End of work is the start of life — golden oldies embrace their twilight years

Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, dying of Aids in the mid-1980s, asked in song: who wants to live forever? Well, everybody it seems, and with the resolute determination of 95-year-old “make my day” actor Clint Eastwood, whose war cry is “I don’t let the old man in”.

Increasingly, people are following poet Dylan Thomas’s advice that “old age should burn and rave at close of day” and are raging “against the dying of the light”.

Since some scientists and futurists believe the first person to live to 200 has already been born, it’s fitting that the onset of old age has been pushed out, following the optimistic 19th-century poet Robert Browning’s instruction: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.”

Life expectancy is steadily on the rise, which is no surprise as improved nutrition, healthcare, sanitation and disease prevention have resulted in more people than ever before living well into their nineties, and beyond.

Wanting to live forever demands a lot of research into understanding and mitigating the effects of ageing and ensuring longevity. This exploration ranges from molecular biology and regenerative medicine, to gene therapy and public health (a lot of it using the accumulated knowledge of artificial intelligence).

Already, several countries plan on increasing the retirement age within the next 15 to 20 years: Denmark to 70 and Belgium, the UK, Estonia, Slovakia, Italy, Sweden and Cyprus to 67 or 68, all by 2040.

Your seventies are the new fifties, a recent International Monetary Fund report found: on average, a person who was 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive ability as a 53-year-old in 2000 and showed improved physical strength – the frailty of a 70-year-old in 2022 corresponded with a person who was 56 in 2000.

And these healthy, vital and energetic younger-old people (aged between 60 and 75 for the purposes of this article), are embracing the freedom from the nine-to-five grind with as much gusto as possible.

As a 70-year-old friend, recovering from her second hip replacement, explained, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This has not deterred her from planning to walk part of the Camino de Santiago in 2026.

No comfy chair in front of the telly watching daytime soaps for us lot. Finding new purpose or repurposing a lifetime of hopes, dreams, hobbies and desires seems to be at the heart of making the best of retirement.

None of the people interrogated for this article is taking on board gloomy Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, which compares ageing to autumn, twilight and a “most final” dying fire where the embers are considered “ashes of youth”, and life is over once they are gone.

As unlikely as it seems, old people are happier than middle-aged and younger people, according to Laura Carstenson, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity who studies ageing and happiness, said in a TED Talk.

As I discovered, happy retirees are reading books, learning new skills, travelling, visiting museums and art galleries, exercising, joining clubs… More impressively, many are living generously – sharing their knowledge and resources with others.

We’re a lucky lot, the 1% of the 1%, able to live comfortably in our old age and do in retirement the things that make us happy.

Giving back and keeping curious

On the opposite end of the country, in Cape St Francis in the Eastern Cape, Dr Toni Gennrich, research associate at Nelson Mandela University (NMU), has made a decision to choose only things that bring her joy, conceding that “retirement has given me the luxury to do this”.

Her life in her seaside paradise is busy: promoting poetry through the South African Poetry Project, flexing her academic muscle doing research at NMU, supervising postgraduate students, walking on the beach, reading voraciously, taking a barre class twice a week to keep up her muscle strength, meeting friends and making new ones, and giving back.

For the past six years Gennrich has done volunteer work with children in Sea Vista, the township in her village, through an international project called Global StoryBridges. “It links children digitally around the world with one another. I work with 10-to-12 and 13-to-15-year-olds. We meet every Monday afternoon in the township library, where the children work on making short videos about their lives.

“These are shared with children from underresourced environments around the world, giving them a chance to learn about others while developing critical digital skills and personal communication.

“My children connect with others from Brazil, Chicago, Uganda and China. I leave the library on Mondays exhausted, but it is so fulfilling and being with them fills me with real happiness.”

To keep their brains active and engaged, Gennrich and a group of her friends, The Curiosities, meet to discuss interesting things: “Dream analysis, print-making, poetry, Shakespeare – keeping curious is important to us.” And of course there is travel, local and international. She has just returned from a six-week sailing trip on a friend’s catamaran in Spain.

