From the March 13, 2024, edition of Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): There was somebody who tweeted at me yesterday about all of this. And he suggested, well, you know, I paid for my parents, and now it's my children's friend's turn to pay. Like, that's not the way that society is supposed to work. I don't want my children to pay for me. My goal is to be able to invest enough so that I can cover my children, not the other way around. And by the way, it is worth noting at this point that it will not be our children paying for us. It will be debt paying for us or immigrants paying for us as we retire.

So then we get to the second argument, and this is the one that apparently set people off really a lot. The second argument that I make is that I think that retirement, generally, for a lot of people is stupid. Here's what I mean by that. So I don't mean that you retiring from a job that's backbreaking labor is stupid. That's your personal decision.

The argument that I'm making is sort of twofold. One, that the government has no actual obligation to fund your retirement if it allows you to keep your money in the first place. If it stole your money, then I understand. People who had their money stolen by the government, they want their money back. I get it totally.

Then there's the question of what retirement actually constitutes. There seems to be this idea about that retirement is natural, that you hit 65 and you go, like, sit on a beach somewhere for the next 20 years of your life. And whether that is publicly funded or privately funded, the point that I was making yesterday is that I do not think, that as a general rule, it is good for people to consider themselves retired from the world. I don't think that it's good. Retirement, particularly in the post-familial, post-church age, harms mental health. It robs people of purpose. Again, I'm not saying that you can't retire if you want to. If you have the money to do so, go for it if you want to. And I'm also not saying you should be forced not to retire if you can afford to retire. I'm making the case that, actually, early retirement, by the data, tends to harm your health, that working longer tends to be good for you. That is the argument that I'm making.