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Idiom: Put out to pasture
Older workers will no longer be put out to pasture at 60 years old.
When you think about being 60 years old, in today’s terms, it’s not very old at all.
I’d say 60 is the new 45.
For the longest time in Japan, large corporations forced their workers to retire at 60 to make room for the new hires entering the workforce.
Don’t misunderstand me; there’s nothing wrong with retiring at 60 if you have a nice pension, and it’s your choice.
Up until a few years ago, that wasn’t always the case.
Companies put older workers out to pasture whether they wanted to continue working or not once their 60th birthday rolled around.
When someone is put out to pasture, they are forced to retire.
To give you a better image of it, think about a racehorse.
Horses race for around three or four years—five if they’re lucky—and then the successful ones are retired or put out to pasture with some nice fillies for the rest of their lives.
Think about green fields or pastures, lazy days and not much to do. (I won’t mention the unlucky racehorses here because it’s too sad.)
Many racehorses, though, don’t want to retire – they want to run.
Sure, a six-year-old is not as fast as a three-year-old, but the desire is still there, and they still have more to give.
It’s the same with people.
Just because they’re older doesn’t mean they want to retire.
Many feel they still have much more to contribute to the workplace and society.
Now, thanks to population decline, which has caused a labour shortage, more mature workers have a new lease on life.
Retirement will become a dirty word, and we’ll all work until we’re 80 or older. YAY!
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 79.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.