Fernando Gros's Blog, page 3

A Personal Statement About Generative AI

When it comes to technology, I’m usually optimistic. I believe technology can be liberating. It can make life better. I look at technological innovations in the home. Light bulbs. Washing machines. Refrigerators. These changed domestic life and freed up many hours for people to live a less burdensome life.

Over the years, I’ve brought this optimism to digital innovations. Personal computers. The Internet. Smartphones. The case for them was obvious. They made it easier and often cheaper to do repetitive and challenging tasks that required a lot of time and effort. They made life better.

I approached Generative AI in the same way. I wrote about this over a year ago, asking how it might help someone like me. I was sceptical, but I tried to find the positives.

I was naive and wrong.

It’s become increasingly clear that the negatives around generative AI far outweigh the positives. And that there are very few positives.

The True Cost of Generative AI

The training of these systems involved the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history. No one asked if my 20 years of writing here could be scraped to train large language models that will make someone else richer. And yet it happened. It happened to every creative – authors, musicians, photographers, artists, and designers – who posted their work online. Theft. Plain and simple.

And with all that data, Generative AI manages to solve very few real problems. It approximates solutions. But doesn’t deliver them. There’s no reason to be hopeful Generative AI will get much better in the coming years. It may have already peaked. All we are left with is poor-quality impersonations of things that could be done better by actual humans.

The Lesson of Generative AI

What Generative AI has done is lay bare the attitudes of the people who advocate for it. How little respect they have for their employees. Or for the whole class of people who work in creative industries. To these “leaders”, it doesn’t matter that Generative AI generates mostly crap. They believe their employees are capable of little more than crap anyway. And art is just well-marketed crap. At least Generative AI is cheap crap. Crap that won’t speak back like a human would. Or demand a pay rise.

Which is crazy given how expensive Generative AI is. Not just the outrageous amounts of funding that have gone into a technology that has no clear and compelling use case. But also, the environmental and cultural costs of Generative AI’s insatiable appetite for computational power.

All The Use Cases Are Already in Use

Announcements from Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) were reported as a sign the company is trying to play catch up on AI – or Apple Intelligence, as they called it. While some generative features were shown, most of the useful tech was things Apple had already been working on for years. What until now they described as machine leaning.

Back in 2012, I reported on Apple acquiring the Italian software developer Redmatica. This was for tech that went into managing audio files and music production features in Apple’s Logic products.

In 2015, I attended the Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference in New York, and there were plenty of machine learning tools in the algorithms that powered software for mixing music and repairing audio files.

Whether it’s making music, editing photos, or making and moving products around the world, the past 10–15 years have seen a huge shift in the power of software for creative industries, logistics and manufacturing.

But it’s important to distinguish this new generation of software that solves complex problems incredibly fast from the generative AI plugged as something that can create new things from the smallest of simple prompts.

The Crucial Technological Distinction

If AI is increasingly being used as a catchphrase for all sorts of software innovations that we already use and live with, then it’s worth distinguishing between AI and Generative AI.

The latter, Generative AI, is the tech I’m talking about here. The words created by ChatGPT. The images coming from Midjourney. The changes Google is making to search.

I believe this distinction matters. On one side are tools that speed up or make more reliable tasks that we can already do. That help manage processes and workflows that are still directed and supervised by real people. Tools that already exist and already work.

On the other side are tools that claim to be able to help us do things we can’t do. That claim to be able to manage processes largely unsupervised. That generate work on its own.

It’s the difference between a tool that helps a writer edit their work faster and more consistently and a tool that tries to replace the writer altogether.

But I acknowledge the distinction might be hard to hold onto as more and more apps have AI features shoehorned into them. Even we choose not to use them they will still be there.

Allow Me to Rant for a Minute

I find it hard to write about this. Not because the technology is hard to understand or difficult to explain. But because sitting down to write, I can feel the walls caving in around me. It’s as if the weight of all my beliefs about the cultural value of technology and innovation, the aesthetics of a life well lived, the morality of treating people well, just collapse. I find myself wanting to scream “rich people in Silicon Valley want to convince you that art, democracy, and human connections don’t matter because they can make more money if you buy into the shrunken version of humanity they are peddling.”

Okay, rant over. Back to the essay.

Choosing Humanity

Let’s put this in the context of our relationship for a moment. Writer and reader.

This blog has over 2,200 posts. Behind the scenes, it’s a bit of a mess. My cataloguing system, categories and tags, has evolved haphazardly over nearly 20 years. I could run some tool in the background to clean that up. It would make things easier for me. It might even make navigating the site easier for you. Then again, you might not notice. It’s unlikely to change our relationship.

Please don’t think I use a tool to write the blogposts themselves. Imagine if I revealed this very essay was written by such a tool. How would you feel? Two years ago, you might’ve thought, “Okay, that’s interesting.” Now you’d probably just say I was an arsehole.

That’s because doing the latter undermines the relationship we have. Writer and reader. While the former, the relationship between the website and whatever we call someone who navigates through a website is much less personal.

Choosing Creativity

You’re not here, on this website, for any old random words or images. You’re here for something specific. For words that inform and inspire. And maybe for art and images that reflect a thoughtful engagement with the world.

Using Generative AI would undermine that. Which is why I’m not going to use that technology. It has no place here. It doesn’t offer anything I need.

At one point, I thought it might help with things like writing headlines and summaries. It never did. It also never helped me organise my thoughts. Or summarise things I needed to read. It wasn’t good for sparking ideas or providing examples I could quote.

Generative AI can’t do any of that in ways that fit with how I work. There’s no promise it will get close to it either. Even if it did, the ethical concerns make it untenable.

Plus, my whole journey is about embracing weaknesses and addressing them creatively. Learning to write better headings, something I don’t feel I’m good at, is just another in a very long string of creative challenges.

Having a Healthy Relationship with Technology

Being sceptical about Generative AI doesn’t put you in the same category as people who doubted the prospects of the internet or personal computers.

