Seeking purpose: What is a long life for?
Singapore has funded long life brilliantly. We need to help people discover what it is for.
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Sometimes older people scroll simply because they are bored, says the writer.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Wee Shiou Liang
We have all seen it by now: an older person absorbed in an endless feed, drifting out of the room and into the glow of a screen. We reach instinctively for the language of addiction and screen-time limits. But the phone is not the disease; it is the dressing on a wound. Ask what it is filling and you arrive at something a geriatrician I spoke with named without hesitation: boredom – and, beneath the boredom, a loss of purpose.
He sees it daily, he told me – older patients, often weighed down by several health conditions, who no longer feel their days are there to fulfil anything. Their boredom is not the pleasant emptiness of a free afternoon; it is heavier, the sense that nothing ahead of them requires them.
