In the 2015 film The Intern, Robert De Niro plays a 70-year-old widower who becomes a father figure to staff at a technology start-up after he joins an intern programme for senior citizens.
The narrative is schmaltzy. In real life, many older workers report that their charms fall flat with millennials. But the film highlights a growing trend of 70-somethings resisting retirement and trying to maintain the income, camaraderie and sense of meaning that work brings but enforced leisure does not.
I was raised by parents who both dreaded retirement. My mother lied about her age into her seventies to keep her job and pay the mortgage; my father wrote his last magazine column from his death bed. So I’m sympathetic to the proposal by the Centre for Social Justice, a UK think-tank, that Britain’s state pension age should rise to 75 by 2035, rather than to 68 by 2044, as is now planned.