That scepticism was born of ignorance. What’s fascinating this time is how many of the people who are critical of Generative AI are folks who use technology every day. That have been and continue to be early adopters of other tech. It’s informed scepticism. Not ignorance.

Which is why I’m not committing myself to rejecting everything that might be labelled as AI. Creative software that already uses machine learning, like most forms of music production software, will still be part of my life. I will judge, on a case-by-case basis, writing tools that help me edit and organise my work, depending on how the AI tech works. Photo-editing software that speeds up removing noise or dust spots from images will always be welcome.

But I won’t be using AI to generate work. Creativity matters. Humanity matters.

The fact this blog comes out of one person’s imagination still means something. So, it will continue to be made in the time-honoured artisanal way. This has proven over the years to be a path to fulfilment.

The post A Personal Statement About Generative AI appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Is The Dream Dead?

1.

The old Adobe Master Suite was such an aspirational product for me. All the tools to work digitally across any media. It was central to the creative dream I had back in the early 2000s. Being able to work with any kind of creative media and share the results through the web.

A few years ago, Adobe switched to a subscription model and the Master Suite became affordable. I signed up right away.

But recently I downgraded from Adobe’s All Apps plan to their Creative Cloud Photography plan. The full Creative Cloud subscription had become so costly. And I was using so little of it. The notification that it was going from A$79.99/month to A$87.99/month was the final straw.

2.

Just recently, Google started offering AI answers to search queries. The more that search becomes about answers to questions the less it will provide traffic to sites like this.

Search already doesn’t work well. Less than half of search attempts lead to clicks, according to a recent study. For those of us who built the internet with our work and creativity, this means the end of traffic to our sites and the finding of new audiences.

Do we even need to go into the problems with social media at this stage? Twitter has turned into a feral wasteland. Meta’s all-powerful algorithms make Threads and Instagram places where it’s hard to sustain an audience. None of them treat links to blogs like this kindly.

The dream of being an online independent creative depended on people being able to find you through these channels. Search. Social media. Global reach powered by the internet.

3.

Back in 2004 when I started this blog, I was living in India. I’d recently withdrawn from a PhD programme. Looking for a new direction in life, I started to imagine a music studio. But I also wondered if the space could be more. Maybe a workshop for photography, design, visual art as well. It already felt like blogs were the future of publishing words. We were already talking about how music was a ubiquitous utility like water. Turn a tape and there it is. The same end was coming for distributing everything from photographs to radio, TV, and movies.

The dream wasn’t about being an internet writer, or musician, but something like a record label, or publisher. Nothing less than revolutionary creative independence.

4.

I built a simple studio in my farmhouse outside Delhi. With every move — from Hong Kong, to Singapore, and ultimately to Tokyo — I built better studios. More tools. Ever faster internet connections. Greater clarity of vision.

Reach and engagement are the words people use to describe growing an audience online. During those years, I experienced plenty of growth in reach and engagement. I landed work. Completed great projects. Embarked on delightful collaborations. Met amazing people. Travelled. Had wonderful experiences. And felt like everything was getting better.

Everything kept growing.

5.

Like the cliche puts it, the more things changed the more they stayed the same.

Record labels and publishers never went away.

Meanwhile, the internet’s intermediaries became more powerful. As we went from influencers to content creators, what never changed was how getting noticed relied on playing the game according to the rules of the medium. TikTok, YouTube, Meta, Google… they had all the power. They dictated the kind of content that rose or sank.

The creatives are just sharecroppers bringing their harvest to market.

6.

Scott Borne recently posted on Threads about how he made the transition to being a professional photographer. The first time he got a press pass for the Indy 500, he took a stunning photo of a spectacular crash. The image was syndicated by AP and earned him $3,500. Enough to buy a very nice new car back then.

In an essay entitled The Money Is in All the Wrong Places, Kelsey McKinney pointed out that back in 1936 Ernst Hemingway was paid $1 a word. In today’s money that would be $21 a word. McKinney points that the most she “…was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word” and that “no one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word.”

7.

A few weeks ago, I was on a quiet bike ride along Adelaide’s beaches. For years, rides like that were my inspiration. I would holiday in Adelaide. Take loads of photos of sunsets and seagulls. Dream about the ever-evolving studio. Plan for new creative projects.

But it has been years since I felt the freedom to dream like that. So much has happened in the past five years. Moving from Tokyo to London to Melbourne. Watching my kid go off to college. Come home because of the pandemic. Then go away again. The passing of my mother. Increasingly taking care of my father. Not really feeling like I belong anywhere.

During those years, the growth ended. Numbers for every metric. Readers. Subscribers. Followers. They all plateaued then started a slow, relentless descent. None of my efforts seemed to make a difference.

On one late afternoon ride, as the cool sea breeze tried to stifle my efforts on the pedals, I found myself wondering: what if no one ever finds my blog again? What if there are no new followers on social media?

What if there was no more growth?

8.

You could really feel the internet changing around 2014. Online culture became rougher. Harsher. More hostile. Algorithms changed. There was either vitality or virtual obscurity. Little in between.

But also, I changed. Anxiety and mental health issues hit me hard. I had to slow down for a few years to heal and address experiences from earlier in my life that had caused me long-term problems.

My circumstances changed. In mid-2019, I left Tokyo. I packed up my studio, and I haven’t seen it since. It’s still in boxes. From London to Melbourne. Waiting until I find a new home.

9.

This all feels so absurd. How could we be so enslaved by these tools that promised us creative freedom? I hear Morpheus’s words from the Matrix echoing in my ears, “a prison for your mind”.

But what if the really absurd revelation is how free we now are?

I’ve been making time to think about this for a while now. What if it really is impossible to find an audience? Or build community? What if no one ever discovers this site again?

Maybe it all becomes simpler?

10.

