Here's our retirement crisis in a nutshell: Americans realize that they need to work longer and save more, but in many cases they can't.

Reality intrudes in the form of layoffs, a chronically weak job market and sometimes poor health. Having skimped on saving in their younger years, folks know they should stay on the job well past age 65, but then they're forced to quit sooner.

In the Employee Benefit Research Institute's annual retirement confidence survey, 37 percent of respondents said they intend to work past 65. That's up from just 11 percent in 1991, which means that a generation of workers has largely discarded their parents' notion of a traditional retirement age.

When the EBRI talked to retirees, though, half said they had left the work force unexpectedly. Often, having to leave ahead of schedule led to worries about having enough money to cover even basic expenses.

In another mismatch between expectations and reality, 70 percent of workers think they'll work a part-time job in retirement, but only 27 percent of current retirees are doing so. A lot of people, then, are counting on income that won't be there when they need it.

Folks do realize that they may have to cut back. Only 14 percent of workers expressed confidence that they'll be able to afford a comfortable retirement. When pollsters asked about paying for medical expenses and long-term care, the very confident number falls as low as 9 percent.

The insecure majority of workers aren't just being worrywarts, either. They're responding to some very troubling trends in the economy.

The level of job insecurity is something we hadn't found before, said Craig Copeland, a senior research associate at the EBRI. We are seeing that even people with jobs feel that a lack of job security is one of the biggest concerns they have.

Furthermore, even people who have good jobs probably don't have a traditional pension plan, at least not in the private sector. Most of us are responsible for our own retirement security.

And most of us are falling short. More than 60 percent of workers, and 55 percent of retirees, have less than $25,000 in any form of savings, the EBRI found. That's not much, considering that many folks can expect to live 20 years or more in retirement.

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The retirement crisis: Even when we need to work longer, many of us can't