Hello, I’m Paul Solman of the PBS NewsHour. At age 68, I’m on the third green line right above my head in the chart on the left, in the dot at the far right. Note that I’m hardly alone.

I never imagined I would work in journalism, as I now have, for half a century, never thought I would work that long at all. And yet, though I have plenty to otherwise keep me thoroughly engaged—including five grandchildren within 20 minutes of the house and two more on the way—I work two jobs, teaching my brand of real-world economics to the NewsHour audience as the show’s economics correspondent and to college students at Yale and elsewhere. Moreover, I intend to keep working until I’m shown the door.

The gratification I get from work may be somewhat atypical but, as this older worker project of ours and the charts above confirm, more Americans than ever, including more and more of my junior colleagues in the baby boom, are staying on the job past "retirement age."

In my current 65-69 age range, fully 50% more workers are still active than was the case just 20 years ago. What’s more, as you can see in the chart above me on the right, the portion of people working past 75 has more than doubled since 1993.

So here’s the question we set out to answer: Is retirement as we know it becoming a thing of the past? How long are we likely to work and why? Will we be happy on the job, or grimly counting the dollars and days until retirement?

The older worker team has spent much of the past year looking at the factors—demography, economics, and just plain personal preference—that help explain what’s happening to the American workforce as it ages.

— Paul Solman Business and Economics Correspondent, The PBS NewsHour, 68