On being old

FT business books — what to read this month | Financial Times

From a book review in the FT The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society’, by Mauro Guillén.

The loneliness and emptiness of retirement could be alleviated if classrooms and offices welcomed all comers, regardless of age. Big shifts in thinking will be needed to bring this about, not least inside educational institutions and executive suites. But it’s a change that is long overdue, says [ Mauro] Guillén, who pointed to words written about a century ago by anthropologist Margaret Mead: 

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

And yes, I do think about these things more and more.