In the dominant cultures of Singapore and indeed, most of Asia, we are often socialised (ie. taught by society) that with ageing, we should learn to "take it easy" and decrease the amount of the activities that we should undertake.  So ironically, we were taught to work very hard when young and after we have accumulated the resources, then NOT to do anything when we are older. Thankfully, the mindset is changing somewhat and you are starting to see more active ageing in a place like Singapore where more elderly are keeping themselves active to do all the things they might have wanted to do when they are younger but never have the time to do.

So what caused the old mindset of "waiting to die"? This mindset  is explained by the Social Disengagement Theory in the next section). One of the key reasons is the changing social role of the elderly. Historically, most societies often has far more younger members than older members as discussed  by Sweeney in her lecture above using the example of the United States. This is also true of Singapore as well as indicated by the Singaporean statistics found in the previous section (Chan, Raman, & Malhotra, 2012). 

In a society where there are younger people, the older people often face a social pressure to handover their duties to the younger people so that they can create "vacancies". This is the reason why most, if not all societies have the concept of legal age for RETIREMENT. For the males and increasingly, the majority of the females who are working, the arrival of Retirement Age meant a transition to life where for the first time they will no longer have monthly income. So if they have not saved enough, this will create future impact on their social activities and even health decisions.

Along with the concept of retirement comes the concept of "redundancy" and "burden" since older people are no longer seen as "contributing" members of society. This is then may lead to the rest of society to see older people as "flawed", "weaker" and possibly "deteriorating" members of society. But is this true? This is the view of the older people when see from the young. In the next section below, we should practice the Sociological Imagination by look at the elderly from their points-of-view. Thad Polk will dispute the association of the decrease in cognitive (intellectual) capabilities with older people in his video lecture.