Being a Baby Boomer Doesn't Mean You're Dead Yet

What do you think of when you think of someone who's "middle-aged"? Technically, I'm past middle age--I really don't think I'm going to live to be 110. Nor do I want to--everyone I know, plus all my teeth and functioning joints, would be gone.

Two interesting things in the last 24 hours made me think about this this morning when I should really be doing other things. One was this, a page posted on the blog of someone who tweeted me about museum experiences, which is what made this so serendipitous. Let's see if I can condense the story [bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha]:

Our walking route goes through the grounds of the Museum of the Southwest, the old Turner Mansion (where, back in the 1960s, there was a scandalous murder. The wife was killed, and a black man was convicted of the murder. Some people believe the husband did it and the black man was just the convenient target. Duh: Midland, Texas. 1960s. Anyway, I love a mystery--just about any kind of mystery except the ones that plague me, like: what in the world happened to the charcoal henley I prepared for making a yoolie, cutting it and picking the floss and putting it in a bag and pinning it to the collar? I had it all ready to go, and it vanished. I have no idea where it is or what could have happened to it, and that's the kind of mystery I most certainly do NOT like.

Most other kinds, though? Love them).

OK, I'm already not doing so well with the whole "condensing" thing, am I?

Anyway, so we walk through the grounds. The museum is closed on Monday, but people work there, and the director of the children's museum has given us a standing invitation to stop in on any Monday to check out the current exhibit--she knows I'm not a kid person and am not going to come in on a day when there are actual kids visiting. So yesterday we went in to check out the current exhibit, on masks. It was interesting, and--even better--they made use of QR codes: you can scan various codes for more information, short videos, slide shows. I loved it, and we got to talking about QR codes and then podcasts.

More about that in a minute.

When I got home, I tweeted about this--about the museum doing a good job using QR codes in a creative and useful way. And that's when I got the tweet. It had a link, and I don't follow tweeted links unless they make sense in the context--from someone I know about something I would expect them to tweet. You know the drill. But for some reason I checked out her profile and went to her website, and I found this, about how she set up a business helping middle-aged people with their problems with technology. This is a good thing--and a brilliant idea--but it bothers me that it's necessary. And the "Baby Boomers" in the title make me shriek a little.

Back to the conversation at the museum. Another woman was there, and she was talking about how she's getting ready to start doing podcasts for the museum. Both women are in their late 20s/early 30s. The one we know says she's not into technology at all; the other admitted that it's a little scary--she wants to do podcasts but doesn't really know how to put it all together. I explained the process--what she'll need, what some of the options are--and gave her my email so she can ask questions.

This isn't the first time this has happened, that someone way younger than I am has asked about podcasting or making iMovies or setting up a website or an Etsy shop. What I'm coming to believe, more and more, is that it's not about age and technology, but about interests. My nieces and nephews (20s, early 30s) are all on Facebook. Most of them have smart phones that they carry in their hands constantly. My editors and people with whom I work are mostly about the same age. They know Facebook and Twitter, Etsy and Pinterest and Linkedin. They know all that stuff.

But most of the people I know know nothing about how to set up an automatic backup of their hard drive or create and distribute a podcast or create a QR code or make and share a movie with music. They don't know about Dropbox for file sharing or about creating pages on their blog. I believe it's not that Young People are amazingly technology-savvy; it's that they're very socially oriented. They use social media constantly, and they know how to use technology for that. But many of them don't use their actual computers/laptops/iPads for much else beyond that and sharing photos and videos and maybe doing some light word processing. This isn't a bad thing; it's knowing what you want to know and focusing on that.

Sure, there are more 19-year-old computer geeks writing code and creating apps and hacking into bank accounts than there are 60 year olds doing the same thing, but there *are* 60 year olds doing it. It's not about age; it's about interest: knowing what interests you and focusing on that and learning what you need to know to be able to do it.

(And here I have to insert that I *do* know at least one kid who's a total computer geek, who takes apart and rebuilds his computers and can do amazing stuff that I can't even understand. But it's OK that I don't understand--the math-and-science part isn't the part I want to know more about; I know whom to call if suddenly a huge wad of wires and bolts and 2 x 4s and PVP pipe falls out onto the desk.)

I've ranted before about how irritating it is to me to hear women (it's almost always women; men may feel the same way, but they keep it to themselves. Except my husband, who has no problem telling you how little he likes technology and how happy he is to leave it to me, which is just one more reason we get along so well) my age say they can't do this and they can't do that and (the straw that breaks me every time) they have to wait to send me something/do something/show something until their son (it's always their son and never their daughter) has time to do it for them. This makes me crazy. While I have no problem with someone who, like my husband, has no interest in computers or what's online and is happy to admit it, I have a real problem with someone who wants and needs to use the technology but has decided, for some reason, that they're too old to do so and that Someone Young has to do it for them. I kind of fell for this, too, when I wanted to start doing podcasts. I foolishly assumed that every Young Person with a computer knew this stuff, and I knew a bunch of Young People with computers, so I'd have a bunch of information and a bunch of options, right?

Not a single one of them knew anything about it at all. Most of them didn't even know what podcasts were.

