finding it hard to impress employers, they're simultaneously going to need to be doing it more regularly.
Secure full-time work is more rare than ever, with underemployment and the gig economy increasingly become the norm. The chances of walking into a high-paying full-time job at 60 has never been lower, despite the government expecting you to do another decade before claiming the pension. Keen on spending your golden years as an Uber driver?
The other is that changing jobs in middle age very often means changing careers. And doing that when you're an adult is incredibly difficult.
The idea that one can easily retrain people sidelined from dying or dead industries is blithely thrown around by optimistic futurists, normally with some sort of comment about how today's flexible workforce needs to be constantly updating their skills something something 2.0. And that's just straight up impossible for a lot of people.
It's not because people are dumber or because older people get stuck in their ways dagnabbit and become concerned only with yelling at clouds and telling the young people to get off their lawn. Neuroscience has shown that our brains remain marvellously malleable and peaks in different abilities throughout our lives, as I assume my saxophone-learning neighbour is noisily trying to prove a couple of ear-splitting evenings a week.
The reason is that learning new skills requires time and mental space to focus, and you get less and less of that as you get older.
The vast majority of Australians got their initial training - school, university degrees, apprenticeships, diplomas - while being supported for the most part by their families, before working their way up in their 20s - an age when, for most people, there were fewer responsibilities to distract one from building a career.
By our forties and fifties we're far more likely to be financially responsible for the household, to have children and partners that depend on our bringing money in, and therefore aren't easily able to say "OK, family I'm going to take a few years off to learn a new and more market-friendly trade, followed by a decade interning and working on low-tier wages! Hope everyone's cool with living in this tent for the foreseeable!"
When I was 17 I spent entire weekends fiddling with a single guitar pedal to see what noises it would make if I used it as wrongly as possible. There's no way I could carve out that sort of time now, even for something that wasn't nearly as screamingly useless.
These days I have a wife and a child and rent and bills, and a wildly time-consuming job which keeps everything on an even-ish financial keel. If this writing lark was to evaporate, as the more terrifying predictions of automation keep suggesting will happen any old tick of the clock, then I don't see any way I could support us and be an active and involved parent while also doing the necessary several years of fulltime study to learn how to… um, repair our robotic drone overlords, I assume? That's what we're all going to be doing, right?
If we're going to pretend that raising the retirement age isn't purely driven by the politics of the budget-line marked "pensions" - and let's be clear, that's exactly what it is - then we need to do a hell of a lot more to make it possible for older people to find and keep jobs, to have access to education and training, and to be supported during periods of reskilling.
Given that there's no sign that there's going to be a massive uptick in national employment, and signs that the idea of "work" itself is reaching its use-by date, it's probably more reasonable (and cheaper) just to start paying out pensions from an early age and encourage the citizenry to have a bit of free time before the Reaper comes a-knocking.
Or we can just blame older people for their failure to avoid late-in-life unemployment. At least that'll give us something to do until the robotic drones take over.
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