It’s no secret that people often find themselves busier after retirement than they were before. Without the 9-5 soaking up the best part of each day, seniors are free to pursue their own interests and take up just about whatever hobby they choose.
The ability to care for older or vulnerable people and to ensure a good quality of life for most people at all ages is a defining aspect of humanity. Many of us who provide care take great joy in doing so; there’s a feeling of value in being immediately helpful that appeals to many people.
Human minds are not built to work in isolation, but specialised over millions of years to function as connected nodes in a network of humanity.
There’s a very good reason why the phrase “wellbeing” is so open-ended. It’s because it’s all relative, really. One person’s requirements and needs for a fulfilling lifestyle are not the same as the next person’s.
The idea of respite care has been around for literally hundreds if not thousands of years, since the earliest days of planned and community-coordinated caregiving.
While recent political developments haven’t helped the housing market, even sweeping political changes will be unlikely to trigger a dramatic drop in the property market, certainly not to the levels seen in 1992 and 2007.
We are often told, in the context of a country or even a city, that we have an ageing population. Setting aside the fact that this is technically true of every population (nobody’s ever got younger with the passage of time, after all!), a more accurate description would be that we have an ageing species.
