Writing While Semi-Old
Supposedly my mental powers are waning. I’m in irreversible decline.
I can dig it. I’m not so delusional I still think about winning on Jeopardy. Fifty was the threshold on Senior Jeopardy for a reason and I’m 72. I know my quick recall of specific facts isn’t what it used to be, but then we didn’t used to have Wikipedia.
My creative powers are not waning.
By creative I mean continually updating my models from many perspectives and constantly producing my own expressions in many forms. Since that is pretty much what I do most of the time every day, it’s not hard to be more creative than ever.
I’m also better at it, which might be the more surprising part. I take in a huge amount and I send a lot of my own synthesized insights back out in a few different ways. Sometimes I publish when it’s good enough. Sometimes I know it’s next-level when it is coming through me and I just try to stay out of the way.
People who know tell me when I get one right. Practice doesn’t make perfect but it does if you listen to your feedback or lack of feedback and act on it.
Who cares? Besides me, I mean.
Even as my powers are supposedly waning, simply by being semi-old, I supposedly have some Wisdom. Maybe I’m an outlier who can still produce after the wisdom starts accumulating.
But wisdom from still-functioning elders doesn’t grab an audience like ‘Ten Tips for Negotiating Your Next Raise’ does. It’s really hard to entice anyone to read anything longer than a paragraph without an obvious benefit-to-them.
I can say I don’t care if anyone reads it but it’s not true.
I like the idea of being a semi-old nano-influencer. My creative platforms were nicely lined up. Medium is where Followers want me to write about VR. That’s why they followed me. My best VR Medium pieces get 100s of reads quickly and 1000s over time. If I write about any other topic and publish it on Medium, it gets less than 10 reads ever.
That’s why Sub-Stack became where I’d publish everything that’s not VR, like this. It’s an all-opt-in, all-free subscriber vehicle for me. It’s slowly growing by itself and I’m in no hurry.
The only reason I am reflecting on the situation right now is that both platforms are disrupting or being disrupted big-time at this moment.
Medium blew up, again. And Sub-Stack is in mainstream cross-hairs for helping superstar non-conformists destroy journalism.
Medium’s entire Editorial staff was offered buy-outs because paying editors to pay professional writers to grow in-house publications didn’t produce subscriptions the way the owner and CEO had apparently hoped. And since he’s Ev Willams, the original blogger and tweeter, he can do what he wants, which he has, more than once.
The anti-Sub-Stack argument is that in days of yore, Big Name Journalists paid for the whole news department, paid for the overhead and everything else — especially, as we hear a lot, for the State House-level investigative reporting that the Fifth Estate needs to do, because no one else does. Someone like Glen Greenwald can still do great reporting on his own, but he can’t keep his eye on 50 State Houses.
If he and others like him leave the publications and work independently, who will?
I have no idea.
This highlights one of the main features of Writing While Old:
What matters to me doesn’t matter.
I feel a creative energy flowing through me more than I ever have in my life. I don’t want to waste it. I need to let it turn into writing and videos and now— entire Worlds in VR.
I am not just grateful to feel this way while semi-old, I’m crazy about it, a little intoxicated by it—that this faraway and necessarily unknowable time of life could be full of learning creating stuff.
It doesn’t matter. This is not what the mainstream culture wants, expects, or is designed to deal with.
I’m just a scout and I’m here to witness the future of Oldness. VR offers shared social presence. But what will the systems facilitate? Consuming or creating, or both, as we choose?
These questions are being answered now, during the pandemic.
VR is inherently linked to distribution technologies. No one imagines being in VR without content and/or alone. VR leads to networks.
VR networks are being forged now and old people are one of the most active centers of marketing and implementation.
There are about 30,000 assisted living communities and another 15,000 nursing Care facilities in the United States alone Companies are currently creating, in effect, private headset networks, by providing hardware and content for old people to institutional subscribers. A current Wall Street Journal report gives some indication of progress to date:
MyndVR, 150 elder-care facilities in 47 states and Canada
Rendever, 250 senior homes
Viva Vita, 10 senior-care facilities
Less than one percent. But an easy-to-understand tendency is already in place. The focus is on the Content. How many titles are available in the library? These systems are walled gardens, so the question is important to the extent that Content is King, which it will be if it is presented that way.
At the moment MyndVR and Rendever are something like what AOL was once trying to be, for many of the same reasons. Safety, security, and targeted Content. And did I mention safety?
The Mission Statements make it sound like VR as a Social Benefit is compatible with VR as a way to make a ton of money. Maybe it is. I really hope so.
That’s why I’m pointing out that watching movies or clips of Paris in a headset isn’t a way to address social isolation It might be a way to help address the lack of sensory stimulation and other big problems and there’s plenty of research underway, but passively consuming Content in a VR headset isn’t that far from the Matrix.
It’s also why I’m pointing out the Network aspect of how VR is emerging. Networks can be used to connect people, not just to distribute Content. VR really can defeat distance and make people feel present with each other.
,AlcoveVR is AARP’s virtual product that could be the place for making those connections.
AARP is a sales and marketing machine. It is so obvious that millions of people between 55-100+ will be led into a virtual freemium world, with lots of nice stuff and a price tag on the next level. Who wouldn’t get the next level brain gym for gramma?
Can the imperative of selling and making a return on investment live comfortably with the avowed social benefits?
I’m writing about myself here, how I am regarded as retired person who is still creating instead of just consuming.
Will I be treated as a category to sell stuff to or as a person? Someone to be shown respect or someone to be taken advantage of? Will I be able to share my own creative work with my friends and family or anyone or will the Walled Garden be limited to authorized content I have to pay for? Will my family livestream family events so I can be there when I can’t, or will I have to purchase a generic holiday morning?
Virtual Worlds are so perfectly suited to helping people stay creative and connected as they age, compensating for functions in decline and amplifying what anyone values the most. They are also perfectly suited for manipulation.
Now you see my plan. I am setting up my Alcove and I will not just Write about it While Semi-Old — I will use it to exemplify being alive and connected to people as I continue the transitions.