When the reirees are asked, these are their reasons:
- they want something meaningful to do
- they want to actively participate in society
- they want to stay physically/mentally fit
Work to them is connected to:
- social recognition
- social contacts
- self-realization
- structured days
Retirement to them is connected to:
- isolation
- lacking purpose
If retirement = watching TV and sitting on the porch staring at the street (aka: my creepy neighbors across the street from my old apartment, who'd spend all day looking at the street/into my window... god, that looked like a dull life), then yeah, retirement = lacking purpose, and yeah, I'd keep working if those were my only options - dear god, that sounds dismal and dull.
The advantage of being financially independant is that you can look for meaning, social connection, etc, and do it WITHOUT NEEDING A CERTAIN $ AMOUNT OR PUTTING UP WITH BS. So you can volunteer for charity, you can work part-time doing a job you actually enjoy (at 20% of what you were making before, even). Wanna work as a librarian? Tutor people? Build houses? Learn carpentry? Become a seamstress (and, FYI, you can totally make decent amounts of money offering darning/hemming/fixing work)? Garden (I know one semi-retired lady who loves gardening, and she basically turned it into a side-business she enjoys)? Hell, work with farm animals? Run a farmer's market stand? Do cooking demonstrations? What would you do if you weren't tired from 40+ hours/week of doing paid work, if paid work was no longer a concern? What do you wish you could get paid to do? DO THAT.
Continuing to, say, work at Costco because you only see dismal options in retirement shows a profound lack of immagination with regards to how you're living your life. (And Costco is a comparatively GOOD place to work, but, c'mon, people, aim higher!!)