• Locations
  • Experience
  • Stories
  • About us
  • Careers
  • Shop
Join the waitlist
Ambassadors

10 Questions —
David Stewart

David Stewart started his career as a photographer and a creative director. At 56, he channelled his skills and interest into founding the AGEIST.

What has motivated you to do all the interesting things in your life?

Having a sense of agency and effect on the world around me is what has motivated me my entire life. I need to see the impact I’m making on my surroundings – in a big way. I am also extremely curious. Once I knew I could have a bigger impact with AGEIST, I went all in.

When you think about the AGEIST and the community around it, what are you most proud of?

We are now a leading authority on ageing for our kind of people – those who are living in a modern, active way. I’m very proud that we have been able to give a face to this community who was previously invisible and considered to be just a liability. Instead of viewing age as a problem that needs a solution, we’re saying that this phase of life is something to aspire to. Essentially, we’re involved in moving the culture in a small way, much like what happened with feminism in the 70s or gay rights in the 80s or 90s. People need to see images to understand this shift, because only then does it become a reference point, an attainable goal. And that’s what we’re really good at: the showing, along with the telling.

Like the AGEIST, THE EMBASSIES exists to change the social narrative and experience of age. What one piece of advice would you give our audience to better enjoy the whole of their lives?

The most important thing is to have a life of meaning and purpose. If you have that, then you will automatically aspire to health and wellness. You will automatically move towards community and engagement. That’s the huge problem with retirement. Often work is a person’s purpose. If you take that away from someone, and they don’t have anything to replace it with, they go off the rails. It’s manifested in statistics. Just look at the relation between retirement and death. Victor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy and the author or Man’s Search for Meaning, said it well: people need meaning. The Japanese even have a phrase for it: ikigai. If you have meaning, you can sustain anything. Purpose can become an organising principle for your life.

You often speak about the need for those who are building homes for the 50+ community to think about spaces and wellness solutions that can help them achieve their full potential. What’s the most important thing to consider?

You have to be careful with this 50+ thing. I’m 61 and my mother is 90. What I need and what she needs is vastly different. When a person enters a senior community at 85, they do so because they need access to amenities and services that facilitate life. But people who are younger don’t have those needs; in order for them to move, they need to want to be in a place. So essentially, we need to build for what’s desired rather than what’s required. That is what THE EMBASSIES is doing, and a major point in achieving that is community. Unfortunately, that’s the thing that most housing does not address because the purchase decision is often made solely with real estate or design in mind. If you want me to live in a place, you have to surround me with other people I find stimulating, no matter what their ages may be.

Is there a place where you can do your best work, have the best time, be the best version of yourself? In a nutshell, what does your ideal place look like?

With Covid, I had a change of heart about this. I’ve recently spent a lot of time in the mountains of Utah. It’s a place entirely devoid of culture, but it gives me the space to think and I get a lot more done there than I do in LA. Alternating between places seems to work for me. When I’m in LA, it’s all about the culture. And then when I go to Utah, I have the trees and animals. Maybe if I lived in a different place, I wouldn’t need these polar opposites. But I tend to like extremes. When I lived in Chinatown in Manhattan, I had a trailer on a mountain top in upstate New York.

You were a creative director and photographer and now you lead a media company and a community. If you look back, what would you do differently?

Nothing. Life is a series of steps. You can’t jump them. When I have the time, I still take the pictures for the AGEIST. I couldn’t have been born into doing all the stuff I do now. I had to do what I did to be where I am and do what I do.

You were a creative director and photographer and now you lead a media company and a community. If you look back, what would you do differently?

Nothing. Life is a series of steps. You can’t jump them. When I have the time, I still take the pictures for the AGEIST. I couldn’t have been born into doing all the stuff I do now. I had to do what I did to be where I am and do what I do.

What’s your outlook on the near future? Should we feel optimistic?

I think we are going to see people pay more attention to proper science and really tap into what matters. We need to think of Covid as an accelerator. It has turbo-charged all manner of things by giving people the time and space to reflect. Black Lives Matter would not have happened with the intensity it has without Covid. People in cities would not have been working from home as much or breathing cleaner air – and maybe now they’ve decided that they would like more of that. We may have nationalism and hard borders we can’t cross but, because of Zoom, I am now more connected to people around the world than I ever was before. I don’t think people will just forget these relationships. We have gone through a weird anti-science and anti-knowledge period. And look how that turned out! Now science is becoming a top priority. People are increasingly looking to experts and scientists, and really paying attention to their answers. And that’s great.

Have you learnt anything new recently – about yourself and others – or acquired a new skill?

Something I’ve been seeing that I think is interesting is that all these changes we just talked about are also happening on a personal level to people. All of a sudden, people have been given all this time to re-evaluate. Normally re-evaluation would take years. Now it has happened in months, and people are taking action. Not just to leave the city for the country, but in many more ways. We are seeing a reordering not just of societal priorities but of personal ones as well. This period has forced people to have uncomfortable conversations that before would have taken years.

What do you hope you will be doing at 95 that you have not dared to do yet?

I would like to change that question. The better question to ask is, how do you envision dying? If you have a vision of how you want to die, you can think about the life you want to live up until that day. I want to be walking in the Alps and have a coronary and die there. It’s going be a problem for my wife, but she’ll figure it out.

And what do you do now that you still want to be doing when you are 95?

If I want to die hiking a 4000-metre mountain, I need to be a person that has the curiosity to do that. That means I have to take care of my body, my spirit and my mind in order to be the type of person that wants to hike a mountain when I’m 95.

  • The Concept
  • Join us
  • About us
  • Answers
  • Stories
Deutsch
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Medium

ABOUT

Founded in Switzerland and globally at home, THE EMBASSIES is a global serviced living concept for lifestyle driven grown-ups, and radically changes the narrative on ageing presenting a new way to grow old. The concept includes an international network of individually curated communities in the world’s greatest cities providing all amenities and services for its members, residents and guests.

Höschgasse 25
8008 Zürich, Switzerland

hello@embassies.com
  • Privacy policy

THE EMBASSIES
of Good Living AG © 2022