Japanese women say sodai gomi to describe their retired husbands.

Taken literally, the phrase means large-sized waste! Wives hate to be around pension-age husbands who sit at home doing nothing. In America, the term is ‘retired husband syndrome.’ In Pakistan, hmmm, well wives honour the old geezers, not lampoon them. It’s in our DNA.

All you septuagenarians out there wake up and smell the coffee. Don’t let age slow you down. Don’t line up to walk into the sunset and vanish forever. Not yet! Yes, yes, I know you don’t have five billion dollars handy to buy Dow Jones and its affiliate The Wall Street Journal, only a fellow like Rupert Murdoch can. Still, if the 76-year-old can do it, so can you.

I don’t mean that you should go out and get married for the third time as Murdoch has done and that too with a woman half his age who has presented him with two toddlers to date. Life is a gift to be lived at all stages, no matter how advanced the doggone years. It’s all in the head and you don’t have to be a billionaire to live each moment with zest. Whatever your budget, no matter how tiny your egg nest, you can still dare to dream … Deep down, your soul will tell you what you want. Ultimately, it’s a choice only you can impassion.

Live with your music still in you.

Allow me to backtrack and sketch a motif of Rupert Murdoch. Who is this guy? Well, you can look up on the media bogyman over the net. What might hold your interest is how the Aussie’s fledgling fortune took off when he put his faith in a women’s magazine called New Idea. That was 50 some years ago. Today, the magazine’s circulation is 3rd highest in Australia, easily beating Reader’s Digest. Surely this must tell you something about the mind of the man who later broke all barriers to acquire the most influential newspapers and TV channels in Australia, the UK and the US? It tells us that he’s willing to take risks, no matter how chilling to conquer the world and eternalise his media empire across three continents.

The maverick has penetrated the blue-blooded aristocracy jealously guarded by four American families for centuries in the realm of newspapers, causing angst and anger. The clan of four regarded themselves as guardians of ‘public trusts’, controlling independent newspapers ‘vital to the national discourse’. They are the Sulzbergers, who own the New York Times; the Grahams, who control the Washington Post; the Chandlers, who controlled the Los Angeles Times; and the Bancrofts who owned Wall Street Journal until a week ago when Murdoch wrested it from them. The Journal is the second biggest paper in the US.

At a private gathering, Arthur Sulzberger Jr was heard howling to guests that with an intruder like Murdoch controlling the Journal, the era of families running independent newspapers was over. He seriously agonised whether a day would come when the Australian-American would make a bid on his family paper the New York Times (NYT), already in a financial splutter. But Times op-ed columnist Alastair Campbell in an article titled ‘Don’t be afraid of Rupert Murdoch’ admits that the NYT “is not what it was. But nor is the world it reports upon, and nor is the business world in which it operates. And love him or hate him Murdoch, consider his influence to be benign or malignant, at virtually every step of change, Rupert Murdoch has been ahead of the game.”

Aha, people who are “ahead of the game” no matter how old or how slummy still have a chance of making it. Right?

The old fox, I mean Murdoch, is described as being a businessman first, journalist second and power player third. “We are kidding ourselves if we pretend that the personalities who own newspapers do not have an influence on editorial stance and posture. Mr. Murdoch does not really need to interfere directly. His editors know what he thinks and he is rarely far from their thoughts,” says Campbell.

The subliminal question then is why should a man at seventy-six be so juiced by the adrenaline pumping through his body to want to change the face of print journalism?

The short answer: he signals change. He knows he will succeed if the paper focuses on ‘what it means’ journalism and not just ‘what happened’ wrought ironed in the tenets and traditions of hard news reporting. “Murdoch likes opinion and interpretation and in a world where today's papers can end up full of yesterday's website bulletins, that approach is likely to stand him in good stead,” says one analyst.

Breaking views is what the tradition-trampling Murdoch favours over breaking news.

Readers may well wonder why I harp on Murdoch when I should be talking about lifestyles for seventy plus as was the flavour of this article. Fair enough. I concede Murdoch is not an ordinary Joe to pander about while discussing ‘retired husband syndrome’ or talking about Japanese wives canning their husbands waste material. He’s too stinking rich. But hey, life is not all about sitting in the garden and smelling the roses or going for that stroll in the park early morning to hear love birds sing. Nor is life about being a couch potato watching the idiot box 24/7.

Say goodbye to all that jazz. Recognise the draw of eternal essence; let glamour of change take charge. The Greeks didn't write obituaries, they only asked one question after a man died, ‘Did he have passion?’

Are you passionate for change? Then make Murdoch your model!