Writing in the Coagula Art Journal, Hazel Dooney talked about the changing role of the artist in the digital age. Audiences don’t just prize art now. They want a connection with the artist. They demand the artist demonstrates their authenticity.

This means artists need to speak about their work. Their creativity and creations. But having to constantly curate a creative persona can be exhausting.

I’ve written before about the challenge of crafting a personal brand for creative work and my own struggles with the state of blogging and being a social creative. My recent essay for Writerly touched on this as well. A general fatigue I feel with writing for the internet. And the risk of live-action role-playing our creativity

Into this malaise, Dooney whispered the sweetest words of encouragement. To “…communicate less yet with intensity, embrace mystery, edit hard, go with my own rhythm”. As she puts it, “It is a simple approach, really: do everything as if it were poetry.”

11.

Years ago, I met a designer who did layout work for many of the best food magazines in the UK. Her kids went to the same preschool as my own. She worked from home and had a very stylish studio. But what caught my attention was how old her computer was. She didn’t have the latest Mac, and her software was several years out of date. But she did high-quality contemporary work.

And she seemed to have fun while doing it.

Pros don’t always have the latest tools. Reliability is more important than being up to date. It takes the pressure off as well. Freeing up mental space to focus on creativity.

12.

I am neither a poet nor a revolutionary. I lack the charisma to change things at scale or the deft touch needed for saying things lightly enough that they float through culture.

Perhaps that’s why I find my home in essays. Words like these are what I do best. Blogs like this are a good home for these words.

Maybe I don’t need to do anything more revolutionary than just continue?

13.

The early web was so unruly and unstructured. The amniotic fluid in which early blogs grew was chaotic but also creative. The internet felt more vibrant and surprising back then. Now it feels violent and shocking instead.

It’s like when the circus comes to town. You have an empty field. Then for a few weeks you have a circus. Then you have an empty field again.

14.

When I asked if the dream was over, I was mostly asking if the dream of making a living from creativity online is over. Of course, people still make money from being social media stars. By playing along and being a function in the algorithm. The human face to the collaboration between brands and platforms.

But I was never dreaming that dream. I never dreamt of trying to outsmart computers and algorithms and billionaires with fragile egos.

My dream was using creativity to make things that could be sold by being online. Art books, music, photos, prints. A workshop with a window to the web. Those dreams coalesced in a simple room off to the side of a dusty farmhouse outside Delhi.

I started to believe that dream was finished. Like Morpheus said, “a prison for your mind”.

15.

Ask me why I write and I will say it’s to make sense of the world. I take photos because it fascinates me that two people can stand in the same place and see different things. I love calligraphy because few things reveal a person’s soul more clearly than how they bring ink to a page.

And I play guitar because I started at age five and don’t really know myself when I’m not making music.

None of this has anything to do with the internet, with algorithms and social media platforms, with the wicked ways of the web.

16.

The dream isn’t over because the urge isn’t gone. Creativity remains. It endures and calls us forward.

What is over is a moment in our history. A period when being online made it feel easier to be creative. When various forces, emerging technology, taste and fashion, pulled together.

What feels insubstantial is the internet. That’s sand in my fingertips. What feels the same in my hands is a pen, a camera, or a guitar.

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The Bridge Of Resentment

Outside table for lunch. The veranda provides welcome shade from the afternoon sunshine. Fashionable cafe food. I’m chatting with a friend. We’re in similar situations. Trying to move our lives towards being more creative. We’re doing cool stuff. But dreaming of bigger, bolder projects. As we say goodbye, we wish each other well. We promise to be supportive and encouraging. A rising tide floats all boats, we say.

A few years later, I’m on the eve of self-publishing No Missing Tools. The book isn’t likely to change the world. There’s a good chance it might sink unnoticed. So many similar books face the same fate. But I’m investing my time and money anyway. It’s the biggest thing I’ve committed to in years. I email my friend to let them know it’s finally happening. The dream is coming true. I await a reply.

Nothing.

The week the book comes out, my friend takes to social media. They post a stream of links to recent work on art and creativity. All the regular best-selling names you already know. What they don’t do. Not even once. Is mention my book.

I didn’t understand it. I felt betrayed. This wasn’t the only person who promised to help, only to disappear when the time came. But it was the most extreme example.

Understanding What Happened

The experience would crash into my consciousness unannounced over the coming years. Especially on long bike rides and solitary walks along the beach. It made me angry. And sad. I journaled about it. It came up many times in therapy. Over time, I heard from other creatives, over and over again, of similar experiences. Friends and family greeting their creative output with unwelcome, unkind, even hostile reactions. Then it started to make sense.

It was about crossing the bridge of resentment.

I was on one side, my little self-published book in hand. My friend was on the other, holding their unrealised dreams. And they resented how that distance made them feel.

We don’t talk enough about out resentment. It’s a powerful feeling. Resentment can cloud our judgement. Making us bitter. Unable to celebrate other people’s success. Unable to see ourselves in a healthy way.

Resentment feels like anger, but what it expresses is envy.

The Power Of Resentment

It’s easy to fall into resentment when other people succeed. It can feel unfair that the attention is on them. One of the most hazardous things we can tell ourselves is “I could’ve done that.” Maybe. But we didn’t.

Resentment is caused by feeling powerless and lacking influence. The person feeling resentment reacts against looking impotent. They tend to lash out. They feel entitled to call out what, to them, looks like an injustice.

A lot of our culture is fuelled by resentment. We see it especially playing out in online dramas. Trolls are the embodiment of resentment. But resentment is also seeping into so many areas of life. And especially politics.

Resentment undermines our ability to enjoy life. Writing in her book, The Power of Fun, Catherine Price says,

“…if I were to identify a list of universal fun killers, resentment would be near the top of the list.”

Comparison And Competition

She goes on to describe resentment as toxic. It’s why the experience of watching someone cross the bridge matters. Resentment is all about comparison and competition. Seeing the world in either/or, winning or losing, binary ways.

