Alternative Retirement: Tim Carpenter, EngAGE Founder, Offers New Views On Aging (VIDEO)

How did we get to a place where we dislike aging so much?

That’s the question EngAGE founder Tim Carpenter poses to his audience in this clip from the TEDxSoCal event in August, just before outlining his views on alternative retirement as a time of both continued personal growth rather than the traditional dead end. It’s that outdated view, he suggests, from which the fear of aging stems.

“I find it a little bit immature that we can’t decide that we just want to get older,” said Carpenter, whose organization helped create the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, a first-of-its-kind senior apartment community with high-end arts programs including studios, theaters and writing classes, in southern California. “I like the idea of getting older in comparison to the alternative.”

Carpenter -- whose not-for-profit organization strives to transform the way people thinking about aging -- went on to compare retirement to another, more-heralded time of creativity: “It’s a lot like college. It’s a transformation point in our life, it’s a launching pad.”

Watch Carpenter's full chat here: