The trend toward longer working lives is unmistakeable, Jonathan Peterson reports in the Los Angeles Times.

He leads with the example of John Feyk, 79 years old, who gets up before 5 a.m. to work as a chemical engineer at Aerospace Corp., where he as worked for most of the last 45 years. "I didn't decide not to retire at 65," says Feyk. "You have to decide to retire."

But people are still mostly getting pushed, rather than pulled, into extending their productive years, by disappearing pensions and health benefits and inadequate savings. That is, there are plenty of sticks, but precious few carrots.

Peterson reports that after falling for more than 100 years, the average retirement age in the U.S. is edging up, from 60 a decade ago to 62 now. About 29% of people in their late 60s are still working, compared to only 18% in the mid-1980s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“For many years, society made it increasingly easy to stop working,” Peterson writes. “Social Security retirement benefits were repeatedly enhanced after World War II. The advent of Medicare in 1965 helped pay the medical bills. Large employers typically offered pensions that guaranteed set payments for life."

Now working longer looks like the fix for both individuals and the country. Peterson cites research by the Urban Institute that if all workers added even a single year to their careers, it could markedly reduce the projected shortfall in Social Security.

Marc Freedman, author of Encore, argues that we have to turn the necessity of longer working lives into a genuine virtue.

“The old compact was so powerful it turned the push of retirement into a pull,” Freedman says. “We’ve yet to work that magic around working longers. Most of all we are missing a compelling vision of work in the second half of life.