But creativity is not a competition.

It can look like a competition because we’re conditioned to focus on the market. Sure, some artists get paid more than others. Some books top the bestseller lists. Others don’t. From accolades to royalty cheques, it can look like a competition.

But no one is competing with you to make the thing you can make.

The book you write. The music you make. The photos you create. They are yours. Other people can write and play and operate a camera. But their creative output is theirs. What they make doesn’t affect what you can make.*

When someone puts their work out into the world, it can evoke feelings in us. It should. That’s a wakeup call. A reminder to get on with our own work. It’s the moment when we have to embrace our own creativity. Rather than fall back into resentment.

Which is what I did. I resented my friend not supporting my work. I became fixated on the injustice of it. I let it poison my feelings about my social circle. And rob me of some of the joy of putting a big piece of work out into the world.

The People In Your World

Years ago, I wrote about how people can’t fulfil every role in our lives. We need at least seven different kinds of people around us. Friends aren’t always the best people to talk to about our career. Family won’t always get excited about our biggest projects.

And you might find yourself looking back at the bridge of resentment with a mix of confusion and anger. Wondering why your friends stopped on the other side and refused to cross with you.

Robert Frost talks about how “way leads on to way” when navigating our life. The path we choose matters less than the fact we chose one. And the story we tell about it.

While some people won’t cross the bridge with us, we meet others once we ourselves cross. I’m not suggesting this process isn’t painless. But it’s a change we cannot and should not avoid embracing.

*There are some kinds of risks. Theft of intellectual property. Plagiarism. And even the whole of whatever the hell AI turns out to be is. I’m not downplaying these risks. But they are a separate ethical issue.

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New Writing in Across The Margin

Recently I wrote about shifting the focus of my writing, away from posting only on this blog. One example is an essay I recently had published at Across The Margin, entitled The Writer Within.

Across The Margin is an online arts and culture magazine. It features literary essays, fiction and poetry that explores the human condition, questions of identity, and our relationship to contemporary culture.

My essay is about what it means to grow up working class with aspirations to be part of the arts world. Can we ever really overcome the hurdles? Do the wounds of being told our dreams are unrealistic ever heal?

The article is available free, so please take a moment to visit the site and give it a read.

Of course, essays will continue to be published here as well. In case you missed them, here are a few recent essays:

Mastering Memoir: Inside the Granta Writing Memoir Workshop
Compostable Knowledge
Aristotelian Friendship
Make Every Slope Count
Hazardous Attitudes
Losing My Religion
On Having Buffers

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Why Criticism Still Matters

For a moment in the 1970s, The Bee Gees were the biggest thing in pop music. With their distinctive falsetto voices and lush vocal harmonies, they released hit song after hit song. Their soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever powered the film that launched John Travolta’s career as a movie star.

But at the peak of their popularity, the tide of popular culture turned against them. The kind of fun, dance-oriented music they were synonymous with was suddenly out of fashion. The 2020 documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, highlights the way the “Disco Sucks” movement killed the mainstream popularity of bands like them.

In 1979, at an event in Chicago called Disco Demolition Night, disco albums were collected and then blown up during a break in a major baseball game. This moment signalled a cultural shift. The stunt revealed a nasty secret. A lot of albums fans destroyed were by Black artists. Much of it wasn’t even disco music.

The Disco Sucks movement was a reaction to the huge popularity of disco music. But also, many of the artists making disco were Black. Many of the clubs popularising the music were gay. The result was record labels stopped signing disco acts and promoting disco albums. The charts became whiter, straighter, and more conventionally rock oriented.

That was the world at that time. The direction of popular culture could be shaped by a few powerful voices.

Criticism or Creativity?

If you go back far enough in the archives of this blog, you’ll find lots of reviews. I used to regularly write about films I saw, books I read, albums I listened to and performances I attended. For a while, I even co-hosted a film review podcast. I was a fully fledged critic.

Then I stopped.

A big influence on that decision was something photographer and director Chase Jarvis said. His idea was that if you were an artist, then you shouldn’t be a critic. You couldn’t inhabit both mindsets.

Creator or critic. You had to choose.

Like so many either/or distinctions, this one has fallen apart over the years. I no longer believe it’s that simple. In fact, I’ve come to value criticism far more than I did before.

Where we once had criticism, we now, too often, have opinion and complaint. This infects much of the popular discourse. And it never moves us to a deeper understanding of ourselves, our culture, or the art under consideration.

But criticism is fuel for creativity. It inspires and informs. It’s a lot more than just saying whether something is “good” or “bad.” It transcends stars and lists and rankings. In a way, criticism is its own art form. And like all art, it challenges the status quo and transforms culture.

The Function of Criticism

The critic isn’t simply an opinion-giver. Their role isn’t to issue decrees. This is good. That’s bad.

We can think of criticism as akin to tuning an old radio. Criticism brings clarity to our appreciation of a work of art. A good critic helps us understand how and why something is good (or not good). They help us see beyond the product to how it was produced and why it matters.

They draw lines for us, from craft to culture.

The best criticism is the kind that still makes sense to engage with after you have seen the film, read the book, watched the performance, or seen the exhibition.

Good criticism elevates our appreciation. It helps us articulate our experience. It gives us a framework for understanding our own tastes, preferences, and even prejudices.

Our culture has supposedly been democratised. There no longer seems to be any role for critics. And yet so many people complain that it’s hard to find good new music to listen to, books to read, films and TV to watch. We are drowning in content. And lacking conversations about that content that rise above the nuance-free shouting matches that dominate a lot of online spaces.

Critical Creativity

Criticism can bolster our creativity in a number of ways. Criticism makes us think about our own taste. The aesthetic values that motivate us. It reminds us of the importance of craft. Every act of criticism is a reflection on how we feel things should be made. And criticism is always connected to a community. To a body of practice. Or a shared identity that gathers around certain kinds of art and creativity.

