Rinkli Funstaz = that tribe of pioneering over-65s who, in their search for exaltation / entertainment / success do not want to – and will not have to – reconcile themselves to any traditional culture of ageing.

Our Perspective:

Life may be short. But it’s getting longer and healthier and better resourced.

This is now true for enough people in the Western world for the very definition of old age to be progressively re-set by the very people living it.

Companies which make and sell things, governments which make and finance public policy, families which want to maximise their own life-welfare should see a transformed future coming.

For science and medicine are combining to compress so many of the pathologies that once so readily disfigured even early old age.

Sexagenarians, septuagenarians, octogenarians are also being given lifestyle tools  –  sharpened with every year that passes by a rich and ever more precise scholarship in the fields of health, exercise, diet, well-being management. Their access to entertainment, opportunity, self-renewal… widens to the point where it becomes, in effect, a culture of entitlement.

The old and invariably pessimistic vocabulary by which the Third Age was once described has to be shed.

The demographic time-bomb is fizzling out, its fuses drenched in the squall of shifting attitude and universalised, ageless and ever-improving savoir-vivre.

The baby boom is old hat.

The dependency ratio (by which we used to count the number of people who could work vs. those too old) no longer tells an interesting, a dynamic story.

Decrepitude is a synonym for old age no more than Radicalism is for youth.

Yes, a free bus pass is nice; the fast lift to the penthouse is so much more cool now, so much more available.