What if everything you’ve been told about ageing well is wrong?
For centuries, getting older came packaged with one of two equally uninspiring options. Option one: fight it. Spend a fortune on anti-ageing products and procedures in pursuit of a youth you can’t actually recapture. Option two: accept it quietly. Step back, slow down, take up less space, and shrink into a beige version of the person you used to be.
At Oasis Life, we’ve always believed there’s a third option. And it turns out, research agrees.
Disgracefully. On Purpose!
In the Autumn 2026 edition of Ripple magazine, award-winning writer and editor Pnina Fenster opens with a story about fashion designer Marianne Fassler. Asked how she’d like to grow old, Fassler didn’t pause. Her answer: disgracefully.
Not disgraceful as in shameful. Disgraceful as in: defying expected conduct, decorum, and convention.
It’s a word that captures something important about how ageing well in retirement actually looks when you strip away the clichés. Not serene. Not quietly wise. Not decorously fading. But alive, expressive, curious, and entirely yourself.
The Script Is Being Rewritten
The cultural picture around ageing in South Africa and globally has shifted significantly in recent years. Today’s older adults are, on average, healthier, more mobile and more self-expressive than any previous generation. Research from Sweden, Japan and the US points consistently to lower disability rates and higher levels of engagement among older adults. The World Health Organisation has documented marked increases in movement and exercise participation — a clear shift away from the old default of slow down and sit down.
Social science has caught up too. Life’s Third Age is increasingly recognised not as a period of withdrawal, but as a time for opportunity, reinvention, learning and travel.
Even the IMF has embraced the concept of the Silver Economy — the acknowledgement that older adults wield serious spending power and deserve to be taken seriously as active participants in culture and commerce.
Getting Older Means Getting Free
One of the more surprising findings from psychological research on ageing and wellbeing is this: getting older gradually removes one of life’s most exhausting burdens — other people’s opinions.
Psychologist Laura Carstensen, author of A Long Bright Future, has spent decades studying what makes older adults happier. Her finding is straightforward: as people age, they invest less in what others expect and more in what genuinely matters to them. They want depth over breadth. Meaning over performance.
Her prescription for greater wellbeing? Spend less time performing and more time doing what’s emotionally meaningful to you.
Psychologist Ellen Langer, widely regarded as the mother of mindfulness research, takes this further. Her research on mindset, health and longevity suggests that it’s not primarily our bodies that age us — it’s our thinking. Novelty and uncertainty are stimulating. Routine and passivity are ageing. When we stay open to new experiences and perspectives rather than defaulting to habit, we act younger — and our bodies often follow.
This is backed by neuroscience: novelty-seeking, self-expression and experimentation support neuroplasticity, improving mood, memory and motivation.
Older Icons Who Get the Memo
The cultural shift is visible everywhere if you know where to look. Jane Fonda at 86 and Helen Mirren at 78 fronting L’Oréal campaigns. Architect Norman Foster, 88, still designing landmark buildings. Artist David Hockney, still actively working. Designer Paul Smith, 77, cycling to work and producing best-selling collections. Singer and writer Patti Smith, 77, still touring, writing and travelling solo.
The late Iris Apfel — interior designer, author, and style icon — collaborated with Vogue, Christie’s and H&M until she passed away at 102. She didn’t slow down. She simply kept going, on her own terms, in her own spectacularly original way.
These aren’t exceptions. They’re a glimpse of what becomes possible when people stop treating age as a limitation.
What Ageing Disgracefully Actually Looks Like
You don’t need wild dreadlocks or a Sports Illustrated cover. Ageing disgracefully is available in small daily doses. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls these micro-moments of positive emotion — small, intentional acts of joy that accumulate into resilience and confidence over time.
In practice, it looks like this: taking up something you’ve always wanted to try even if you’re terrible at it. Wearing clothes that make you feel happy rather than appropriate. Filling your home with mood-boosting colours. Saying yes more and should less. Cultivating curiosity. Travelling — in person or through books, music and film. Singing. Moving. Experimenting. Staying open.
At Oasis Life, this isn’t abstract. It’s what we see in our residents every day — the ones who arrive at the Clubhouse for a new class they’ve never tried before, who sign up for the quiz night on a whim, who start a conversation with a stranger over coffee and leave with a new friend. The ones who are, quietly and joyfully, becoming more of themselves.
Retirement at Oasis Life Is Built for This
The Oasis Life lifestyle is designed to support exactly this kind of active, expressive retirement. Across our four Western Cape estates — Burgundy Estate, Clara Anna Fontein, Constantia and Sunningdale — residents have access to activity programmes, social spaces, Clubhouse dining, and a community of people who are very much still in the game.
The Life Right model takes care of the friction — the maintenance, the administration, the logistics — so that time and energy are freed up for the things that actually matter. Not for doing less. For living better.
As novelist Ursula Le Guin described it: you don’t stop being creative because you get old. You get old because you stop being creative.
This article was inspired by Pnina Fenster’s piece ‘The Delightful Art of Ageing Disgracefully’, published in the Ripple Autumn 2026 — The Edit Issue.
