Thursday, October 1, 2026
I am astonished to tell you that I just marked my 79th birthday.
No greetings and salutations, please. It’s a big number, and it weighs a ton. I’m standing on the threshold of lights-out and wondering how I got from then to now.
In 1949 I could walk under my parents’ dining room table. It was my special parlor trick. Then playground, school, dating, college, marriage, kids, grandkids and closing curtains. I’m still short, but I can’t clear the tabletop. And that’s not all that has changed.
Culture, politics, fashion, food and entertainment are often unrecognizable to me. Sometimes I feel estranged from “modern” life.
As I write this out of my own brain, sharing my unadulterated, unimproved or revised thoughts, I’m being assaulted by prompts asking if I want “Copilot” to rework my sentences. I don’t know where Copilot came from and have no idea how to get rid of it. This isn’t a one-off experience. It’s daily combat with technology that threatens to drive me screaming from the house.
I’m barely exaggerating. Many friends are more adept with technology, but many more are less skilled. This is a constant challenge, whether I try to pay a bill or reach a doctor or, heaven forbid, get a copy of a document from the DMV.
Life is hard enough, what with approaching death and such. But add heaven knows how many streaming services when all you want to do is turn on the freaking TV for a half hour; it’s too much. With all the tools that are supposed to make life easier, it has undoubtedly become more complicated. And this isn’t just an oldster’s kvetch.
Time was, I could go for a walk in peace and quiet, enjoying my own thoughts. Now I’m fully sucked into the need to do three things at once: walk, listen to a book while I read and answer messages, and have some app count my steps. I never signed on to this app, yet it has the nerve to tell me after a walk: “Next time you can do better.”
I want to be alone, and all day long I’m assailed by pings and rings and notifications ad nauseum. I talk to friends in real time and real space, and as I share my private thoughts with them, they’re talking to the watch on their wrist. This can’t be good for anyone.
I know this sounds like every older generation’s observations of the young, but in this case, really, you know I’m right. No one just sits and talks to one another anymore without a prop, like a phone.
I think about my first encounters with boys when we were in grade school. We started and stumbled and learned to talk to one another, and then danced and then dated and made out in cars. Today I read story after story about how 20-somethings say that romance and dating are dead. Who killed it?
Did we boomers somehow get the best of it? You know, right place, right time? The pace of life, the devices, the culture of increasing isolation are not working to make a better life for the grandkids.
We were inexperienced and naïve enough to feel wonder and delight in love and travel and having children. Now “parenting” seems like a burden to many young people, and indeed it is, with apps that track ovulation and breast milk availability. The technology hijacks the entire experience. You can’t do better as a parent by finding the exact time Baby will burp after feeding. What you can do is lose the joy of the moment.
From my vantage point, stepping into my 80th year, it’s been a pretty good life so far. These last years have brought some painful challenges, but the decades before provided a buffer of good memories and gratitude. We can’t travel right now, but it is said that real discovery isn’t looking for something new but seeing the same life with different eyes.
I believe with all my heart that for many of us boomers, the pandemic and its isolation, the separation from kids, grandkids and friends, robbed us of the years we might have eased into older age. And now we’re here. The best I can do is look at this moment, and it will be just a moment, with new eyes.
Copyright 2026 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.
