The map widens. From Singapore’s state-designed aging to Belgium’s 800-year-old women’s communities, what happens when we look at the world with fresh eyes.
A few weeks ago, we took a global tour of solo aging — Japan’s moai friendship circles, Denmark’s senior co-housing, South Korea’s honjok movement, Africa’s ubuntu philosophy, India’s joint family in transition, Latin America’s shifting kinship networks, and the intentional design projects of the UK and Netherlands. That essay was Part I. It was, quietly, one of the most-read pieces Footlooses has ever published. Which tells me something important: you want to know how the rest of the world does this.
So let’s keep going.
Part II takes us to five more places — each one carrying a distinct answer to the same question every culture is asking: how do we hold each other as we grow older?
The models are different. Some are state-built. Some are ancient. Some are religious. Some are radically secular. But all of them offer something to learn from, and all of them widen the map of what a good old age can look like — especially for those of us building solo lives outside the traditional templates.
Pour something warm. Let’s travel.
🇸🇬 Singapore: The State as Designer
If Denmark’s answer to aging is architectural and Okinawa’s is relational, Singapore’s is unambiguously administrative — and that isn’t a criticism. Singapore has arguably built the most deliberately designed elder-care infrastructure in the world.
The core financial pillar is the Silver Support Scheme. It provides continuing financial support for Singapore citizens aged 65 and above who had low income during their working years and now have less in retirement. From 2025, eligible seniors receive up to S$1,080 each quarter — up from S$900 previously — with no application required. Eligibility is assessed automatically using government records. Ministry of Finance
But the financial support is only one layer. In 2026, Singapore rolled out something even more ambitious. The country has been divided into 84 sub-regions, each catering to approximately 8,000 to 16,000 seniors. At the heart of each sub-region sits a designated Integrated Community Care Provider — a “quarterback” of the senior’s health journey, replacing the maze of different agencies with a single point of contact. Sourcingcares
And then there’s the physical architecture. Kampung Admiralty is an intergenerational development where playgrounds, nurseries, and spaces for older persons are co-located to encourage intergenerational contact and communication. It’s not just senior housing. It’s designed proximity — engineering the physical conditions for the elderly and the young to actually see each other every day. NBER
What’s borrowable: The idea that aging well is not just a private problem or a family problem — it’s a design problem, and states can meaningfully solve for it with imagination and paperwork.
🇮🇱 Israel: The Kibbutz — Aging Where You’ve Always Lived
There are 266 kibbutzim in Israel. Most people know them as agricultural collectives founded in the early 20th century on socialist ideals. Fewer people know that they’ve become, quietly, one of the most successful natural experiments in aging well anywhere in the world.
Research spanning twenty years has consistently shown that the aging populations of Israeli kibbutz communities demonstrate characteristics of “successful aging” expressed in high life expectancy and positive well-being — mostly due to the social arrangements and policies adopted by their communities in the domains of work, social relations, stability in social roles, and surroundings. PubMed
What is it about the kibbutz that produces this? Characteristics that differentiate life on the kibbutz from community life elsewhere include comprehensive medical care, intensive social support and social engagement (including sports and physical activities), no mandatory retirement from work, economic security, a rural environment, adherence to an ideology of collective welfare, full participation of women and men in the labor force, and employment in physically strenuous occupations. ScienceDirect
Put simply: the kibbutz is a community that never separates its elders from the collective. No retirement to a distant home. No “downsizing” to a smaller flat in a different neighborhood. You age where you’ve always been — with the same people you built the community with, doing meaningful work as long as you can, embedded in a social fabric that has known you for fifty years.
Interestingly, research has also documented that when kibbutzim have shifted toward becoming more similar to the rest of society — privatizing services, weakening collective structures — the wellbeing of their elders has measurably declined. The model works. Weaken it, and the benefits fade. PubMed
What’s borrowable: Continuity of place and community is medicine. Any design — whether a kibbutz, a co-housing project, or simply staying in the same neighborhood for decades — that preserves this continuity will produce measurable aging benefits.