Finally making money with art

In retirement, artist Kevin Collins has rediscovered the very core of his creativity and is making his art bring in money.

“At the grand age of 83, the renowned author and artist Maurice Sendak, who brought Where the Wild Things Are to life, said: ‘I can’t believe I’ve turned into a typical old man. I can’t believe it. I was young just minutes ago.’ Now I am 15 years younger than Maurice, and yet I often feel that I was young only minutes ago,” he says.

Having studied at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Art in the late 1970s, Collins spent 40 years working in advertising at the city’s top agencies.

“After a full working life in Joburg, where the prime reason for me being in the city was employment, moving into a phase of suddenly being on the other side has been inspirational. I am really enjoying what the city has to offer older folks: talks in and on gardens and galleries, which I now can slip into the working hours of old, to observe the city from a gentler view without the traffic and grind.”

“In the 1970s I had to find profitable work to pay back student loans, but I dreamt of the day I might paint full-time. Now, finally, in retirement, I’ve made making art my source of income.”

Collins had a sold-out ceramic plate exhibition at the Latitudes Art Show in Johannesburg in May.

Cooking from a garden of plenty

Andrew Unsworth, former travel editor of the Sunday Times (before which he worked as a landscape gardener in Johannesburg), retired to Graskop in Mpumalanga, where he designed a large garden and built raised beds for organic, pesticide-free vegetables.

A supply of fresh produce grown with perseverance – “tomatoes and grapes rot in summer, slugs and snails infest lettuces, moles love parsnip roots, birds feast” – led to another lifelong interest: cooking.

“I have the time to experiment and avoid cooking the same few dishes repeatedly,” Unsworth says.

“I have the time and have become pretty good at pork pies and proper Cornish pasties. I even grow swedes to use in them.”

Off the screen and into the water

Karen Longman is in training to swim the Midmar Mile (for the first time) in 2026. Having sold the successful industrial and medical consumables business she took over when her husband died suddenly, to care for her ageing parents, she has incorporated travel into her life.

This includes (this year) a trip (cancelled by inclement weather) to Scotland and the Inner Hebrides to swim with basking sharks, which was replaced by a trip to Jordan to see Petra. There was also a diving holiday in Cyprus and a holiday to southern India, a trip to celebrate her birthday.

Longman, who started scuba diving when her daughter bought her a course for her 50th birthday, says: “I fell in love with the ocean the minute I put my head under water. The negative impact of this was giving up eating anything from the sea other than seaweed.”

She adds that “travel enriches the soul, the mind and keeps one young”.

Older age also means that those “darn diving tanks get harder and heavier, so there is nothing else to do but get fit as quickly and comfortably as possible”. She does yoga classes and aqua aerobics and works with a personal trainer.

Her greatest gift to herself was weaning herself off social media so that she spends “the time doing things instead of hoping people will see me doing things. Time is short and there is still so much to do and see and experience, and not enough time to be addicted to a screen.”

Lifelong study at the seaside

Intellectual and cultural stimulation keep Celeste Wood’s mind sharp and her brain engaged and active. After 32 years spent working in a senior position at a large corporation in Johannesburg, Wood says the seeds of what she envisaged her retirement to be began when she reached the definitive age of 60.

“These started with observations of what I knew I would enjoy when I was no longer an employee: a brisk walk early every morning at the Emmarentia Botanical Gardens, being able to play my piano daily versus being restricted to weekends, and reading more books on topical issues such as the geopolitics and historical events that have shaped the world.

“Other items on my wish list included being able to learn and practise mindful yoga as opposed to a hectic gym workout, which I was not very adept at. International travel was also very much on the ‘must-do’ list.”

The goals she’d imagined before her retirement, including the study of philosophy which relies on reason, logic and critical analysis, became a reality once freed from the demands of a working environment. Shortly after retiring at the end of December 2020, Wood joined the University of the Third Age (U3A), the global movement focused on lifelong learning for retired individuals. It offers a diverse range of activities, from lectures and courses, to outings and social events.