But that's understandable, once I started thinking about it: you know about what interests you, and they weren't interested. Makes sense. What doesn't make sense is assuming that if something *does* interest you, you can't learn about it because you're too old.

How is that possible? Oh, sure, if you've got some kind of brain malfunction, then it would make sense. But otherwise? No, age isn't an excuse. You learn what you want to learn. If you decide this--whatever it is--is something that would be fun or useful or lucrative or entertaining or whatever--you learn it.

Back to the museum: one of the (remember: young) women said it was all just overwhelming--Etsy and Pinterest and Twitter and all the rest--and I told her that's because people think they have to know it all and do it all and master it all, and that's just not true. You can't use all of it--there's not enough time. There're not enough hours in the day to keep up with everything. You have to figure out what you want to do and focus on that.

Focus, focus, focus. That's the key.

Same with technology. You don't need to know everything about your computer. This iMac does tons and tons of stuff that I don't know about. I have never used Automator or made a slide show or a DVD. I know nothing about creating spread sheets or PowerPoint presentations (on the Mac, that would be KeyNote). But here's the deal: I don't need to know that stuff. Someday I might need to know it, and then I can find out about it. Until then, though, there's no reason for spending time learning it and having that information cluttering up my brain until I forget it. And forget it I would because 1) I have no reason to use it and reinforce the neural pathways of the stuff I learned and 2) I forget everything. (Except, it seems, every moment of my mother's last day in the hospital, which plays for me like a movie at totally random times.)

Anyway. There are two problems here, and they dovetail. One is that people my age seem to think they're too old to learn new stuff, and the other is that many people of all ages believe there's so much stuff to learn, they'll never be able to learn it all.

They dovetail at curiosity. If you're curious about something--if you want to learn how something works, want to master it, want to find out what you can do--that's over half the battle. A huge portion of the rest is figuring out what you don't need. You don't need to learn everything all at once. You learn the basics, and you learn the stuff that interests you, and the rest can wait. I will probably never need to make a DVD, never mind that there's an application for doing that--iDVD--right here, and that all the manuals devote chapters to this. I haven't opened the program, and I haven't read the chapters. But if the day comes (which I doubt it will--few people share movies on DVDs any more), I can open it up, read the chapters, figure it out.

I have never had a lesson in anything having to do with computers. I didn't know anyone who used a computer until I was in graduate school, and there was only one person who had one, a total geek girl. I had a graduate degree and was in my 30s before I ever touched a computer--heck, I didn't learn how to type keyboard until I was in college. I got my first dedicated word processor forever ago. It was used, and it was huge, and it weighed a ton. The disks were big platter-sized (well, almost) things, and the "manual" was some poorly-Xeroxed sheets hastily stapled together, and I bumbled along and figured out what I needed to know to do a bunch of writing on that thing--it served me well. I never tried to learn to do much on it--I knew it was just a temporary thing. The next computer I had was also used, and again with the photocopied "user's manual," and again with the bumbling. When I finally got my first brand-new PC, the first thing I did was go buy manuals--the "for Dummies" ones and the 1000+-page ones and everything in between. And I read them all and spent a ton of time trying things out. By the time I switched to a Mac, I'd learned what I needed to know, which was this: you don't need to know everything. You need to know only what you need to know; you can learn the other stuff when you need to know it.

Life isn't like school. You're not required to learn stuff in a certain order. You don't have to master everything in a course before you can move on. In life, you can learn just the basics and then add to those when you need to. And the key is: as long as you're curious and willing to stretch yourself, it's never too late to learn new stuff.

[Whoa. I was sitting here typing and started getting a headache. I never have headaches, so this was pretty odd. And it got odder and odder until I reached up to my head and discovered the reading glasses I'd pushed up there are not my regular, familiar ones but a much smaller, tighter pair I'd grabbed from one of the 10,549 locations where these are stashed throughout the house. I took them off my head, and the headache immediately went away. I think there's a lesson in there.]

I have so many problems with women my age and the things they believe about what they can do, what they can't do, what they should do. About technology and clothes, about physical activity and interests. People I know are selling their houses and moving to another town to "be near our grandkids," which makes me wonder how they can have so little that interests them that they can give it all up to move hundreds of miles away to be someone's baby sitter. Sure, they want to spend time with their family, but giving up everything--the house, the neighborhood, the friends, the activities--is the life you've created of that little interest to you that you're willing to give it all up just because You're Getting Old?

Oy.

I hate hearing "I can't do that," "I can't wear that," "I can't learn that." If you think that--at any age--then of COURSE it's true. Tell yourself you can't do something, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Do me a favor. If you're Middle-Aged, male or female, and you're mired in the "I can't do that" slough of despond, sit yourself down for a good talk. If you're in decent health, there's no reason you can't do the things you want to do. Change your diet, get more exercise, walk away from the television, get some books. Make lists. Keep a journal. Make a chart. Make plans. Above all, be curious. The longer I live, the more I realize that the people I want to know and talk to are the people who are curious about things. Wide-ranging things, random things, serial things, obsessive things. Just curious.

I think that's another blog post, though.

OK. I'm done. Thanks for sticking it out all the way through~~XO