Inside Out | Redefining retirement: Li Ka-shing and Warren Buffett show how ageing is a state of mind
The digital revolution has huge potential to alter the experience of old age forever, with a host of online services making it easier for seniors to ‘age in place’
Old age may be about a creaky back, cranky eyesight, hearing difficulties and the ego-sapping slippage into baldness. But above all else, it is about a state of mind – which surely has been well illustrated this weekend with Li Ka-shing’s decision, aged 89, to sort-of, retire.
I remember visiting my 86-year-old mom and dad in the UK two years ago, only to arrive with them about to leap in the car to go down to the local church hall to make tea “for the old people”. Even aged 86, “old” is a state of mind.
As Li’s biographies get written, I suspect many will say some of his more creative, daring and lucrative decisions were made long after an age when most of us would have been pushed out into retirement, with little better to do than thwack golf balls.
So too of the many other octogenarian tycoons who have, for most of our lifetimes, dominated the Hong Kong economy. And let’s not forget the likes of Warren Buffett, now 87, and seemingly unconcerned by the issue of old age.
These thoughts were all rather bleakly distilled by a fascinating and disconcerting presentation in Singapore last week by Takahisa Takahara, the 56-year-old chief executive of Unicharm, one of the world’s leading producers of “hygiene products” – the euthanised phrase for the quietly hidden world of women’s sanitary, baby, and adult nappies, or diapers as they like to be called in the US.