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foltiktoday at 4:37 PM3 repliesview on HN

A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy.

If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.


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lurk2today at 4:44 PM

I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.

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seizethecheesetoday at 4:45 PM

We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.

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0xytoday at 4:53 PM

There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.

Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.

Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.

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