No, my AARP cohorts, my baby boomer and sexagenarian friends, I will not be wintering in Palm Springs or Forty Myers this year. I won’t be spending my days on gator infested golf courses and pretending to like it. There will be no more Bengay and Advil inducing doubles matches, nor cribbage, bridge, or pot luck dinners at the community center, and you can forget about those senior citizen cruises, too. Why this sudden change of heart, you ask. Why this new outlook on life? It’s simple: I’ve stopped resisting the modern world and learned to love technology. So how did an Internet Cro-Magnon turn into the next generation of blogger?
A Wii For Me, A Wii for (U)
“When I became a man, I put away childish things.” I can’t place the line, but I remember it every time I think about technology because it was my grandson’s new Wii system, particularly the tennis game, that changed everything. In other words, in order to embrace the modern world, I had to pick up childish things. Well, I’ve always liked indoor tennis. This was bonding time, too. My grandson had a field day when I sent the game controller sailing through the living room window (those wooden, Wilson rackets used to pop out of my hand sometimes too) even posting the destruction on YouTube, along with millions of other Wii mishaps and injuries. That was it; the tech seed was planted.
The Apple Store
From YouTube to Facebook, from Facebook to the Apple Store, that was my trajectory. Call it a re-education. Smartphones, tablets, minis, I learned how to use them all. I sat in on Saturday morning tutorials, the Blue Shirt Brigade flashing California smiles as they gave the group of tech dinosaurs a crash course in modernity, answering questions about Pinterest, Instagram, Cloud computing. Was it the bright lights and Scandinavian design of the Apple store that was so attractive or the gadgetry? Blog about it, said my grandson. Apple as Utopia. The Global Village. A doomsday cult?
What Older Generations Think About Technology
Inspired by Marilyn Hagerty, an 85-year old food critic whose review of a popular restaurant chain received 290,000 hits when it first went viral, I took my grandson’s advice and started my own blog. It documents what older generations think about new technology; and yes, a retired engineer in Ohio did refer to Apple as a doomsday cult, using the world Orwellian 20 times in his post.
Needless to say, it was no easy task to get the blog up and running. A website content service helped me with the nuts and bolts. Now I have a steady stream of guest bloggers, ad support and more traffic than an L.A. freeway at rush hour. I’ve got companies knocking down my door to help them better target the gray-haired demographic.
Who has time for Palm Springs or Fort Myers?
Damon H is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments.