In an essay dealing with the role of criticism in contemporary arts culture, Jane Howard says:

“To review is to grapple with a piece of art, yes. But it is also to grapple with yourself: how do you see the world, and how does the world see you? What are the biases you bring to life and to art? Who are you, experiencing this piece of art, on this day, in this place?”

When we engage with criticism we actually engage with ourselves. With the project of being more in touch with who we are and how we want to move through the world. The goal of criticism isn’t firing off our opinions in all directions. It’s moving through the world with self-assurance.

Through criticism, we learn to navigate culture.

This is a pretty powerful way to both plant your flag, telling others who you are, and invite deep conversations. Where mere opinion-giving is fragile, reactive, and defensive, criticism is solid, able to withstand disagreement, and invite deeper exploration.

Criticism Is Not Complaining

What substitutes for criticism and garners engagement on social media is a discourse of complaint. Whether it’s a movie or a piece of music, the thing itself isn’t evaluated on its own terms. Rather it’s reviled for not being something else entirely.

Films based on comic books are the most egregious example. Rather than seriously consider the adaptation, the critic engages in a kind of hypothetical comparison to some imaginary version of what could’ve been made.

And at its worst these kinds of complaints can fuel movements like “Disco Sucks.”

But even at the much smaller level of sharing our own personal projects this happens. We face the “you should’ve made something else” complaint. Except we didn’t make something else. We made the thing we made. So please look at it.

In his book Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish says something relevant to this point:

“Complaining isn’t productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesn’t. Distancing yourself from reality makes it harder to solve the problems you face. There is always something you can do today to make the future easier, though, and the moment you stop complaining is the moment you start finding it.”

Good criticism engages the world and the things in it as they are. Not only as we wish they were. Rather than avoiding reality and evidence, it embraces them as the starting point. It tethers us to what’s possible instead of letting us fly off to a fantasy world where everything should be as we imagine it.

Years ago, I made some artwork on the theme “Don’t Complain – Make Something.” It reflected my thinking at the time, and I still believe it. I’d just add that good criticism counts as making something.

Feel Free To Critique

Criticism still exists. At least at the margins. Literary journals like the New York Review of Books keep it alive. Some newspapers (or news websites) still host reviews. We’re

But my plea is broader than that. We could all do more criticism. Using whatever platform we have. Something more than just saying a thing is good or bad.

Reveal your inner values and aesthetics. Help us be more serious about our culture. Demonstrate how to feel more deeply. Enjoy more profoundly.

Hopefully, we can all be moved to the core by the great work we experience.

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Communication Meltdown

I don’t often write rants. And I don’t post as frequently as I used to about productivity. But I’m going to do both right now.

Have you ever sent someone an email and then they reply with a text message? Or a Direct Message on social media? Or, worst of all, a phone call?

Maybe you’ve asked for a specific piece of information. And the response is a forwarded email, with the information you requested buried deep in a series of nested replies. Or you just get a link to a random document that lives somewhere online.

Then there’s that moment when you need to make a decision, or review an action. You find yourself having to reconstruct all the information you need from a litany of touchpoints strewn across various apps and corners of the internet.

Yeah, I hate all of that.

Not on the level of personal preferences. Not for aesthetic reasons.

This scattered approach to communication is bad for us. Bad for our attention span. Unsafe. And unhealthy.

Communicative Promiscuity

Few phrases crush my soul like “I put it in a Google doc” or “I’ll forward the email to you.” I die inside when people reply to an email with a DM on social media. Or I have to use some random app or platform to continue the conversation.

I’m not alone. In a funny short essay, Gwynna Forgham-Thrift sums up this angst in a piece entitled My Comments Are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack.

As delightful as it is, the piece ends on a sardonic note some people revert to when faced with this challenge.

“You know what? Should I just walk over to your desk, and we can go through them out loud?”

Maybe.

Sometimes a face-to-face conversation is better. But it’s also sometimes better to send a well-worded email with a clear call to action. We use phrases like “drop by” or “pop over”, but face-to-face conversations never take seconds. A 200-word email will take less than a minute to read.

Every medium of communication has attributes and weaknesses, benefits and limitations, which we trade off when choosing one tool over another. We need a way to think about this.

Honest Talk About Face To Face

Many situations in society normalise extroversion. This is especially true in corporate workplaces. And amongst the older leaders of those organisations. That’s what makes the face-to-face option seem like the best and most natural choice.

But it isn’t necessarily true for the half of the population who are introverts. There are plenty of situations where an email might be a better way to traverse a power gap between two people. Or manage very different ways of working or thinking. After all, many creatives are introverts.

Sometimes the email is a good way to document. To “get it in writing”, so to speak. Not relying on each person’s memory of a verbal agreement.

Also, email is a way to manage priorities. The “get back to me later” nature of email is sometimes exactly what we need. Sometimes, our attention needs to be elsewhere. And moving an issue along might be enough for now. If we treat everything like a priority – something we need to solve immediately – we will get little done.

Or we will divide our attention so much that we do nothing well.

The problem isn’t the digital communication. It’s the volume of it we encounter. The thoughtless way it gets used. And how conversations get scattered across platforms and channels. Typically, the messages we encounter are rushed and poorly formatted at the expense of easy comprehension. It takes effort to hold together such fragmented conversations.

And all this is made worse by the assumption that communicating faster is always better. That talking it out is preferable to thinking it through. That verbalising words is easier than choosing them with care. Or writing them out.

The Allure of a Dumb Phone

Every time I log on to social media, someone is proclaiming their desire to switch to a “dumb phone”. It’s never an actual message to say they’ve done it. There’s never a photo of their new dumb phone. It’s always a desire. A hope. A wish.

I get the appeal of these kinds of phones. The Light Phone, in particular, caught my attention when it was first released. The simple design feels like the path towards digital minimalism.

