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Shades Off | Covid strategy, retirement age show Hong Kong’s treatment of the ‘elderly’ needs a rethink
- With one of the world’s lowest birth rates and high life expectancy, why is the retirement age in Hong Kong not also among the highest in the world?
- Meanwhile, the longer the lockdown of our lives continues, the more we will feel and look our age
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Letting others know your Chinese zodiac sign is a fairly accurate way of telling your age. In a tiger year, I can’t help but reveal that I am that king of beasts.
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I was born in a water tiger year, which comes around every five cycles and is once more upon us. That is another way of saying I am now in my sixth decade and, by the reckoning of some people, considered elderly.
I do not consider myself “elderly”. For me, the word conjures up images of people using walking frames and wheelchairs, just as my mother did in her late 80s.
There seems to be a consensus, in the West at least, that 60 is the new 40. I would vouch for that with how I feel and what I have been told about my physical shape.
Medical advances, dietary knowledge, regular exercise and keeping an active mind mean that people in their 60s are living longer and healthier lives than earlier generations. Many could easily pass for being in their 40s or even 30s.
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But age is just a state of mind. What we think of as old changes over time and will continue to do so as life expectancy increases.
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