Business leaders, HR professionals, policy makers, educators, and social sector practitioners from Asia, the U.S. and Europe will be gathering January 8-9, 2009 in Singapore for this conference to increase the awareness of employers in the Asia-Pacific region of the issues and best practices in preparing for an aging workforce. Co-hosted by AARP and the Council for Third Age, the event is part of a series of symposia that examine how retirement and the needs of older persons are being addressed
Tag Archives: retirement
Staying Engaged
By Jim Selman | Bio
I’ve been thinking about aging and
observing the human phenomenon for a long time and I know that most of
the chatter in my head isn’t ‘me’—it’s just the tapes of my past and my
ego playing the tune to which my culture expects me to dance. For
example, I believe and know from experience that the key to health and wellbeing is “participation”—staying
engaged in whatever games I choose to play. Yet, that little voice
Passing Time
By Jim Selman | Bio
I was talking to my neighbor today about the book that Shae and I are working on. It is about retirement and we’re engaged in the question of ‘when’ does retirement occur. Is it merely an ‘event’ that happens at the end of our last job? My thinking is that it is whatever is left of our lives when our primary concern in life is no longer about earning a living. In this context, a trust fund baby could be born retired just as a person who is ‘retired’ could still
Inside the Rainbow
By Jim Selman | Bio
If we think about retirement or growing older in general, it seems to me that most of us are trying to figure out what we want for our future. Our orientation is to explore options given whatever opening we have, rather than to consider that aging is an opening and the challenge is to create new possibilities—not simply cope with our circumstances.
I used to think about life-after-retirement as a kind of blank canvas on which we could paint whatever future we choose.
Circumstantial Drift
By Jim Selman | Bio
One of the biggest questions most of us have is “Why do we do what we do?”, particularly when what we do isn’t what we want to do or think we should be doing. My answer is that, for most of us, most of the time we’re not actually choosing what we do. We are living our life according to our historical patterns within some narrowly proscribed personal and cultural ‘story’ about what is and is not possible and what our options are in any given situation. In effect,
Slowing Down
My neighbor and good friend is moving to an apartment without stairs in another city where there’s a better environment for retirees and a more laid-back lifestyle. She tells me that she is ‘slowing down’. I am sure she is making the right decision for her—stairs have become difficult following hip surgery last year. And I am sure she knows that our choice of wording reveals
some of the bias hidden in our cultural predisposition to the
future.
To be sure, we hear a lot of people declaring
Memorial Day II
Today is Memorial Day in the USA. This is usually a long weekend filled with family and fun. I am at Lake Kiowa in Texas, a retirement community of about thousand homes. My Dad and sister live here. There is a lot of golf, fishing and endless clubs. This is a prototypical retirement community—most people are active. There are flags in front of most of the houses, there is apparently a cottage industry that will put up and take down your flag on special occasions like this weekend, election days
Working Longer
According to Professor Yarrow, a history professor at American University, it is unpatriotic to retire while you are still in good health.
"Retiring when you’re still in good health isn’t just wrong, it’s profoundly selfish and unpatriotic…Dropping out of the workforce while still in one’s prime means ending one’s contributions to America’s strength, mortgaging our children’s and grandchildren’s future, and leeching trillions of taxpayer
Nextville
Barbara Corcoran, weekly real estate contributor to NBC’s Tonight Show and columnist for the New York Daily News, with Warren Berger, recently published an interesting book about finding out where you belong in the next act of your life. Nextville: Amazing Places to Live the Rest of Your Life offers readers a "Happily Ever After" real estate quiz that helps determine the types of lifestyles and
Unreasonableness
I spent a good chunk of my life learning to be reasonable. In business, the mantra for any proposal was always: “Is it practical?” It seemed to me that reasonableness (and its sister practicality) were virtues. People who were unreasonable or impractical seemed to be exceptions—they came across as flaky, dangerous, occasionally lucky, unpredictable, disconnected, loose canons and, above all, they weren’t team players. When I turned 50, I came upon a quotation by George Bernard Shaw