In 1904, Sociologist Max Weber developed the understanding of the impact of John Calvin's theology on economics and individual effort. He described what came to be known as the protestant work ethic as foundational to capitalism. While his interpretation of Calvinism and especially predestination can be debated, it formed the basis of understanding a view of individual industry as it relates to God's approval if not salvation.Protestant theologians usually declared that good works could not earn salvation, but at the same time encouraged hard work not only to please or glorify God in general, but to seek to know the indication of God's approval with rewards in the earthly realm. In overly simple terms, the folks God has chosen for salvation have already been chosen (predestined) and the fact of their chosenness was evidenced in their worldly success.
While some will point to contemporary trends of secularization, especially in Europe, that challenge this basic understanding of the motivation for individual economic engagement, it still holds true in much of America.
The idea of the importance of individual industry got combined with the concept of vocation, that says that each person has an ideal and predetermined 'call' to a particular career, to produce an even stronger understanding of purpose as defined by our particular participation in the economic common good that was presumed to require capitalism.
As Calvin writes in the Institutes of Christian Religion:
" . . . to prevent universal confusion being produced by our folly and temerity he (God) has appointed to all their particular duties in different spheres of life. And that no one might rashly transgress the limits prescribed he has styled such spheres of life vocations or callings. Every individual's line of life therefore is, as it were, a post assigned him by the Lord that he may not wander about in uncertainty all his days. "The Puritan minister Cotton Mather discussed the obligations of the personal calling, writing of "some special business, and some settled business, wherein a Christian should for the most part spend the most of his time; so he may glorify God by doing good for himself". Mather admonished that it wasn't lawful ordinarily to live without some calling: "for men will fall into "horrible snares and infinite sins" (both from Christian at His Calling). This idea has endured throughout the history of Protestantism. Almost three centuries after John Calvin's death in 1564, Thomas Carlyle (in “Past and Present”) would write, "The latest Gospel in this world is, 'know thy work and do it.'"
Within these positions, there is little mitigation for different personal situations and less for the condition of retirement as we normally think of it. A leisurely, restful period as the last chapter of life is not what these folks had in mind, so it is no wonder that people have a tough time imagining retirement that is anything less than productive or at least purposeful.
I’m not going to try to reinterpret or reframe these ideas for a different context. We do need to realize, the oppressive nature of these ideas and the way they were often used to exploit the working class into serving a greedy form of capitalism rather than the common good.
The notion of the protestant work ethic does explain why professionals who continue to practice their calling in a lesser way in retirement report great satisfaction: they are still pursuing their vocation. What the church may need to do by way of reparations is to help people refine or reject the notion of vocation altogether, not only to reject a form of determinism but enable people to peacefully do nothing at all.