#a pretty big deal for the UC's contemporary politics

[thetruearchmagos]

Do people in your world retire? Do they die before they get the chance? If they can retire from their jobs, at what age does that typically happen, and why? What does the average retiree, or person of that age who hasn't retired, do with their free time?

Hello hello, thank you kindly for the Ask! You'll probably see this late, but would you mind me sending one in kind? ^^'

Now, on to my answer!

Well, as usual I'll be keeping it to the United Commonwealth for this. I promise I'll talk a little about life and lifestyles in one of the many other polities and societies in the 12 Worlds some day, but that day is not today.

First of all, the UC doesn't technically have a lot of the systems you might associate with retirement. Things like a state pension scheme or entirely age-based 'social security' aren't the sort of thing I'd imagine the Commonwealth government keeping on the books, so when and how someone leaves the workforce varies greatly on their specific circumstances.

In aggregate, I'd probably put a common age in most of the 'well developed' portions of the UC for retirement at about their seventies by the 'contemporary' era, and ticking upwards as ever improving healthcare and such keep people's bodies ticking as well as they ever did for longer. Still, considering how incredibly disparate economic, technological, and medical realities are between the longest-running UC member states and many of its more recent members, that figure varies just as wildly. Realistically speaking, there is no one answer to a question like this in a polity as vast as the Commonwealth, but as far as its centrally driven 'strategy' goes there's more of an aspiration to pull itself up in its entirety to the circumstances of that former figure.