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We retire at different ages, for different reasons. Those who are financially secure and happy to be on permanent vacation may choose to retire early.

Those whose occupations define who they are will just go on working till they expire. If you rest, you rust, so the saying goes.

Data on the relationship between effective retirement age and lifespan is not as definitive, although it’s widely held that forced retirement due to ill health is a strong mortality risk factor.

Nonetheless, going by the law of averages, if you’re about age 60 or so today, and in reasonably good health, you’re likely to live to at least 72.5 if you’re male (77.4 for female), according to government statistics on life expectancy.

If you were born after 1952, overall healthy and happy in your work, you could break the law of averages.

Based on the official retirement age, an average of 15 years to enjoy your retirement is relatively short to realise your plans and dream projects, some of which are listed in the HSBC’s ‘Future of Retirement: Life After Work’ report.

A colleague, aged 65, who recently took a voluntary separation payout, said he had to rethink his concept of retirement, his mortality and social identity. We may retire from the job, he said, but not necessarily disengaged from “self-actualising”.

He would draw on the knowledge, wisdom and skills acquired from the workplace to reinvent and refire. “What a man can be, he must be,” he said, citing psychologist Abraham Maslow’s concept of our hierarchy of needs, and to be refired by the “desire for self-fulfilment… to become everything that one is capable of becoming”.

Retirement provides that needed time and setting...

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