Her day starts before the sun is fully up over the Atlantic. Myndie Friedman leaves her home in Long Beach, New York, to catch a 7:30 bus, then a train into Manhattan, then the subway, then a ten-minute walk to the medical office where she works as an administrator. Two hours there, two hours back. She is almost 70, and she is a widow. She has no plans to stop, because she cannot afford to. Her story, told to CBS News this year, is the story of a growing number of American women who reached retirement age and discovered that retirement was not waiting for them.
A third of what she needs
The arithmetic is brutally simple. Friedman’s monthly Social Security check covers only about a third of her living expenses. “I need another two-thirds to live the way I’m living,” she told CBS News. So she keeps working, and keeps making the four-hour round trip, at an age when most people imagine themselves slowing down.
What she wants is not luxury. She described to CBS the difference between the things she has to pay for, food and healthcare above all, and the things she would like to have room for once she stops working: some enjoyment, a life that is not only obligations. It is a modest wish, and for her, it is still out of reach.
She is far from alone
Nearly one in five Americans aged 65 and older is now working or looking for work, the highest share in decades, according to federal labor data and Pew Research. The gap Friedman describes is everywhere. The average Social Security retirement benefit in 2026 is around $2,071 a month, according to the Social Security Administration, while a single adult’s basic living costs can easily run to twice that before a single extra is added. A 2024 AARP survey found that one in five Americans over 50 has no retirement savings at all, and that most worry prices will rise faster than their income.
The squeeze is especially hard on women. They tend to live longer than men, often earned less over their careers, and are more likely to have spent years out of the workforce raising children or caring for relatives, all of which shrinks savings and benefits. Losing a spouse can mean losing a second income overnight while most bills stay exactly the same. For many widows, going back to work, or never leaving, is not a choice but the only plan that adds up.
Not every story is a hardship
The same report found other older workers who describe their jobs very differently. One woman in her seventies, who has worked at a pharmacy in Connecticut for 18 years after a 40-year career as an administrative assistant, told CBS she never imagined a retail job and has come to love how active and social it keeps her, while its health benefits keep her husband’s expensive medication affordable. A 71-year-old former printing business owner reinvented himself as a personal historian, writing other older people’s life stories, and called it the most fulfilling chapter of his life. Work after 65, it turns out, can be a burden, a lifeline or a second wind, and sometimes all three.
Staying active has real benefits of its own: researchers keep finding that movement and purpose matter enormously in the decades when the body ages fastest. But that is very different from having no choice.
What her story asks of the rest of us
Friedman’s mornings are a reminder of how fragile the idea of a well-earned rest has become, and of conversations worth having earlier than most families do: about savings, about what happens if one partner dies first, about how long the money really needs to last. Psychologists have noticed how, later in life, people start thinking about what they pass on. For many women of Friedman’s generation, the more urgent question is simply how to get by.
The takeaway
Myndie Friedman is almost 70, widowed, and commuting four hours a day because Social Security covers only a third of what she needs. She is one of millions of older Americans still working, many of them women for whom retirement has become something they can only afford to imagine. Her wish is not complicated: a life with a little more in it than the bills. That it still feels out of reach says a great deal about how we prepare, or fail to prepare, for the years after work.
