Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did.

The line argues that prolonged idleness can be more damaging than sustained effort. Framed as a provocation, it suggests that work—understood broadly as purposeful activity, challenge, and engagement—helps preserve vitality, social connection, and a sense of meaning, while “retirement” can slide into passivity, isolation, and physical decline. At the same time, the quote is rhetorical rather than statistical: it reflects a work-centered ethos often associated with business culture and with Malcolm Forbes’s public persona as a promoter of ambition and enterprise. Read critically, it can be taken less as an attack on rest than as a warning against losing structure and purpose after leaving formal employment.