The irony is you could make your iPhone “dumb” if you wanted to. You don’t have to install social media apps. You can turn off some or all notifications. Focus modes allow you to limit the use of some apps at certain times of the day or when doing specific activities. You can even enter “Simple” mode via the iPhone’s accessibility settings.

Not only can you make your device “dumb”, but you can also make it “dumb” in exactly the way you want.

Actually, the allure of the “dumb phone” is more of a cry for help than anything else.

Changing the phone we use is a digital band-aid. The feeling of overwhelm comes from the way communication dominates our lives. A false sense of urgency makes things worse. The solution is to set higher standards for how we communicate.

Quality Is Lost and Misinformation Reigns

Sending information is not the same as communicating. But digital messages are often sent as if the only goal is distributing packets of data. This has been described as the bullet theory of communication. Shooting information at each other like bullets.

However, the message we send isn’t the whole story. What gets received, and understood, is what matters. A well-communicated message lands clearly. Completely. Coherently.

Many of us worry that AI is coming for our jobs. Perhaps we should worry. Poor communication sets a low bar for AI. The best tool we have to prove AI isn’t the solution is to clean up our own act and communicate more effectively.

Poor-quality, fragmented communication creates an opportunity for AI to fix. High-quality, well-directed communication sets a high hurdle for AI. Human communication at its best is profound, subtle, and effective. AI has not demonstrated an ability to replicate this.

The added benefit is better communication feels less overwhelming. Fewer but more meaningful messages allows us to feel more focused and less stressed.

This is good because we need every mental resource to overcome the barrage of misinformation headed towards us. The problem is bad. AI will make it worse. We must avoid wasting our energy on trying to make sense of poor-quality, fragmented communication. Instead, we should use that energy to check the cogency and veracity of the ideas we encounter.

The Choice to Not Choose

We seem to treat technology like the tides. A cosmic force we are helpless to resist. Facebook made us angry. Instagram made us narcissistic. We go as far as to suggest Twitter (now X) ruined democracy!

It’s like the story of King Canute placing his throne on the shoreline and commanding the tide to turn back. The popular myth is he was a fool who overestimated his royal powers. Historians suggest what might’ve happened was an object lesson for his followers, the king trying to teach them about the limits of human authority in the face of divine power.

We know royalty lack magical powers or divine majesty. We understand gravity, the movement of planets and their moons.

Yet we ascribe magical powers to the technology around us. It is not irresistible. We are not enslaved to it or unable to regulate its impact on our lives.

If Twitter, or Slack, or email, or any form of digital communication sucks, it’s because of the many choices every user makes. Sure, the tech could always improve. More features. Clearer design. Better moderation.

But the style in which we communicate… that’s a choice. We choose clarity or incoherence. Focus or fragmentation. Calm or angst. We choose the world of words and ideas we want to live in.

How To Communicate Better

Something has gone wrong with the way we communicate. This isn’t a “tech is bad” rant. It’s not the tools but the way we use them. And it’s not aimed at any one group. We, collectively, are making a mess of communicating with each other.

Thankfully, we can opt for clarity over chaos. Here’s a few things all of us can do.

1. Audit: Take a look at how you communicate and how you receive communication. How does thinking about it make you feel? How many different platforms do the same people use to communicate with you? How long would it take you to find a specific piece of information someone sent you a month ago? What kind of messages need a reply right away? Which ones can wait?

2. Make some choices: Spend a little time thinking about each channel of communication you use. What is it good for? Where does it falter? Think about channels you might want to drop. Or ones you might want to use more deliberately. Identify the places in your life where better quality communication should be a priority.

3. Set some boundaries: “Pick your brain” is one of the phrases I decided not to respond to. You’ll need to find your own boundaries. Apps you will and won’t use. The speed and cadence at which you respond. It’s your job to show people what your boundaries are.

4. Be consistent: All this depends on living up to your own goals and standards. Lead by example.

Radical Asynchronicity

The idea that we have to reply to every message, email, or notification right away is killing us. It’s ruining our attention span. Our ability to concentrate and create. The quality of our lives. Our relationship to nature. And our own mental health.

We don’t have to be like this.

We built our civilisations on asynchronous communication. Inscribed tablets, scrolls, letters – even telegrams – carried the best ideas and scientific insights. These took time to travel. And the recipients read them at their own pace.

Books are the great example of this. A writer condenses years of work into one physical object. You might read it in a month, or a year, or a century later.

But our instantaneous communication is great as well. We need both. Synchronous and asynchronous. Not a balance. Or a trade-off. But both.

Think of it like a garden. A variety of different plants that reach our senses in different ways. Some might have strong scents. Others, none. Some blossom or change colour once a year in dramatic, eye-catching ways. Others don’t flower at all but continue to fill the landscape all year. They all complement each other. The result is harmony. And you never confuse one plant for another.

The post Communication Meltdown appeared first on Fernando Gros.

New Writing In Writerly

Every writer hopes to be published. We also hope to be published somewhere that takes care of our words. And presents them beautifully.

Writerly is that kind of publication.

Writerly is a young and beautifully produced literary journal. In the latest edition, volume 3, I have an essay called The Calendar. It’s about writing, and grief, and the way our dreams sometimes come true, but never in the way we imagined they would.

I’m delighted with the way in which Writerly has presented my words, and formatted my images, and presented the work alongside other wonderful essays, stories, and poems.

Please consider buying either a digital copy of the journal or the print edition.

Writerly And My Writing Pivot

In the past year or so I’ve slowed down the pace at which I publish articles on this blog. From once a week to a couple of times a month. Partly that’s a response to personal burnout. Publishing weekly during the worst of the pandemic keep me feeling connected to the world.

But there’s more to it than that. Writing online feels less rewarding now. I reflected on this in a piece called The Slow Goodbye. Something is ending.

