Please Raise Your Hand If You’d Like to Work Until You’re Dead

Ah yes, friends. Another glorious day in the Land of Freedom™ where “personal responsibility” means you personally must be responsible for patching every pothole in the system while billionaires glide over them in tax-deductible hovercrafts.

Today’s topic?

Raising the Social Security full-retirement age to 69.

Because nothing says “We value our seniors” like adding a few more years of labor to the countdown clock before you’re allowed a nap.

🌪️ LET’S DO A REALITY CHECK, SHALL WE?

The government—those merry elves in D.C.—would like you to believe that working until 69 is “no big deal.”

Sure. If you’re in Congress or the Senate, where “work” consists of:

• Taking long recesses
• Shouting on C-SPAN
• Enjoying the gold-plated benefit packages you and I will never see
• And using “sick leave” the way normal people use coupons—freely and frequently

Up there on Capitol Hill, you can take a four-day weekend because your emotions were injured by a poll.

But for the rest of America?

Try walking into Amazon, Home Depot, or an insurance company while in your sixties and asking for a job with full benefits.

You’ll get the same response you’d get if you walked into Tiffany’s barefoot and asked to see “your finest diamonds, please.”

🏭 THE MAGICAL JOB MARKET THAT DOESN’T EXIST

Let’s paint the picture the policymakers seem to see:

“Oh, you’re 60 and just got laid off because your company ‘restructured’?

No worries! America is bursting with high-paying, benefit-rich jobs for people in their sixties. Just choose one!”

Where?

In what enchanted forest?

Who is handing out these invitations to the Senior Dream Careers Festival?

Because here in Actual America:

• Companies are downsizing
• Departments are merging
• Full-time jobs are becoming “contract work”
• Nobody wants to pay for your health insurance
• And experience is treated like it has an expiration date stamped on it

Got 40 years of expertise?

They’ll pick the 23-year-old who can use a spreadsheet and work for the price of a Chipotle bowl.

🌱 SO WHERE EXACTLY SHOULD OLDER AMERICANS WORK?

Are we imagining a nation full of 62–69-year-olds happily:

• Lifting boxes in a warehouse?
• Standing on factory lines?
• Picking produce in the fields?
• Running drive-through windows?
• Driving Uber at midnight?

Because that’s what’s left.

Those are the “opportunities.”

We aren’t raising a retirement age.

We’re raising an expectation of economic survival games for older adults.

🤚 SHOW OF HANDS, PLEASE!

Let’s test the enthusiasm.

Who here is in favor of raising the retirement age to 69?

Anyone?

Hello?

Anyone at all?

Surely the corporate executives and think-tank gremlins who wrote this policy are here somewhere, waving their hands from the safety of their ergonomic chairs.

But the people who will actually have to work those extra years?

Yeah. I’m not seeing many hands.

Just aching shoulders and worn-out knees.

🧨 FINAL THOUGHT: FACTS AREN’T RUDE—THEY’RE REALITY

We’re not being dramatic.

We’re being accurate.

Tariffs, tax cuts, trickle-down fairy dust—none of it has magically created stable, well-paying jobs with benefits for older Americans.

So raising the retirement age to 69 isn’t “fiscal responsibility.”

It’s economic cruelty with a side of delusion.

And as always:

Policies are easy to pass when you never have to live under them.

Stay loud, stay awake, stay sarcastic.

— The Mindful Activist

Julie Bolejack, MBA

juliebolejack.com

mindfulactivist.etsy.com