Lee Kuan Yew On Getting the Best out of Life
“The human being
needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and
elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge.
If
you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in
you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a
dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real
torture.”
MY CONCERN today is, what is it I can tell you which can add to your knowledge about aging and what aging societies can do.
You
know more about this subject than I do. A lot of it is out in the
media, Internet and books. So I thought the best way would be to take a
personal standpoint and tell you how I approach this question of aging.
If
I cast my mind back, I can see turning points in my physical and mental
health. You know, when you’re young, I didn’t bother, assumed good
health was God-given and would always be there.
When
I was about 57 that was – I was about 34, we were competing in
elections, and I was really fond of drinking beer and smoking. And
after the election campaign, in Victoria Memorial Hall – we had won the
election, the City Council election – I couldn’t thank the voters
because I had lost my voice. I’d been smoking furiously. I’d take a
packet of 10 to deceive myself, but I’d run through the packet just
sitting on the stage, watching the crowd, getting the feeling, the mood
before I speak.
In
other words, there were three speeches a night. Three speeches a night,
30 cigarettes, a lot of beer after that, and the voice was gone. I
remember I had a case in Kuching, Sarawak . So I took the flight and I
felt awful. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be an
effective campaigner and a lawyer, in which case I cannot destroy my
voice, and I can’t go on.
So
I stopped smoking. It was a tremendous deprivation because I was
addicted to it. And I used to wake up dreaming…the nightmare was I
resumed smoking.
But
I made a choice and said, if I continue this, I will not be able to do
my job. I didn’t know anything about cancer of the throat, or oesophagus
or the lungs, etc. But it turned out it had many other deleterious
effects. Strangely enough after that, I became very allergic,
hyper-allergic to smoking, so much so that I would plead with my Cabinet
ministers not to smoke in the Cabinet room. You want to smoke, please
go out, because I am allergic.
Then
one day I was at the home of my colleague, Mr Rajaratnam, meeting
foreign correspondents including some from the London Times and they
took a picture of me and I had a big belly like that (puts his hands in
front of his belly), a beer belly. I felt no, no, this will not do. So I
started playing more golf, hit hundreds of balls on the practice tee.
But this didn’t go down. There was only one way it could go down:
consume less, burn up more.
Another
turning point came in 1976, after the general election – I was feeling
tired. I was breathing deeply at the Istana, on the lawns. My daughter,
who at that time just graduating as a doctor, said: ‘What are you trying
to do?’ I said: ‘I feel an effort to breathe in more oxygen.’ She said:
‘Don’t play golf. Run. Aerobics..’ So she gave me a book, quite a
famous book and, then, very current in America on how you score aerobic
points swimming, running, whatever it is, cycling.
I
looked at it sceptically. I wasn’t very keen on running. I was keen on
golf. So I said, ‘Let’s try’. So in-between golf shots while playing on
my own, sometimes nine holes at the Istana, I would try and walk fast
between shots. Then I began to run between shots. And I felt better.
After a while, I said: ‘Okay, after my golf, I run.’ And after a few
years, I said: ‘Golf takes so long. The running takes 15 minutes. Let’s
cut out the golf and let’s run.’
I
think the most important thing in aging is you got to understand
yourself. And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the
knowledge wasn’t there. I had to get the knowledge from friends, from
doctors.
But
perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me
was one day, when I said: ‘Look, I’m feeling slower and sluggish.’ So
he gave me a medical encyclopaedia and he turned the pages to aging. I
read it up and it was illuminating. A lot of it was difficult jargon but
I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.
As
you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and then, thereafter, you
are on a gradual slope down physically. Mentally, you carry on and on
and on until I don’t know what age, but mathematicians will tell you
that they know their best output is when they’re in their 20s and 30s
when your mental energy is powerful and you haven’t lost many neurons.
That’s what they tell me.
So,
as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself
to maximise what you have. It’s just common sense. I never planned to
live till 85 or 84.! I just didn’t think about it. I said: ‘Well, my
mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.. My father died when he
was 94.’
But
I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA. But
more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy! He was
working for the Shell company. He was in charge, he was a superintendent
of an oil depot.
When
he retired, he started becoming a salesman. So people used to tell me:
‘Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.’ My father was then
living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets
people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious
stones, he circulates coins. And he keeps going. But at 87, 88, he fell,
going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm,
three months incapacitated.
Thereafter,
he couldn’t go back to swimming. Then he became wheelchair-bound. Then
it became a problem because my house was constructed that way. So my
brother – who’s a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house – took him in.
And he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of
mental powers.
So
my calculations, I’m somewhere between 74 and 94. And I’ve reached the
halfway point now. But have I? Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling
and I felt tightening on the neck. Oh, I must retire today. So I
stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle. After five minutes it
became worse. So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it’s got to
do with the blood vessels. Rung up my doctor, who said, ‘Come tomorrow’.
Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: ‘Come back tomorrow for an
angiogram.’
I
said: ‘What’s that ?’ He said: ‘We’ll pump something in and we’ll see
whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.’ I was going to go
home. But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he
came in and said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I’ve got this.’ He
said: ‘Don’t go home. You stay here tonight. I’ve sent patients home
and they never came back. Just stay here. They’ll put you on the
monitor. They’ll watch your heart. And if anything, an emergency arises,
they will take you straight to the theatre. You go home. You’ve got no
such monitor. You may never come back.’
So
I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left
circumflex, not the critical, lead one. So that’s lucky for me. Two
weeks later, I was walking around, I felt it’s coming back. Yes it has
come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: ‘We’ll put in a
stent.’
I’m
one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand
new operation. Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here
selling his stent. He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the
other. So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation. He
said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it
all and then that’s that. That was before all this pr`oblem about lining
the stent to make sure that it doesn’t occlude and create a
disturbance.
So
at each stage, I learnt something more about myself and I stored that. I
said: ‘Oh, this is now a danger point.’ So all right, cut out fats,
change diet, went to see a specialist in Boston, Massachusetts General
Hospital. He said: ‘Take statins.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said:
‘(They) help to reduce your cholesterol.’ My doctors were concerned.
They said: ‘You don’t need it. Your cholesterol levels are okay.’ Two
years later, more medical evidence came out. So the doctors said: ‘Take
statins.’
Had
there been no angioplasty, had I not known that something was up and I
cycled on, I might have gone at 74 like my mother. So I missed that
decline. So next deadline: my father’s fall at 87. I’m
very careful now because sometimes when I turn around too fast, I feel
as if I’m going to get off balance. So my daughter, a neurologist, she
took me to the NNI, there’s this nerve conduction test, put electrodes
here and there.
The
transmission of the messages between the feet and the brain has slowed
down. So all the exercise, everything, effort put in, I’m fit, I swim, I
cycle. But I can’t prevent this losing of conductivity of the nerves
and this transmission. So just go slow.
So
when I climb up the steps, I have no problem. When I go down the steps,
I need to be sure that I’ve got something I can hang on to, just in
case. So it’s a constant process of adjustment.
But
I think the most important single lesson I learnt in life was that if
you isolate yourself, you’re done for. The human being is a social
animal – he needs stimuli, he needs to meet people, to catch up with the
world.
I
don’t much like travel but I travel very frequently despite the jetlag,
because I get to meet people of great interest to me, who will help me
in my work as chairman of our GIC. So I know, I’m on several boards of
banks, international advisory boards of banks, of oil companies and so
on. And I meet them and I get to understand what’s happening in the
world, what has changed since I was here one month ago, one year ago.
I go to India, I go to China. And that stimuli brings me to the world of today. I’m not living in the world, when I was active,
more active 20, 30 years ago. So I tell my wife. She woke up late
today. I said: ‘Never mind, you come along by 12 o’clock. I go first.’
If you sit back – because part of the ending part of the encyclopaedia which I read was very depressing – as
you get old, you withdraw from everything and then all you will have is
your bedroom and the photographs and the furniture that you know, and
that’s your world. So
if you’ve got to go to hospital, the doctor advises you to bring some
photographs so that you’ll know you’re not lost in a different world,
that this is like your bedroom.
I’m
determined that I will not, as long as I can, to be reduced, to have my
horizons closed on me like that. It is the stimuli, it is the constant
interaction with people across the world that keeps me aware and alive
to what’s going on and what we can do to adjust to this different world.
In
other words, you must have an interest in life. If you believe that at
55, you’re retiring, you’re going to read books, play golf and drink
wine, then I think you’re done for. So statistically they will show you
that all the people who retire and lead sedentary lives, the pensioners
die off very quickly.
So
we now have a social problem with medical sciences, new procedures, new
drugs, many more people are going to live long lives..
If
the mindset is that when I reach retirement age 62, I’m old, I can’t
work anymore, I don’t have to work, I just sit back, now is the time
I’ll enjoy life, I think you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.
After one month, or after two months, even if you go traveling with
nothing to do, with no purpose in life, you will just degrade, you’ll go
to seed.
The
human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in
Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If
you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in
you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a
dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real
torture.
So
when I read that people believe, Singaporeans say: ‘Oh, 62 I’m
retiring.’ I say to them: ‘You really want to die quickly?’ If you want
to see sunrise tomorrow or sunset, you must have a reason, you must have
the stimuli to keep going..’
Have a purpose driven life and finish well, my friends.
If you have to fall, do fall like a seed to germinate, unlike a leaf to die.
