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

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): According to the BBC, quote, research from the Institute of Economic Affairs suggests that while retirement may initially benefit health by reducing stress and creating time for other activities, adverse effects increase the longer retirement goes on. In fact, this study found that retirement increases the chances of suffering from clinical depression by around 40%, of having at least one diagnosed physical illness by about 60%. And, of course, that's not particularly surprising because for a lot of people, they find purpose in the thing that they've been doing for the past 40 years. It used to be, by the way, that you could fill that gap with a few things. Right? You retired from your job or you were forced into retirement by your company, and you'd fill that gap in a few ways.

One would be friendships. There's only one problem. In the United States, friendship has been declining for decades. As Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, nobody even has social clubs anymore. Church, which is another place that people tended to put their time in retirement, has been declining for decades. So people don't know what to do with themselves. Family has been retiring — has been declining for decades.

In fact, actually, as an ironic byproduct of Social Security, family has been declining. Because it used to be before Social Security, what happened to grandma when it was time for grandma to retire or grandpa? They lived with you. Grandma and grandpa lived in the house with you, and you helped your parents out. That's what it was about. And that created intergenerational contact and point of — and that was fulfilling for grandma and grandpa, and it was fulfilling for kids and grandkids because then you got the wisdom of grandma and grandpa. That's been completely destroyed by Social Security. Now the American vision is, you hit 65 or you hit 70, whatever it is, you retire, and then we shuffle you off to the Villages or some old age home or something. And listen, if you want to be there, that's that's fine. I mean, it's a free country. But the idea that this is, like, the ideal form of what 80-year-old life looks like is you don't see your kids, you don't see your grandkids, and you live in a home by yourself, that that the data do not support the idea that this is wonderful for people. And it is worth noting that when this sort of idea was proposed, elderly people actually revolted against it. They didn't like it.