The result will be empirical based on relative individual factors. If both senior and junior workers have to be retrained every year, the senior worker may be the better investment after all. One depressing outcome of this competitive push to reduce retirement-benefit cost by offering short-term, part-time and outsourced employment rather than the traditional career, is an implied peak after which workers become less employable the more expertise they have, such that the slide to senility is marked by lower and lower status jobs, because they earn too much at what they're trained for. Competitive incentive to reduce payroll by getting rid of the highest earners complicates and is driven by the demographic anomoly of the Baby Boomers outnumbering GenX. Electricians and biologists would call this a feedback loop. The difference may result in a new construct based on why or for whom one works. If work is something we only do...

The result is a personal definition of how this "life work" pays: If the opportunity cost, or activities of life foregone working for someone else, outweigh the nonimal wage, i.e. say for example if missing your grandchildren grow up is not worth the additional return from continued employment, then not working delivers higher 'income.' On the other hand if life outside work is dehumanizing enough, seniors may even come back and work for nothing, a factor the authors of some 'volunteer for your healthcare benefits' proposals may profit by considering.