Maggie's Farm

sure, a financial adviser. Of the type advising governments on how to milk pension funds for money to buy more votes from young people...

Ever more governments are clamoring to get rid of retirement completely in practice while keeping people from paying premiums for it in reality.
In the end those reaching retirement age end up not with a pension but on unemployment benefits, followed by social security or become medically disqualified to work and end up on the same social security.
Which is cheaper for the government as social security is less than pension payouts to those same people would have been.

A lot of people, maybe most, are physically and/or mentally exhausted by the time they reach retirement age. They may live longer after retirement, but they're incapable of doing productive work and even if they aren't they're derailed as "too old, too slow, unwilling to learn new things" by 25 year old HR flunkies and shoved out of the job market as effectively as if they were dead.

I'm sure some of them liked it. Many others are burned out at 65, and looking forward to hanging up their work clothes for good by the time they reach 63.

And I'm not just talking construction workers and lazy sods who don't want to work.

The retirement age was set when people were physically worn out from hard labour by 50, so most didn't reach that age. Now medical science has made it so people are still worn out at 55 but medicine has made it so they can keep going into their 70s or 80s.
Therein lies the problem, and there's no real fixing it unless more automation is brought in to allow them to be cared for financially, physically, and mentally, without overly taxing the young who enter the workforce ever later and ever less capable (thanks "social studies").

I'm 46 and mentally and physically frail enough that not even 50 years ago I'd have been committed to a mental hospital and stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, but because of medical science and changes (which I like, I'd hate to be a ward of some team of nurses, however nice and well meaning, for the rest of my life) in the law I have to keep working for over 20 years more, IF I survive long enough.
Work related stress has caused me physical problems that cause me to miss work regularly because I hurt too much, and mental problems that would have me on suicide watch if my doctors knew about them (and I'm planning on telling them the next time I see them for checking up on my other chronic complaints that are more easy to live with).
I'd LOVE to be able to work past the legal retirement age, but as things are going I fear I won't survive long enough as is, and there's talk of raising it even further. Not that it matters as ever more older people find it impossible to find a job, as I mentioned.

My parents were similar, as are many people I know and have known.

It's not a matter of people not wanting to work, but of not being able to yet forced to to make ends meet.
When my dad's doctors told him at 55 he had to retire in a year or be dead within 2, he was in shock for a while before making a very hard decision to give up the work he loved for the wife and children he loved even more.
And he no doubt tortured himself mentally ever after seeing the company he built over more than a decade sink into oblivion after he left, but he never told me or anyone.