Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

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Kung-fu Hillbilly
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Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by Kung-fu Hillbilly »

Image
Image: thailandproperty.com

Claudia Bell
2017


Local families take people in and feed them for a just a few dollars a week. You just have to see it as an adventure.

The risks of remaining at home included accounts of wearisome boredom, an inevitable weekly lifestyle, a sense of social isolation (‘no-one cares about old people’), and growing financial disadvantage. Becoming a permanent tourist somewhere else might provide rescue from those circumstances. These concerns were balanced against the attractions of staying home: not having to cope with travel logistics, easy reliance of friends and neighbours for everyday company, and the relative ease of familiar daily routines (though boring).

‘There is a sense of big brother watching everything you do. Don’t park your car there, no dogs, no smoking, fill out this form – rules for every little thing. A real nanny state. I finally got fed up with it once and for all.’

‘Some people can sit about and watch television, go to the shops,go home and watch television again. I just felt there must be more, and I had to escape. I am pretty sure you can die of boredom...!

In common for all was the quest for happiness, ease and fulfilment. Apart from two itinerants, every person interviewed said they had not expected that they would be doing this in late life. All born during or just after WW 2, they had had conventional expectations of what their later years would hold for them. Just one American woman said she had long been an adventurer, having worked as a teacher in the Middle East and in various parts of Central Asia until her (peripatetic) retirement. One man had a parallel story as a career navy sailor. But all of the rest expressed some surprise or happily marvelled at their situation now, in their later years. They felt that they, too, had subscribed to their own culture’s expectation of people when they aged. Then, when it happened to them, they sought a means to escape.

Risks such as tsunamis, potential natural disasters, accidents, terrorism or fatal illness were perceived with resignation: these were events well out of the control of the participant. Something disastrous conceivably could happen. This was cast philosophically as simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

An American man in Phnom Penh told me: ‘you hear of old foreigners here, found a week or so after they’ve died alone in their apartment. It’s always just called a ‘heart attack’. They get tidied away, no big deal.’

Full https://digitalcommons.library.tru.ca/c ... roceedings

Bell, Claudia (2017) "Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia," Critical Tourism Studies Proceedings: Vol. 2017 , Article 143.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.library.tru.ca/ct ... 7/iss1/143
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MarkArmstrong
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by MarkArmstrong »

What is this "Meaningful retirement" Sorry if you have lived your life and won't to spend the last few years doing whatever you want so be it.
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by ItWasntMe »

MarkArmstrong wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2023 8:38 pm What is this "Meaningful retirement" Sorry if you have lived your life and won't to spend the last few years doing whatever you want so be it.
With all due respect, vary of the "related threads" section, you keep commenting on threads that have died several years ago.
Unless that's what you want to do of course..
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by MarkArmstrong »

So any discussion of events! Threads isn't allowed? What a strange world we live in.
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by Anchor Moy »

MarkArmstrong wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2023 12:25 am So any discussion of events! Threads isn't allowed? What a strange world we live in.
@MarkArmstrong Put it this way - almost 4 years ago Kung-fu Hillbilly posted this "event", and at that time we commented on his post or we didn't.
Of course, everything's "allowed" and AFAIK you can bump up as many old threads as you want, :booty: , but - speaking for myself - I always hope that an old thread is bumped up because someone has something new to add to it. :friends:
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MarkArmstrong
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by MarkArmstrong »

So we ignore anything that happened more than xx:yy minutes ago. Seems to be a strange way of thinking.
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by Doc67 »

MarkArmstrong wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2023 1:25 am So we ignore anything that happened more than xx:yy minutes ago. Seems to be a strange way of thinking.
Correct, we ignore what was posted 1,890,720 minutes ago. Especially when it got fuck all interest at the time.

Got it?
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MarkArmstrong
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by MarkArmstrong »

Oh yes totally understood.
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by Freightdog »

MarkArmstrong wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2023 2:13 am Oh yes totally understood.
I doubt that it is. If you did understand, then it might cross your mind to actually add to the thread, whether it’s old or not, whether it elicited a response first time or not.

There is an age old problem that faces anyone approaching retirement, especially if a major focus of their life prior to retirement was their career. You come to a sudden halt, and if you’ve no plan, you drift.

Drifting might be your plan, in which case all power to you (I doubt it would be exciting as Reacher’s retirement) but stagnating in place, awaiting the end doesn’t seem like much of a proposition to me. I saw an aunt basically live 35years doing absolutely nothing, and dying when she reached her ‘90s, seemingly smoking herself to a not so early grave. What a waste. The answer to the question- can boredom kill you? Probably not. But can a lack of meaning?

Personally, I want to have a semi-retirement. Once I’ve reached the age limit for practicing what I do, I’d like to continue by teaching and training based on what I did. Keep those three decades of my professional life active, even as an arbitrary law pulls my medical certificate.

I’ve got a small fleet of cars that I would like to tinker with (if I can find a way around the right hand drive restriction). Several hundred specific places yet to visit. Anything other than trawling around dead topics on a forum, and supping cheap beers, and whining about censorship having been called out as a thread-necromonger.
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Re: Retirement, Risk, and Rescue: Western Retirees as Permanent Tourists in S E Asia (Study)

Post by phuketrichard »

MarkArmstrong wrote: Sat Sep 02, 2023 8:38 pm What is this "Meaningful retirement" Sorry if you have lived your life and won't to spend the last few years doing whatever you want so be it.
FUCK
u ask about censorship an commenting on old threads ( the story was even from 2017) and your told how it should be repsonded to and then u go and bring up one 3 + years OLD, like it was posted yesterday


WTF :facepalm:
even in ur comments above u come across as a troll
never seem to say anything
In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. HST
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