Four For Friday | June 23, 2023
Discover more from Looking Forward by Stephen Johnston
Four For Friday | June 23, 2023
LF59 | Emergent wellness, expectations gap in senior living, behavior change in Tokyo stations and the FT on healthy retirement.
Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
Wellness emerges out of a system
It can be quite tempting to think of ‘wellness’ as a simple thing that can be optimised like cash flow, but it’s complex, in the true sense of the world. This article frames wellness as an emergent phenomenon, arising from “the interaction between our way of being in the world (human thriving) and the enabling conditions of the environment and context we live within and co-create (regenerative environment)”. This approach has a number of practical applications:
An individual’s self care and sense of purpose impacts the overall system - we’re not just atoms operating in a vacuum.
Similarly, your thriving will depend on a shared collective wellness - isolating behind gated communities is not thriving.
Wellbeing is heavily influenced by the surrounding environment and the context in which you live and work.
Successful wellness interventions will likely use multiple strategies and tactics; it won’t be just a case of “paying people X to take 10k steps a day”.
Business has a role to play in optimizing thriving for all, not just its shareholders.
Expectations gap in senior living
A new report from Age of Majority and ICAA shines a light on the gap between perception and reality in senior living. It looks at issues such as the disconnect in perceptions, the draw of ‘autonomous’ living and the amenities gap. Free download, registration required.
The amazing psychology of Japanese train stations
Japanese train stations use interesting behaviour change ‘nudges’ to help them manage the hordes of people passing through them each day; Tokyo’s stations, for example, handle 13 billion passenger trips a year, the highest in the world. Examples include calming blue lights which have reduced the grisly reality of suicides by 84%, calming melodies (‘hassha’) rather than buzzers to indicate doors are closing (and which are responsible for a 25% reduction in passenger injuries) and even high frequency noises that deter teenagers from loitering - a tone of 17 kilohertz is used, which can only be heard by those under 25.
Healthy retirement - only for the rich?
The FT on why healthy retirement is only for the few (subscriber link, non-subscriber link). A healthy retirement is an expensive luxury most can’t afford. In the UK, 25% of the poorest decile will die before they reach the new proposed retirement age of 68, whereas fewer than 10% of the richest decile will. The article suggests what feels like a better goal for politicians than just chasing GDP growth - a genuine equality of outcomes, measured by being healthy in retirement.
If, instead of a universal retirement age, we had a universal “chance of a healthy retirement” we could set fairer objectives. If we decided that each baby at birth should have, say, a 50 per cent chance of getting to enjoy 10 or more years of leisure, retirement for the top decile could be set just shy of the anticipated age of 68, while those in the bottom decile would be free to retire at 46.
Unfortunately, implementing such a model is rife with challenges, but it’s certainly a useful thought experiment to open up people’s minds.
Note: next week, Looking Forward will be taking a beach break, as I’m on family vacation in Bali. Back w/c July 3.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen