A melancholic day

Today I felt melancholic. Not sad exactly, not troubled, just heavy in a way that is hard to name. When I sat with the feeling long enough, it led me to a word most of us say casually, at farewell lunches and over teh tarik: retirement.

We speak of it as a reward. A finish line. The thing we work towards. But the more I thought about it, the less natural it seemed, and the more it looked like something we built and then forgot we built.

A number someone chose

Retirement age is a human invention. For most of history, people worked until their bodies said stop, and then the family took over. The fixed retirement age is barely a century and a half old. Bismarck’s Germany introduced one of the first state pensions in 1889, payable from age 70, at a time when few workers lived that long. It was as much politics as kindness.

Today the number is written into law. In Malaysia, the Minimum Retirement Age Act 2012 sets 60 as the age for private sector workers. Strictly, the Act protects us from being pushed out earlier. In practice, 60 has become the door everyone is shown at work place.

There is a quiet irony here. Our EPF allows full withdrawal at 55, five years before that door. The Ministry of Finance itself, in a parliamentary reply reported by Bernama, has said the withdrawal age does not align with the retirement age. Even the system has not agreed on when old age begins.

The scissors

Here is what troubles me most. Picture two lines on a chart. On retirement day, the income line drops sharply and stays low. The healthcare cost line does the opposite. It climbs, and not smoothly. It jumps whenever the body surprises us, which it does more often with each passing year.

The Malaysian numbers are sobering. Aon’s 2026 Global Medical Trend Rates Report, as reported by Asia News Network and Sin Chew, projects our medical inflation to rise from 15% this year to 16% in 2026, well above the Asia-Pacific average of around 11%. At 16% a year, medical costs roughly double every four and a half years. A retiree’s income does not.

And much of that cost lands directly on us. Allianz Life Insurance Malaysia’s chief executive Giulio Slavich, speaking to Bernama in August, pointed out that more than one-third of Malaysia’s health spending is paid out of pocket.

Insurance was meant to be our shield. It is cracking. Many policyholders saw premiums jump by 40% to 70% in recent years, as The Sun reported, before Bank Negara stepped in to cap increases at about 10% a year, but only until the end of 2026. Last weekend, Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad said some 340,000 private medical policies have been surrendered by people who could no longer afford them, with many now turning to government hospitals (The Vibes, 18 October). NAMLIFA president Krishnan Appanu told Bernama that for ageing policyholders, cover can become unaffordable exactly when it is needed most.

So for many, falling ill becomes a burden. And because our real safety net in Malaysia has always been the family, it becomes the family’s burden too. The children we once cared for now weigh our hospital bills against their own housing loans and their own children’s school fees. Nobody says it out loud. Everybody feels it.

Are we ready? Not really. Finance Minister II Amir Hamzah Azizan told the Dewan Negara in March, as reported by Bernama, that only 41.2% of active formal-sector EPF members aged 18 to 55 had reached the basic savings level for their age by the end of 2025. The majority walk towards that door underprepared.

So society tells us to stop earning at the very moment life begins charging us more, and less predictably. The blades of the scissors close on the retiree.

We fear death, yet we want long life

This brings me to a paradox I cannot shake. We fear death, yet we want long life. We wish our parents panjang umur at every birthday, and we mean it.

Jonathan Swift saw this three centuries ago when he wrote, “Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.” The Greeks told it as a myth. The goddess Eos begged Zeus to make her mortal lover Tithonus immortal, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus lived on and on, withering until little was left of him but a voice. His wish was granted. It was simply not the life anyone wanted.

The financial world has a colder name for this. Planners call it longevity risk: the risk of outliving your money. Think about that for a moment. The very thing we pray for has been classified as a risk.

Perhaps that is the real source of my melancholy. It is not death we fear most. It is the long, expensive stretch before it, lived on shrinking savings, in a body that needs more care, in a society that has formally declared us done, and with the quiet worry of becoming a burden to the people we love.

Sitting with the question

I have no neat answer this week. Perhaps the law should catch up with how long and how well we now live. But one thing has become clear to me: living healthy is now a responsibility, a job of its own. We must take it on the way we embraced our work in younger days, with discipline and a sense of duty, not only for ourselves but for the family who would otherwise carry us. It is the one insurance policy nobody can surrender.

Yet, as the old line from the Gospel of Matthew goes, the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. The morning walk gets postponed, the teh tarik gets ordered, and the body keeps its own accounts. Staying curious and useful helps too. That, after all, is partly why I began this column.

Or perhaps some questions are meant to be carried rather than solved. Retirement age is a line drawn in sand by people long gone. Our fear of death and our longing for long life are older still, carved into us. I will keep looking in the rearview, and I suspect my opinion on this will shift with the years. That is how it should be.

And yet my faith gives me comfort. Scripture is honest about the first truth: “it is appointed unto men once to die” (Hebrews 9:27). Death is certain. But it also holds out a promise: “In my Father’s house are many mansions… I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2). The road may be long, costly and uncertain, but heaven awaits at the end of it.

To all my friends around my age, those who have already walked through that door and those standing at it now: I wish you a happy and healthy retirement. May your savings outlast your years, may your check-ups be dull, and may your days be full of the things you never had time for.

References:

• Malaysia’s medical inflation to rise to 16% in 2026, says report, Asia News Network (Aon 2026 Global Medical Trend Rates Report)
• Medical inflation report, Sin Chew Daily
• Joint efforts needed to curb medical inflation, keep healthcare affordable, says Allianz, Bernama, 26 August 2026
• Thousands surrender medical policies as Malaysia prepares affordable MediAsas cover, The Vibes, 18 October 2026
• Woman terminates insurance plan after premium spikes to RM1,056 monthly, The Sun (premium hikes and Bank Negara’s cap)
• FPAM welcomes BNM premium cap, urges long-term healthcare solution, Bernama, 21 December 2024 (NAMLIFA’s Krishnan Appanu)
• 60 pct EPF members to reach basic savings level of around RM390,000 by 2030, says Amir Hamzah, Bernama, 5 March 2026
• 65 mln active EPF members achieve basic savings as of Oct 30, 2024, says MoF, Bernama, 5 December 2024
• Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects; the myth of Eos and Tithonus

Dr Paul PK Lim is the de facto towkay of Accoris Management Sdn Bhd, and he loves to daydream.