The live split is whether retirement-as-anti-life is a cultural identity script — the steel-man already separates leaving a job from taking "you're done" as identity — or a priced labor-market cliff that statutes and firms still install. Discriminator: Fitzpatrick and Moore's two-percent male mortality jump at U.S. age 62 versus the Dutch mechanical model in Rabaté, Jongen, and Atav, where people stay in work or disability until the new statutory age and employees bunch three times more than the self-employed. If that bunching gap survives when the identity script is held fixed, the remaining object is automatic job termination, not the whisper. Author dispositions stay author-owned.