Times letters: Learning from the Swedish art of ageing well

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ir, Alice Thomson’s important article highlights potential positive changes for older citizens (“Sweden can teach us the art of ageing well”, Sep 20; letters, Sep 21). A whole new phase of life is waiting to be grasped but it has yet to be embraced in the UK. Although employment today is far less physically demanding than in the past, and medical advances now cure old-age illnesses, home-grown barriers to a better later-years lifestyle remain. Apart from endemic workplace ageism, social norms drive people to write themselves off in their late fifties or early sixties rather than reviewing how they want to work in the coming years.

Planning this new phase of life — which I call “pretirement” — could consider part-time work, retraining

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