Working Longer Is Not Always Better: New Framework Redefines Sustainable Aging at Work

Employment at older ages has become the headline statistic of aging policy across the developed world, but a new theoretical article argues that counting working years tells us almost nothing about whether extended working lives are actually good for the people living them. Writing in Frontiers in Psychology, a team of researchers from Sweden, Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia proposes a process framework that separates the visible outcome—someone still in work at 65 or 70—from the underlying conditions that produced it, and from the health, wellbeing and autonomy consequences that follow.

The authors, led by Ieva Reine of Uppsala University and Rīga Stradiņš University, call their model the Sustainable Aging-at-Work Alignment Framework. Its central claim is deceptively simple: continued employment is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for sustainable aging at work. The same observed outcome—staying in a job past pension age—can reflect good health, meaningful work and a genuine preference to remain employed, or it can reflect financial necessity, restricted retirement alternatives and an inability to exit unsuitable work. Conversely, retirement can be either a freely chosen, valued transition or an involuntary response to declining health, adverse conditions or exclusion from employment. Employment statistics alone cannot distinguish between these very different realities.

The framework conceptualizes later-life work and retirement as a dynamic process shaped by the interaction of three levels: individual capabilities and preferences, workplace demands and resources, and institutional opportunities and constraints. Individual conditions include physical and mental health, work ability, subjective age, self-efficacy, skills and proactive behaviors such as job crafting. Workplace conditions cover psychosocial and physical demands, autonomy, flexibility, age-inclusive practices and access to learning. Institutional conditions include pension eligibility and adequacy, taxation, employment protection and the possibility of combining work with pension income. The core construct is alignment—the degree of compatibility among these evolving elements—which can be objective, such as functional capacity relative to physical demands, or subjective, such as perceived control and perceived feasibility of one’s options.

To translate alignment into behavior, the authors borrow a five-part transition vocabulary: push, pull, stay, stuck and jump. Push denotes involuntary pressure toward exit through poor health, adverse work or age discrimination. Pull denotes attraction toward retirement through accessible pensions or social norms. Stay means voluntary continuation because work remains attractive or meaningful. Stuck denotes involuntary continuation when retirement is not practically affordable. Jump denotes voluntary movement toward valued non-work goals. Crucially, these mechanisms can coexist and change over time: a person may simultaneously value work and need income, and employment that begins as a preferred stay can later become a constrained stuck as health or job demands shift.

The Nordic–Baltic region serves as the framework’s comparative laboratory, not because the eight countries are similar, but because they combine common demographic pressures with striking institutional variation. The numbers illustrate the point. In 2024, the OECD average employment rate at ages 60–64 was 55.9 percent, while Iceland reached 77.2 percent, the highest in the OECD. Yet Eurostat’s 2023 Labor Force Survey module shows a different picture further east: Estonia (54.9 percent), Latvia (44.2 percent) and Lithuania (43.7 percent) had the highest shares in the European Union of people continuing to work after receiving an old-age pension, against an EU average of 13 percent. The authors stress that these indicators measure different things—one captures employment around pension age, the other behavior after pension receipt—and neither can be treated as a direct measure of sustainability.

Motives matter, and here the evidence is deliberately cautious. Across the EU, the two most frequently reported reasons for working after retirement were enjoyment of work or being productive (36.3 percent) and financial necessity (28.6 percent). The published Eurostat summary does not provide country-specific percentages for each motive, so the authors refuse to infer them. However, an OECD synthesis of the same European evidence reports that financial reasons predominate among those working beyond retirement in the Baltic states, in contrast to Norway, where enjoyment of work predominates. Estonian studies reinforce the pattern: those who continue working tend to be in better health, and low pension replacement rates can make continued employment less a matter of unconstrained choice, with some older workers remaining in jobs despite wanting to retire.

The pension systems themselves differ in ways that complicate any single narrative of working longer. In 2026, Denmark’s state pension age is 67, Finland uses cohort-specific earnings-related pension ages—people born in 1961 reach theirs at 64 years and 9 months—Iceland’s old-age pension can start from 65 with a permanent actuarial reduction, and Norway allows flexible pension withdrawal generally from age 62. Sweden has no single fixed retirement age at all, with multiple age thresholds making retirement a gradual, individualized transition. In the Baltics, the statutory age is 65 in all three countries, but Estonia and Lithuania permit early pension uptake up to five years earlier under qualifying conditions, while Latvia offers early pension from 63 subject to restrictions. The authors present these configurations as heuristic comparative cases, explicitly not a ranking of welfare regimes.

From this foundation, the article derives five falsifiable propositions. First, institutional opportunities for flexible retirement translate into voluntary continued employment only where workplaces implement them through job redesign, autonomy, learning and flexible arrangements. Second, extended employment predicts favorable health and wellbeing trajectories only when work ability and job demands remain aligned; where demands exceed capacity without adequate adaptations, continued work should be associated with less favorable outcomes. Third, digitalization supports sustainable employment when accessible training and digital self-efficacy keep resources growing at least as fast as new cognitive demands. Fourth, formal flexibility yields unequal substantive choice: the same flexible arrangements will benefit workers with pension wealth and good health far more than those in physically demanding or precarious jobs, potentially widening inequalities along lines of gender, class and ageism. Fifth, retirement intentions predict actual behavior only when perceived control and substantive alternatives are high; under financial constraint or discrimination, intentions become unreliable guides.

Ageism runs through the framework as a cross-cutting stratifying process rather than a separate level. Internalized age stereotypes can affect self-efficacy, perceived competence and retirement intentions; workplace discrimination can shape recruitment, training, task allocation and access to flexibility; and institutional protections and cultural norms can expand or constrain late-career opportunities. The authors emphasize that ageism can alter both objective opportunity structures and subjective appraisals of capability and choice, and may intersect with gender, occupational class, migration history and caring responsibilities.

The authors are explicit about what their contribution is not. This is a theory-building comparative synthesis, not a systematic review or individual-level causal analysis, and the evidence base remains uneven across countries and constructs. Aggregate indicators use different age ranges, denominators and institutional definitions and cannot establish individual voluntariness or causality. Healthy-worker selection and reverse causality complicate any association between health, job quality and continued employment, while disability, sickness and unemployment pathways may substitute for retirement differently across countries. Alignment itself is proposed as a dynamic construct rather than a validated scale. The framework’s practical implication, however, is pointed: policy success should be evaluated not simply by how many people remain employed, but by whether people can remain, adapt their work, or leave when needed without avoidable deterioration in health, wellbeing, autonomy or substantive choice.

Subject of Research: A process framework linking individual capability, workplace conditions and pension institutions to sustainable work–retirement transitions in the Nordic–Baltic region

Article Title: Sustainable aging at work: a process framework for capability, choice and work–retirement transitions in the Nordic–Baltic region

Article References: Reine, I., Stefánsson, K. H., Sadauskaitė, R., Kairys, A., Zamalijeva, O., Miķelsone, M., Rajevska, O., Sakkeus, L., & Guðmundsson, H. S. (2026). Sustainable aging at work: a process framework for capability, choice and work–retirement transitions in the Nordic–Baltic region. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1988720. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1988720

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1988720

Keywords: aging at work, retirement, Nordic countries, Baltic states, pension systems, work ability, job demands and resources, ageism, older workers, employment policy, bridge employment, digitalization