Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
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As millions flock to GLP-1s, doctors warn the drugs can cause rapid and significant muscle loss.
5 min
Chanel Robinson achieved exactly what the gold rush of blockbuster weight-loss drugs promised: She lost nearly 100 pounds, lowered her cholesterol to normal levels and reined in her polycystic ovary syndrome.
Yet, nearly three years into her journey on Mounjaro, the 30-year-old from Atlanta, Ga., is discovering the hidden costs of the slimmed-down life.
Robinson experiences muscle fatigue daily, feeling physically weak, frail and often cold. Robinson said she experiences bursts of sluggishness sporadically during the day, and has trouble with basic tasks like opening a jar. “It shouldn’t be this difficult,” she said.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro and Zepbound have been a success for public health and the pharmaceutical companies that make them. Obesity rates are falling, the volume of food consumed in America is declining and retailers report a slump in sales of plus-size apparel. It has improved health and happiness for millions of people.
But for at least some of the 13 million Americans taking them, losing muscle along with fat is an unexpected downside that isn’t broadly discussed or immediately apparent.
The drugs can cause rapid and significant loss of lean muscle mass, up to 10%, comparable to a decade or more of aging, according to an analysis published by the American Diabetes Association.
The loss of lean tissue is similar to weight loss from dieting, but the magnitude over a short period can lead to frailty, instability and lack of coordination, doctors and researchers say. Another concern is that losing muscle could slow down patients’ metabolism, leading to weight regain.
“We are curing obesity by encouraging frailty,” said Daniel Green, principal research fellow at the University of Western Australia, who contributed to the analysis. Many taking weight-loss medications initially lose fat and feel great, but quickly start to feel weak and lethargic, he said.
Green’s research showed that the rate of muscle loss could be slowed significantly by regular strength workouts. “It should say ‘must be taken with resistance training’ on the box,” he said.
Drugmakers say weight-loss drugs should be taken only on the advice of a physician and as part of a long-term plan that includes diet and exercise.
A spokesperson for Eli Lilly, maker of Zepbound, said Food and Drug Administration guidelines say it should be used “with increased physical activity.” The spokesperson added: “Sustainable weight loss is about more than a number on a scale.”
Both Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk said clinical trials showed users did lose some lean muscle tissue, though at far lower rates than fat. Liz Skrbkova, a spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk, said that trials for its drug Wegovy showed changes in muscle mass didn’t “significantly differ” from patients who took a placebo. Eli Lilly said users lost three times more fat weight than lean tissue.
Rayna Kingston, 30, from Denver, said her injections of Zepbound left her feeling so tired the following day that she struggled to complete anything other than basic tasks. She said she shifted her dose to a Sunday because Mondays were her least busy day. Her partner would bring her meals in bed because she felt so weak.
She stopped exercising, and said her doctor didn’t give her any guidance on strength training or muscle maintenance. “I was relying on Reddit forums to understand what was happening to my body,” she said. She got so frustrated with the fatigue she came off the medication just under two months later.
Experts say that losing muscle at such a rate can be especially dangerous for those over 50 or with osteoporosis or limited mobility as it could lead to an increased risk of injury. “Loss of muscle mass is detrimental to moving around and quality of life, but it is also not safe,” said Katsu Funai, associate professor at the University of Utah.
Elderly Americans are set to be able to get GLP-1s from Medicare from July.
There is also pushback from doctors and regulators against using weight-loss drugs as a “quick fix” to lose a bit of weight.
People who take GLP-1s regain weight four times faster than those who lose weight through lifestyle interventions, and weight regained is often mostly fat, according to a recent analysis published in the British Medical Journal. There currently are few, if any, guidelines or studies on de-prescribing the drugs, researchers say.
The nurse practitioner who prescribed Robinson the medication didn’t warn her that resistance training is essential to maintaining muscle mass, Robinson said. She said she regrets not exercising and now does Pilates once a week.
In the haste to disrupt the obesity epidemic, weight loss has been treated as the singular, undisputed metric of success, which experts say is problematic.
“People worship body weight as an outcome measure because it’s simple, quick and inexpensive,” said Green. “But what matters is fat and muscle mass, which is more expensive to measure as it requires an MRI.”
Grace Parkin, 34, a property manager from Sheffield, England, has lost 125 pounds after she started taking Mounjaro in 2024. “I don’t care about my muscle mass as long as I’m a healthy weight,” she said.
The doctor who prescribed the drug didn’t tell her to exercise, though the pharmacy that sold the medication gave her information on exercise and protein intake, she said.
She didn’t exercise and said she soon felt side effects: a “deathly cold, from the inside” likely because of the drug. Still, she vowed to keep going, saying the weight loss was worth it.
In response to some of the side effects, drug companies are hoping to develop weight-loss treatments aimed at preserving or even building lean muscle mass.
German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim recently said it had promising results from one such drug. Eli Lilly last September halted a trial of a similar drug.
While weight-loss medications are designed as lifelong treatments for chronic diseases, namely obesity and Type 2 diabetes, they are increasingly marketed as lifestyle fixes.
Tennis superstar Serena Williams, who used GLP-1s to slim down after having children, was featured in this year’s Super Bowl commercial promoting telehealth company Ro’s weight-loss medication.
Serena Williams poses for an ad campaign for a weight-loss drug. Ro/Handout/Reuters
Women may be particularly vulnerable to the drugs’s side effects, which can also include nausea, diarrhea, migraines and rarer cases of pancreatitis.
A study last year from a university hospital in Turin, Italy, showed that women are more prone to adverse reactions to weight-loss drugs than men, including muscle loss.
Green, the researcher, said the issue is of particular concern to those taking GLP-1s recreationally and who don’t have much muscle mass to begin with. Others say a lack of oversight is compounding the issue.
“Patients are self-reporting, and telehealth companies don’t have the patient in front of them to conduct a proper medical assessment,” said Rupal Mathur, an internist in Houston whose practice specializes in weight loss.
She said medical spas are prescribing off-label drugs that don’t meet the criteria set out by the FDA that justify a prescription.
The number of people taking weight-loss drugs who are not living with obesity or Type 2 diabetes is difficult to track since it is unregulated.
However, an analysis by the FDA from 2023 found that more than half of new Ozempic and Mounjaro users didn’t have Type 2 diabetes.
Scientists are calling for more clinical trials to pin down the full effects of weight-loss drugs on muscle loss in different demographics.
“The only studies that have been done have looked at people living with obesity or Type 2 diabetes,” said Green. “That makes it all the more concerning for those using weight-loss drugs in an ad hoc or unregistered way.”