Creator burnout has become such a thing in 2024 that it feels like its own genre of content. My own essay in Writerly touched on it:

“I often find myself whispering, ‘I am tired of writing for the internet.’”

So I’m diverting my attention now. Part of that has gone into working on a memoir. That’s why I was on the Granta Memoir Writing Workshop (as I wrote about recently). And the other part has gone into writing and pitching essays to literary journals. Like the essay I had published in Wilde Magazine last year.

This isn’t a completely new idea. I self-published a book in 2015, partly out of concern that blogs had disappeared from the cultural radar. A few years ago I experimented with making zines for the same reason.

Life Beyond Screens

Screens have been taking over our lives for a while now. But we’ve reached an inflection point. Apple is trying to push us towards a fully virtual reality. Wrap your whole head in a screen. The rest of the tech world is trying to sell us on the inevitability of AI. Every creative act will depend on AI, apparently. The same way everything was going to be about crypto, or Web3, or NFTs, not that long ago.

At the same time, demand for physical media, vinyl, CDs and cassettes continues to rise. Physical crafts and creation is the most popular it has been in years. Audiences for cinema and antiques markets are growing after years of decline. And worldwide travel is predicted to exceed pre-pandemic levels this year.

Even though screens seem to dominate our lives, we are still a physical species.

A book or a zine or a literary journal has a heft that a blog never does. I can say I have 2,251 blogposts and people treat it like a weird quirk. Like admitting I have a vast collection of Hot Wheels cars. But if I say there’s a new essay in a literary journal, people are more likely to say, cool, where can I pick up a copy?

The Trouble With Writing For The Web

Writing for the web is weird. In a way you aren’t writing for people. You’re writing for Google (or Facebook, or whatever Twitter is called now). You are trusting that the machines will introduce your work to people. But often, they won’t.

It’s a bit like retail. You can start a fashion brand. You might hope lots of consumers will buy and wear your clothes. But your real customers are the department stores and retailers who must stock your items first. Without them you’re lost.

Google has weird rules if you want to appear in search results. You need a heading every 300 words. You need a key phrase that appears regularly but not too often. You must not do what I just did, and start consecutive sentences with the same word, even if that feels natural or part of your style.

Moreover, you have to start lots of paragraphs with connecting words like moreover.

If it occurs to you that much of what you read online is kind of the same and kind of boring, it’s because of these rules.

Everyone plays the game. Big media and news outlets increasingly play nothing but this game. It’s more than just clickbait headings. It shapes the content itself.

Of course, this will only worsen as more AI tools are used to create online writing.

The Literary Turn

With every year that passes I feel my age more acutely. The list of things I can realistically achieve with the time I have left becomes shorter. But the importance of doing those things increases.

But there’s always the possibility life will break in and disrupt the best plans we make. If the last few years haven’t taught us that, then we aren’t really paying attention.

I’ve come to realise upon reflection that I don’t want my legacy to be just digital things. This pivot in my writing is part of that. A balance of digital and analogue. Offline and online.

It’s a decision to lean into craft. Not just to produce more words, but to try to choose better ones. To say more things in different ways. And, I hope, to reach a wider and more diverse audience.

Finally, this is about how to be in the world. I’m not happy with the dividend that comes from a digital life. I don’t know anyone who is. And the people in my circle have been innovators and early adopters of digital tech for a long while. They understand the situation and feel very frustrated with it.

I want to speak to the world through the things I make. Not through the game of trying to be seen in increasingly fragmented and incoherent online spaces. Putting more of my time into the kind of work in the latest edition of Writerly seems to me the best way to do that.

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Aristotelian Friendship

I lost two friends during the pandemic. They didn’t die of Covid. One succumbed to a long, debilitating illness; the other, to an accident. Travel restrictions meant I couldn’t attend either funeral.

Both came to mind today. I miss them. They left a hole in my life that remains unfilled. I long for their warmth and humour. Their love, respect, and support.

They weren’t just privately encouraging. They were public champions as well. They read my writing. They bought my work, and they encouraged others to do the same. They made space for me in the world.

This was a reflection of who they were. People who believed in creativity. They nurtured it in themselves. Fostered it in others. They weren’t doing me favours, hoping for something in return. Their friendship was deeper than that.

The Nature Of Aristotelian Friendships

What I had with them was what Aristotle called virtue friendship. For Aristotle, there are three kinds of friendships. First are hedonic friendships. The people we party with. The most basic kind of friendship. Then there are friendships made through shared activity. Work colleagues. Sports buddies. People we do things with.

Last are virtue friendships. People you connect with because of the quality of their character. How they live out what they believe. Their virtues.

As we get older, it gets harder to make new friends. We meet fewer people. Everyone already has their established social circle. Careers and family take up more time.

And making virtue friendships takes time. You don’t instantly see someone’s soul. Our impatient culture, so invested in first impressions, makes little room for any deeper understanding of who people are.

The Culture Of Male Friendship

Male culture is skewed towards the first two kinds of friendship. Many men’s idea of friendship stops growing once they reach their early twenties. Perhaps the best example of this is LinkedIn’s hustle culture. Nothing but functional relationships. Conversations that rarely stray beyond advice about how to land the next deal or enhance status.

Quite a lot of men approach friendships in a conspiratorial way. They want friendships that can cloak misdeeds. It’s surprisingly how quickly some new acquaintances will ask if you have infidelities. Revealing secrets is a way to show you can cover for theirs. Being faithful disqualifies you from a surprising number of male friendships.

Mansplaining

Men also struggle to make deeper friendships because they don’t listen.

Mansplaining is the prime example. It’s when men try to exert power over women by talking condescendingly to them. There are so many cringeworthy examples online of men trying to explain a particular field of science to a woman who holds a PhD and is a world expert on the subject, or some random dude trying to coach a female professional on how to do their job.

Men also mansplain to each other. It’s how men establish social dominance. A lot of men can’t help themselves. They think they have to give advice. They assume the way another person does things is a result of ignorance rather than choice.

