"Inflationary shock" is driving more people age 55 and older, including retirees, back into the work force. This is according to The Wall Street Journal's "Everything Costs More, and That's Disrupting Retirement for Many."

"Really, what you're dealing with is an inflationary shock that has elicited a change in behavior," says Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US LLP. 

Inflation is now running at 7.9%, nearly 8%. That's up from 5% last summer. This is causing consternation among retirees and near retirees who are now seriously wondering if they have saved enough to get by.

"For retirees, it's very hard to know if they've saved enough," Kathryn Edwards, an economist at Rand Corp. tells the WSJ. "It's a big X Factor that's becoming more unpredictable."

Unfortunately, for some seniors, says 64-year-old software salesman Daniel Fitzpatrick, retirement is going to be a luxury they simply cannot afford.

Drilling down into the Labor Department numbers, since October, 480,000 more people in the age 55-plus age group are either working or looking for a job. Before the pandemic, this figure was 180,000.

Among all age groups, 2.5 million more people have joined the work force in the past six months, boosting the national labor participation rate to 62.4% in March from 61.7% in October. Among age 55-plus, those figures are 38.9% and 38.4%, respectively.