The
Gray Wave
“When
you get to my age, you really measure your success by how many of the people
you want to love you actually do love you…If you get to my age in life, and
nobody thinks well of you, your life is a disaster. That’s the ultimate test of
how you have lived your life.”
Warren
Buffett
My
friend Anna and I were having our daily phone rant about technology; about how
it never works when you need it to, and when you try to get help you get a
machine that puts you on an eternal wait-list and then breaks your will to hang
on with elevator music and loud ads. We decided that in-person tech support
should be one of the benefits of Social Security Medicare, since the inability
to deal with modern technology causes us to become mentally deranged, elevates our blood
pressure, and reduces us to mean and bitter people who yell at innocents in
call centers half-way around the world. We decided to launch a movement called
the Gray Wave. We could march on the capital and protest our invisibility and
our oppression! We could use our canes and wheelchairs as battering rams! Just
kidding—that takes too much energy.
I
recently read a New York Times article by David Marchese about the pioneering
economist Herman Daly, who said America’s obsession with growth is a losing
game, that instead, we should measure success by quality of life for all our
people. “The art of living is not synonymous with ‘more stuff’…Growth is an
idol of our present system.” I feel the same way about our obsession with
technology. It gets more complicated and less accessible every day. We have arranged
the world to be totally dependent upon it, and yet half of us don’t understand
it, and at least a third of us don’t even have access to it.
The
late, great David Bowie said, “Aging is an extraordinary process where you
become the person you always should have been.” This is also true. We don’t
have to lose our minds in frustration—this should be, and is for most of us, a
rewarding and beautiful life stage. Many of the old fears of abandonment and of
not measuring up in some important way, have long been laid to rest. We
recognize our faults, our weaknesses and, thankfully, our strengths. Technological
skill is not one of them. We really do need help with that. In our lifetimes,
the world has gone from telephone party-lines, and radio as our primary source
of information, to the computer age and social media. We cut our teeth on typewriters,
not keyboards. We can, however, compete with anyone in language skills and
emotional intelligence. Not because we are superior beings, but because we have
lived it all—all except modern technology. Most of us are not pining for youth,
but technology and the lack of human help with it has led to the perception of
us as “bitter old people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
Betty
Friedan said, “Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and
strength.” It should be a time of sharing our understanding of life and human
nature, and it should NOT be spent on a cell phone for hours waiting for tech
support to sort out our computer problems. Our time is precious now—more
precious than ever. Let’s not spend it screaming at the computer.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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