alt Hacker News>You can see this in retirement, actually. There's real data showing mortality spikes in the years after people stop working. The structure of striving, even when it felt like a burden, was providing something that leisure alone can't replace. People who stop pursuing things often just... decline.
Or maybe people stop working because their health was declining?
The counterpoint is in all the people who pursue daily goals intensely, at high ages. POTUSes and SCOTUSes, by example, tend to outlive most USians, and tend to stay active with projects or jobs long beyond normal retirement.