‘If you live to 100, you might as well be happy’: Korean psychiatrist, 89, on ageing facts

The cover of Rhee's book.

• Rhee Kun-hoo reflects on how to live well during the latter half of life in his latest book - one tip is to maintain a positive outlook

By Park Jin-hai

Rhee Kun-hoo is a psychiatrist who offers nuggets of good advice - the first of which can be found in the title of his latest bestselling book, If You Live to 100, You Might as Well Be Happy.

This year, thanks to a surge in the popularity of Korean literature, the 89-year-old's essays are being translated into different languages in 16 countries.

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His book's global appeal stems from readers' curiosity about Korea, he says.

"Like travellers wanting to explore different corners of the world, international readers want to meet people from different cultures through books. My book gives a little journey into Korea, enabling them to see how Koreans live," the author said at Family Academia, an organisation that Rhee founded in 1995 to promote healthy family life.

His book reflects on how to live well in the latter half of one's life.

"A Korean saying goes 'life is two-crop farming', drawing a metaphor from the agricultural practice of cultivating two different crops on the same land in one year," he explains.

"The first half of life is lived in a rush. You don't even know how to live well. The second half of life is when you can live well because you have the experience from living the first half.

"When you reach your sixties, you look back on how you lived your life in the first half, reflect on it and design how you will live the second half."

His debut collection, I Want to Have Fun Till the Day I Die (2013), based on his experiences as a psychiatrist over 50 years, has sold around 500,000 copies in Korea.

If You Live to 100, You Might as Well Be Happy (2019) was translated into English and published in the United Kingdom in May.

The book's publisher Ebury Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House UK, noted that "this comforting Korean bestseller offers guidance for attaining ordinary happiness at any age and shows us that life is a story worth reading until the very last page".

Despite his book's title, Rhee bluntly states there is no inherent happiness in getting older. Instead, he sees it as a fundamentally difficult process.

"What is so happy about being old? Sayings on growing older mostly say good things about ageing, like the word noikjang, a Korean word meaning 'age makes one stronger' [based on the belief that as people age, they gain wisdom and experience]. That is not true. Ageing is fundamentally painful," he said.

When people are counting down their final days, they grow anxious about old age, but they mostly conceal their true feelings and pretend they are OK. So what should come first is acknowledging the way things are, according to Rhee.

"It is natural for the elderly to decline. The elderly should be the elderly. It is like climbing a mountain in terms of one's physiology reaching its peak and then going down. It's going down. How do you act as if you're going up while going down?"

He encourages people to embrace this reality rather than fighting against it.

"By accepting the truth, elderly people can find what amuses them within the boundaries of what they can do."

Rhee emphasises maintaining a positive outlook, even when confronted with the physical realities of ageing and illness.

"It takes a lot of energy for someone with a negative outlook to become a positive person. For a positive person, it is like riding a wave. You don't have to put in much effort when you're riding a surging wave. But for someone with a negative mindset, it is like rowing against the current," he says.

"It's their mind that's negative, not their body. The body naturally ages, so you need to adapt accordingly. But if you get sick once and cling to that, all the opportunities and little pleasures that could bring you happiness will pass you by."

The joy of an everyday life lived to the fullest helps drown out feelings of loss and helplessness that sweep over older people.

"If life's challenges overwhelm you, you must choose to live happily. Life doesn't fall apart as long as you keep these little moments of joy and laughter nearby. Those moments are always within reach," Rhee says.

Rhee also addresses the generational disconnect between the elderly and the young, noting that, once respected, elderly people are now often considered to be a nuisance.

"They nag, criticise and reminisce about things that are no longer relevant ... for young people, all the things elderly people do look strange and ridiculous," he says.

He draws the analogy of a person who has only lived in a country that only has the season of spring, meeting another who has only experienced autumn.

"When these people meet they are destined to face conflicts, because their experiences are different. If they try to understand theoretically what spring world and what autumn world is like, they can start to communicate. But if not, the conflict would last forever."

He says if younger people go a layer deeper and think about why elderly people behave in a certain way, it would be easier for older and younger people to understand each other.

"Younger people tend to think their fathers should be as brave as they used to be. Seeing their fathers aged and sitting unable to do anything, a sense of hatred and rage spring out of the minds of younger people.

"Young people should acknowledge that their fathers have grown old and that is how it is when one ages."

Apart from giving lectures and writing books, Rhee also runs YouTube channel "MUHA Studio", formerly "Rhee Kun-hoo Studio", with his grandson to advocate for living a joyful and fulfilling life until the very end and to connect with a wider audience.

While he was making the video clips, Rhee learned new words from his grandson and it was satisfying for him, exploring new ways of communicating.

"My speech is old-fashioned and long-winded. These days, people don't listen if you talk too long. The words I use are different from the words my grandson uses, so when we shoot YouTube videos together, I try to use the words those young people use.

"I need to speak in a way that young people, who have different lifestyles and thought patterns, can understand," he says.

"Society is constantly moving forward like an escalator, but if I get off the escalator because I think I have a lot of experience, I'll become illiterate. So never get off. Even if you don't study deeply, shouldn't you at least be able to understand what people are saying?"

Read the full story at The Korea Times.

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