🇸🇪 Sweden: Sovereignty by Design
Sweden is the country with the highest proportion of single-person households in the world. With about one-fifth of the population living alone and close to 40% of all households consisting of only one person, Sweden is among the countries with the highest share of single households in Europe. Sage Journals
You might read that statistic and expect a loneliness crisis. And there are challenges. But Sweden has built two structural responses that are worth studying.
The first is aging-in-place as national policy. Since the 1990s, Sweden has implemented aging-in-place policies increasing the share of older adults dependent on home care instead of residing in care homes. Elderly people who continue to live at home can obtain various kinds of support to make life easier. Almost all municipalities offer ready-cooked meals that can be home-delivered. Almost half of the country’s municipalities also provide communal meals for the elderly at special day centres, while a few organise small groups of elderly people into teams that cook their own meals. SpringerSweden
The second is a fascinating cultural phenomenon Swedes have made room for: Living Apart Together (LAT) — legally recognized non-cohabiting partnerships. The elderly (aged 70+) are more likely to engage in LAT by choice and appreciate their non-residential partnerships. In other words, older Swedes — particularly women — are increasingly choosing committed romantic partnerships that don’t require sharing a household. Sovereignty and companionship at the same time. Not one or the other. Sage Journals
And then, more recently, there’s SällBo — a Swedish housing experiment where seniors and young people, including unaccompanied refugee children, live together in a building with a gym, yoga room, and several communal kitchens. As professor Mathilda Tham of Linnaeus University put it: “Sweden has the most single households in the world. We have become accustomed to having a lot of space, but it is not so future-oriented. Housing over generations can meet many needs and is not only an advantage for the elderly”. World Economic Forum
What’s borrowable: The Swedish model refuses the binary between isolation and cohabitation. An older adult can live alone, be in a committed relationship, receive state-supported home care, share communal meals occasionally, and still call herself sovereign. All of it, at once.
🇧🇪 Belgium: The Beguinages — Eight Centuries of Intentional Solo Living
For our fourth stop, we go back in time — 800 years back.
In the 13th century, in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, a remarkable movement emerged. Groups of unmarried and widowed women founded the béguinages — enclosed communities designed to meet their spiritual and material needs. These Beguines were women who entered into a life dedicated to God but without retiring from the world. UNESCO
To understand how radical this was, consider the alternatives. In the Middle Ages, an unmarried woman had essentially three choices: cloistered nun, mother/wife, or worse. The beguines invented a fourth option — one that had not existed before and would not exist again in mainstream European society for centuries: a community of women who lived independently, owned property, worked for their own income, and dedicated their lives to spiritual practice without taking permanent religious vows. Jisforjourney
The status of Beguines gave these much respected women a cultural and social role to play within their community, combining self-government with a form of democracy: the Beguines elected their superior, the Grande Dame. Unlike nuns, they could leave. Unlike wives, they answered to no husband. Unlike destitute women, they had property and community and voice. UNESCO
The Flemish béguinages formed architectural ensembles, enclosed by walls or surrounded by ditches, with gates opening to the outside world during the day. Inside, they were composed of houses, churches, ancillary buildings, and green spaces. Cities within cities. Havens with gates. UNESCO
Today, 13 of these communities are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Many are still inhabited — by nuns, by single women, by students, and by residents who value the peace of these enclosed courtyards. The last Beguine died in 2012. The movement, technically, is extinct. The physical infrastructure remains. UNESCO + 2
What’s borrowable: The beguinage is proof that intentional solo-living communities are not a modern invention. Women have been building them for eight hundred years. If someone tries to tell you that living alone (with community, not isolation) is a rootless modern experiment, you now have architectural evidence spanning eight centuries to hand them.
