“Want to work”. They don’t want to work, they want a life that they should be able to have at that age after working most of their lives. They are being pushed back into work because their savings disappeared in the financial crisis.
1. you had all your retirement money in a checking account
2. you never bothered to look at your annual spend, total savings, and calculate a burn rate
They want the life their parents had and deprived them of, and many were dumb enough to move from their homes which they purchased cheaply decades ago to buy new homes which are usually more expensive and carry a much higher property tax bill. Their folks are the ones who all worked and earned pensions and then revoked them for their kids because they were "too expensive" to maintain. The "Greatest Generation" lived high on the hog and many of the Boomers who were not fortunate enough to retire on a pension are the ones who ended up paying for it.
If you want to know why Boomers are so heartless when it comes to the plight of the generations that came after them, this is a big reason why. They just assume that life is going to suck regardless of what you do and would rather remain cogs fixed in the wheel than do anything to actually improve something for everyone else.
I think I'm pretty accurately describing their generation, aka the generation of the people who raised me. Note that I am specifically NOT casting blame on them for the eradication of pension programs, because while you can accuse them of being against them to a degree in the public sector, it was their parents' generation who decided that private pensions were great for themselves but not sustainable for their kids.
The "greatest generation" gets whitewashed at the expense of their children, when they REALLY had it the easiest. Sure, they had a world war and that sucked. They also got the greatest economic advantage in American history along with a government eager to give free and subsidized stuff away, and decided that it was too expensive to continue.
During WWII, there was a moratorium on homebuilding because the resources were needed elsewhere. After the war, the GI bill "guaranteed" that veterans would be able to buy homes at zero percent interest and that they would be able to get college or technical educations. Everyone else got to buy homes at very low interest rates for the most part. If you were white, that is.
The reality was that the US government was completely fine with redlining and given that these companies that paired with the government programs weren't building new homes in minority-majority areas, there were 67000 or so families that got to take advantage of the GI bill's homebuying program, and less than 100 of them were people of color. Jim Crow, of course, took care of their ability to access educations, and of course they were still 20 years out from being able to even vote.
It was a gigantic giveaway to whites at the expense of the people of color who went to war and paid their taxes and got very little to show for it. That had a huge effect on future generations. The people who wanted to buy homes had to do it for higher costs while simultaneously not being able to enjoy the same level of education. The difference in opportunity costs and actual financial costs was staggering.
And therrrrre it is.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people that have way better lives than their parents, me included.
Some of us peons are a little pissed at the people who looted the system and kicked the can to future generations.
The pandemic response is a perfect example of the ineptitude and lackadaisical attitude those in power have towards their responsibility to maintain and preserve the things that make America good. Nobody will be held responsible for the negligence, corruption, or outright malicious injury.
If you could take the 1980s Congress who were still largely Greatest Generation types and transport them to today to view the insane nonsense going on, they would be disappointed by both the process and the Democrats but horrified by the Republicans.
Perhaps you can tell us more about your biases regarding other protected classes who might have political beliefs that disagree with you.
Edit: the post you just made about your career of being a subreddit moderator answered my questions.
I said that if you took the people from the 1980 Congress and brought them to the present time and had them watch how modern Congress operate, that they would be horrified of the behavior of the Republicans and disappointed by the behavior of the Democrats. None of them, for example, would have ever even considered refusing to hold judicial confirmation hearings for a vacant Supreme Court seat for a year. Nor would they have found any of Trump's antics to be worthy of anything but scorn and derision, up to and including the southern Democrats of that era who would identify as Republicans today. Especially in the Senate where they used to be far more independent-minded than they currently are. There aren't any Madison Cawthorne / Marjorie Taylor Greene / Lauren Bobert / Matt Gaetzes on the Democratic side of the aisle. They have nothing at all of substance to offer in congressional hearings, always angling for the next soundbyte. As shrill as AOC is on the other side of the aisle, she still at least goes to those hearings prepared to ask relevant questions.