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  With the steady improvement in living conditions, nutrition, medical care, etc, every generation is living longer than the last. With the retirement age fixed at 65, people are spending an ever shorter fraction of their life working than heretofore and much longer retired. When I was a kid, people used to die in their seventies, only a decade or so after retiring. Now this is the exception but the retirement age is still the same. The government has rightly pointed out that this is unsustainable and everybody will have to work a bit longer.
  
  On the one hand, this is promoted as being fairer for the younger generation as they presently not only have to work to support themselves but also have to work to support an ever larger older generation. On the other hand, we are told that there are not enough jobs to go around so older people remaining in work are depriving younger people of work in the first place.
  
  Reading what others have posted above, it occurs to me that this may break down into job categories. Manual and unskilled workers may be knackered or cheesed off by 65 and more than ready to hand over to a new generation. Highly educated and skilled workers appear in every increasingly short supply and are more likely to be in jobs which give them satisfaction and which they would be unhappy to relinquish. Retention of these workers would maintain the knowledge base and act in the national interest.

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