🇹🇭 🇻🇳 Thailand & Vietnam: The Temple as Safe Haven
Our final stop is in Buddhist Southeast Asia, where the model of eldercare has been embedded in religious infrastructure for centuries — and where public policy is now actively building on that foundation.
In Thailand, Buddhist temples have long served as informal community centers, especially for the elderly. In 2003, Thailand launched a “Health Promotion Temple” program under the Ministry of Public Health, using temple space for health promotion, with the aim of having one health promotion temple in each of Thailand’s 875 districts. Temples provide social interaction and support through over 200 elderly clubs, boosting community ties among older adults.
More recently, Thailand has been formalizing an even more direct role: monks trained as mental health counselors specifically for elders. A 2023 pilot study developed a monk-led elderly mental health counseling program, merging Solution-Focused Brief Therapy with Buddhist mindfulness. Sessions involve mindfulness, problem-solving, and severity assessment, led by respected monks — an approach that fosters personal growth within Buddhist principles. Research indicates Thai individuals often turn to monk healers for mental health support, resulting in significant improvements. Beyond their religious duties, monks serve as trusted confidants, providing emotional support to individuals experiencing psychological distress. DOIMDPI
Vietnam offers a striking parallel. Despite being one of the fastest aging countries in the world, Vietnam lacks systemic and comprehensive policies and programs to manage the physical and mental health needs of its elderly population. But research shows that while Vietnam’s formal mental health system is under-developed, Buddhist temples serve effectively as a source of help to Vietnamese elderly with mental health problems. Springer
The philosophical framework here is worth naming: mindful aging. In much of Buddhist culture, aging is not framed as a decline to be resisted or a problem to be solved — it’s a phase of spiritual practice. A time when the noise of household life quiets, and one has the leisure to attend to the deeper questions. Temples become the physical space where that final stage of life is honored, and where community forms naturally among people all engaged in the same spiritual work.
What’s borrowable: Not the religion, necessarily — but the reframe. What if we treated aging not as a slow subtraction but as a phase with its own dignity and purpose? What kind of infrastructure would we build for it, if we did?
What All Five Have in Common
Reading these five together, a pattern emerges — not identical to Part I’s pattern, but complementary:
1. Successful aging models refuse the binary between individualism and dependence. Singapore’s silver support is state-provided and respects sovereignty. Sweden’s LAT is romantic and independent. The kibbutz is collective and respects individual roles. The beguinage was community and granted property rights to each woman. The temple community is spiritually collective and honors the individual’s practice. Every model refuses “you’re on your own” and “you must depend on family” — and builds something in between.
2. Where the state steps in intelligently, quality of life for solo elders rises measurably. Singapore and Sweden — both with strong state infrastructure — produce visibly better aging outcomes for those without traditional family support than places where the state has not engaged. This isn’t ideological. It’s observable.
3. Communities designed for continuity — where you age in place, among the people who’ve known you — produce measurable wellbeing benefits. The kibbutz research is the sharpest evidence. But every model here quietly relies on the same principle: don’t uproot the elderly.
4. There is no shortage of models. There is only a shortage of political and cultural will to build them. Most of what appears in this essay could be adapted for other countries. What stops it isn’t the design. It’s the collective decision to invest in it.
What This Means for Us
At Footlooses, we’ve been building a conversation about solo living as a considered life choice — not a failure state, not a waiting room for coupledom, but a full, deliberate way of being in the world.
These essays are part of that project. Because when you can see that Singapore has 84 sub-regions of state-designed care, that Israel has 266 kibbutzim generating measurably better aging outcomes, that Belgium has 800-year-old walled communities of solo women, that Sweden has legally recognized “living apart together” — you start to realize something important:
Your life shape is not a mistake. It’s a model that other cultures have already validated.
You are not too late. You are not alone. You are not walking a path no one has walked before. You are, in fact, part of one of the oldest and most widely-practiced human experiments — living well, with community, without conforming to a single template.
Take that in.
You’re in good, ancient company. 🤍