“I joined a Plato discussion group and benefited hugely from the insights gained.”

Then came the move out of the big city to George in the Western Cape, an area that was familiar because Wood and her partner had spent regular holidays at their timeshare in Wilderness. She lives happily in George with her two beloved golden retrievers, retaining her “wonderful memories of Johannesburg, where I lived for 43 years, and the host of cultural delights on offer there”.

Out of the dark, light – and Italy

Susan Russell, a journalist, mother to son James and animal lover – she has two rescue dogs, Alan and Lily, and three cats, Riley, Lucinda and Mina – is surprised by the joy that retirement has brought.

“It’s a cliché, but if 10 years ago you’d told me that at 64 I would be enjoying a second career as a magazine editor for a nonprofit, with no retirement policy, had sold the old family home and bought a small but (to me) perfectly formed apartment in the medieval centre of a town in southern Italy, where I have found another community of friends, I would have laughed in sheer disbelief.

“But here I am. None of it was planned, much of it was luck, both good and very bad, but if my second life has taught me anything, it is that while getting older is not for sissies, it certainly has lessons to teach about resilience and letting go of fear.”

Retrenched at 54 from a demanding senior media management job, it was time to take stock.

After starting and closing a vintage clothing business, she realised at 56 that she had no plan.

Then came the job offer – for a short period initially – that morphed into full-time employment that has ended with Russell being appointed to the position of editor of Good Governance Africa’s quarterly publication, Africa in Fact.

Her life changed in 2021 when her husband, Jeremy Thomas, was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He died in 2023.

“It was a dark time and after he died nothing felt certain anymore. But his death, untimely and cruel, enabled a type of fearlessness in me.”

She sold her house, took a trip with son James to look at potential places to live in Italy, and bought a house in the hilltop town of Arpino in southern Lazio.

Russell says she will now live between the two countries.

Thriving on a more balanced life

In the three years since turning 60, Janine Greenleaf Walker, a writer and director at a communications company, began downsizing, embracing Swedish “döstädning” or death cleaning by keeping only much-loved things and getting rid of all of her unnecessary belongings.

She sold the large family home she shared with her husband, returning to the suburb they bought their first home in 40 years ago.

With the move to Parkhurst came a new lifestyle: seeing grandchildren every day, walking the dogs, popping down the road for a glass of wine with girlfriends.

She says: “I still enjoy working but certainly have a better life balance and have learnt the importance of saying no.

“People of my age often find themselves ‘sandwiched’ between the responsibilities of caring for two generations – our adult children and our ageing parents – so it’s imperative we look after ourselves, physically and mentally. It’s something I’ve done and I look and feel better than I have in years.

“My sixties are proving to be a time to thrive and not merely to be on life’s treadmill trying to survive.”

Meditating and boogie boarding

Bryna Zasman was a successful diamond dealer in Johannesburg for 30 years – a high-pressure job that, she says, didn’t allow much time for herself. That changed when she built a new home and moved to Plettenberg Bay.

“What I’ve gained from living here is the beauty of time, the time to do all the wonderful things that I couldn’t before I retired. I’m living my best life.

“When I gave up my business I had fears about my identity, who I would be. How would I adapt to starting a new life in a small place where I knew very few people?

“I had time to reflect, to question: who am I? Even though I’ve been spiritually meditating for a decade, I can now do my meditation in a beautiful environment, which enhances my practice.”

In the past two years Zasman has gone on two meditation and yoga retreats to India. And, at 66, has started boogie boarding – after a 40-year break – with a group of women, the Granny Groms, who meet weekly to take on the waves.

She also did a LifeLine course and spends a few hours of her week taking calls from people in need of help. DM

Disclaimer: We are referring to middle-class people who have spent a lifetime working and are financially secure with a disposable income to have a comfortable retirement.