Modern aging dilemmas
Getting Older in a Tech-Infused World
Can we keep up as we age?
For a long time, I considered myself an early adopter. When something new was released — software, a gadget, a computer — I wanted to try it out. In my work as a technologist in a college, I often set aside Fridays as a day for exploration and testing out new things, and then I’d write about the results on my blog or in a newsletter I sent to the faculty at my school.
Even if I didn’t fully adopt some of the things I tested, I enjoyed exploring them, and it was great to learn about new tools and gadgets. Still, even then, I sometimes felt exhausted keeping up with all the new developments.
One day, I recall walking into my office and saying to my officemates, “I just found out about this thing called podcasts, and I don’t know if I have the energy to figure them out.”
Later that day, I figured out how podcasts worked, and later that week, I launched my own podcast with my officemates called “Click and Double-Click.”
I’ve always been a motivated learner. I taught myself HTML and CSS. I learned several programming languages, mostly on my own. Thanks to Google — and sometimes to AI — it’s easy to learn to do many technical things. Just ask.
