Haseeb Qureshi

They tend to get depressed.

It's very, very bad for your psychology and your well-being to be unemployed, right?

Not because unemployment, like, you know, physically makes you that well off.

Even if you have a strong social safety net that unemployed people are taken care of, they can eat, they can, you know, whatever, live relatively normal lives, still people feel terrible when they're unemployed.

Now, the interesting thing that happens is that even with a strong social safety net,

Somebody who's unemployed at 64, when they turn 65, they're not unemployed anymore.

They're retired now.

And the moment that you switch from unemployed to retired, even if your social benefits did not change, suddenly people are way happier.

Now, why is that?

Why is it that people feel totally okay with themselves when they're retired, but they feel terrible about themselves when they're unemployed?

And the answer is because society tells you when you're 63, 64, that you are not useful.

You are not contributing to society.

You're not contributing to the tribe.

And human beings, we're deeply social animals.

We need to feel like we are being useful to our tribes.

But when you turn 65, it's like, oh, no, no, you've been released from that responsibility.

It's not that you're useless to the tribe.

You are an elder statesman of the tribe.

You are now on the senior council.

You are one of the elderly retired people.