We’re living longer. But what are we living for?

[SINGAPORE] In August, I attended a summit held by AIA on purposeful longevity. That same day, I received a text from my mother informing me that my grandmother had died. Three weeks later, my wife’s grandmother also died.

Both women lived to their late 90s, but their health had declined well before then, eventually robbing them of much of their independence.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about life a lot, and whether, in preparing for greater longevity, we give enough thought to how we actually want to spend those years.

Our lives are getting longer. Life expectancy for Singapore residents rose to 83.9 years in 2025, from 83.7 years the year before, according to the Department of Statistics.

Most of us, myself included, spend enormous effort preparing for our sunset years – ensuring we have enough for retirement, putting the right insurance in place, and trying to remain healthy and employable. And rightly so.

But Professor Andrea Maier, co-founder of health consultancy Chi Longevity, went beyond these practicalities at the summit. Healthy longevity, she said, is “nothing else than being able to walk, being able to talk... to have friends, to have a purpose in life, to be here”.

“Because why would you otherwise wake up every morning?”

For much of our adult lives, however, work takes up so much of our time that we may not confront that question. What happens when it stops?

We have probably all encountered the newly retired person who suddenly finds himself unsure about what to do with all that time. “It’s because he doesn’t have hobbies,” we might say, half-jokingly.

But perhaps there is a more serious question underneath: When did we decide that retirement was when we were finally supposed to figure out what else we wanted from life?

The deaths in my family have also highlighted the problem with waiting until then. Both women achieved the longevity many of us are now preparing for. But a long lifespan did not mean an equally long period of health and independence.

What we lose when we optimise

Something TUV SUD Asean CEO Jonas Strahberger told me in a recent interview offers another way of thinking about this.

Speaking about the need to leave room for innovation, he said businesses naturally strive to optimise their resources, but pushing utilisation to 100 per cent means “you lose all curiosity”.

I wonder if the same applies to how we run our lives.

It is easy to become so focused on reaching the next milestone that we optimise away the space in between. Yet, perhaps some slack is necessary – time to explore, think and discover what matters to us beyond the next promotion, financial target or deadline.

That does not mean abandoning our careers or neglecting our finances.

For many of us, working less may not even be an option. But if we are fortunate enough to have many healthy years ahead of us, surely there should be more to them than work and preparing for old age.

Knowing that those healthy years are finite has made me consider what I would like to do with mine.

I do not need some grand legacy. Perhaps it could be something I wrote that made an impact, or simply knowing that I mattered to someone. For someone else, it could be entirely different.

I still do not know exactly what my answer is.

But perhaps that is a question worth asking while we still have the time and health to do something about it.