Retirement age was recently raised to 70 in Denmark, but I'm honestly not even that pissed off about it, because I think it might finally be the key for people to understand and act upon something that is much more important:
Retirement is not and has never been the carrot on a stick that excuses wasting most of your life on working.
There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for those who choose to endure 50 years of wage slavery. The cake is a lie, and if you didn't get it before, you'll surely get it now that the promised retirement is getting pushed further and further away.
Fuck retirement. You'll likely never get to it, so you need to live now.
You need to make your life worthwhile through the entirety of it. If that life includes paid work, you need to make paid work worthwhile.
Sure, it's a lot of work in itself to make the conditions for your paid work better, but we have to start demanding just that and it's really easy to get started: Join a union.
34 currently and just came out of retirement, as I see. I was my mom's caregiver. Got paid through the state to hang out with my best friend, the person I love most in the world. We were broke, just barely made more than the bills, enough to splurge on a 30-50 dollar item in a month... But honestly, my life was perfect. She passed away in April, and while going back to work isn't the thing that sucks most about all this, standing on concrete floors at a gas station with plantar fasciitis and being generally fucking miserable isn't helping. I just want my mom and my life back
I often hear from people that "the youth" doesn't want to work anymore. And they also talk about me low key, even tho i'm 40. And they tell me wild shit like "kids" don't want to work overtime and crap like that. Just because they licked the boots of every boss they ever had. And they could raise a family and buy a house working at a kiosk. If you work your ass off these days in a kiosk, best case scenario is that you are able to rent an okay apartment and maybe a car at the same time. I know so many boomers that are super incompetent and while they all worked, they never had "good high paying" jobs, like some pharma dude or something. All blue collar workers. And they are all retired at 62 and live in a sometimes very nice house with two or three cars. Which is unthinkable these days.