Conversations simply become a contested space for establishing social hierarchy. Every chat has a winner and a loser. Points are always being tallied.

The Struggle To Make Deep Connections

It’s not surprising that, typically, men don’t make new friendships once they are into their mid-forties. They lack the opportunity to make new connections. They are increasingly less involved in the kind of situations, like sports or partying, that provide for the most basic kinds of friendship. Or they don’t want to cover for other men’s misdeeds. And they lack the skills to take conversations out of the advice and explaining mode into the listening and soul-baring space.

And baring your soul – vulnerability – is the key to Aristotle’s kind of virtue friendships.
You can’t have a virtue-based friendship and approach conversations like contests. The two are incompatible. You have to calm down. Your life will speak for you. The choices you’ve already made will establish who you are. You have to be open and willing to listen.

Then companionship becomes far more important than advice giving. Empathy comes to the fore. You take a back seat to who you should be.

Enduring Friendship

Women tend to be better at virtue friendships. This matters as we age because virtue friendships are more enduring and less context dependent. You don’t have to attend the same parties or work in the same field to keep the friendships alive. They don’t rely on your being fit and active enough to engage in a shared activity.

They don’t even rely on your being in the same place.

Those two friendships I mentioned were forged while living in the same place. But they continued to thrive even after I moved away.

Now the friendships have become memories, but they still influence and inspire me. I miss them. But I’m richer for having known them. And my feeling how profoundly friendships can help us navigate life is deeper as a result.

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Mastering Memoir: Inside the Granta Writing Memoir Workshop

Granta is a prestigious literary journal founded by Cambridge University students in 1889. It launched the careers of many acclaimed writers, such as A. A. Milne and Sylvia Plath, and has published 27 Nobel Prize winners. In 1989, Granta launched a book imprint with the aim of publishing “the best in new literary fiction, memoir, reportage and poetry from around the world”.

Granta has recently started offering online writing workshops. The first two are in memoir and nature writing. The courses were developed in collaboration with the Professional Writing Academy, a digital platform that has been delivering writing education since 2009. And Granta also works with other partners like Faber on their stable of online courses covering fiction, poetry, horror and YA, as well as non-fiction.

This course consists of eleven modules delivered over 24 weeks. Modules cover all aspects of writing memoir: reasons for writing, understanding non-fiction, structuring your work, researching, rewriting and editing… And we address ethical issues like truthfulness and what readers expect from memoirs. Each module includes reading and writing assignments. Feedback is provided by the instructor and your peers on the course. By the time they finish the workshop, participants have a 10,000-word piece ready for submission to publishers or agents.

The course instructor, Dr Midge Gillies, taught creative writing for more than twenty years at Cambridge University. She also taught the biography masterclasses for the University of East Anglia. Gillies is the author of Writing Lives: Literary Biography and co-author of Literary Non-Fiction: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion.

The Art of Memoir

Memoirs are often confused with biographies. A biography aims to tell the complete story of a life, describing all the major experiences and explaining the significant choices. My three years in India, for example, might be only one chapter in a biography. But it would be enough for a whole memoir.

Authors can use this limited scope to be more creative in their writing. There’s more room for personal reflection and introspection. More insight into an author’s psyche. Many memoirs combine elements of different genres of writing.

Making this work requires careful choices. What to include. What to leave out. Where to rewrite. The author’s voice is what sets a memoir apart.

The Granta Writing Memoir Workshop does an excellent job of giving participants the chance to hone these skills. Different learning strategies are employed. Critical reflection. Group discussion. Experimental writing. Editing tasks. Guided revision.

As you might expect, the course uses Granta’s vast resources. There are plenty of examples from articles and books published by Granta, as well as interviews with Granta authors.

A Key Personal Insight

I started the workshop with a solid writing habit. But I realised as the workshop progressed how much my approach to writing was skewed towards production. I was leaving little time for editing or improving the words I wrote.

This is a by-product of writing online for so many years, and the relentless call of blogposts, tweets, and Instagram posts. So much of my writing over the years has been “good enough”.

But writing this way means I don’t often bring everything I know about writing to everything I write.

A Few Shortcomings

The workshop wasn’t perfect. I had a lot of problems with the platform. Partway through, it stopped working with Apple email addresses. I missed important notifications. Also, everything gets sent to your email. Feedback from the course instructor, someone posting their assignment, or chitchat between participants. There’s no way to control which notifications you get. It’s all or nothing. I was waking up to 20+ emails a day from the course. Some were important; most could wait until I logged in.

Before the course, I was advised there would be very few live events. All the teaching would be asynchronous. There were regular events, but they were always at times I couldn’t make from Australia or Japan. It was a weird kind of digital colonialism. When I pointed this frustration out, I was told “you can watch the video later”. Hardly a consolation.

Third, you pretty much have to use Word, although it’s not mandatory. After one of those video sessions I couldn’t attend, everyone started posting feedback on each other’s work in Word documents. This sucked partly because using Word is so awful. But more than that, it added a layer of tedium to learning from other students. You would open a Word document to read someone’s assignment – then have to open six or seven other Word documents to get the instructor’s and other students’ feedback.

Also, I struggled with the first modules of the workshop. It starts by encouraging you to craft an outline and write a synopsis. For some writers that works. But I have never been able to create compelling work that way. I need to discover my path through the words I write. Structure emerges. Reliably. Without coercion. Once past those frustrating early weeks, things progressed well. I went back to those early modules at the end. The outlining and synopsis-writing ideas made more sense then.

Recomendations

The course cost £3,000 (AU$5,800). I want to put that right up front because recommending something so costly isn’t easy. The value depends a lot on your circumstances and where you are in your writing journey. To put this in context, the one-year full-time MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia costs international students £22,500 (AU$43,900). A lot of writers offer cheaper online workshops. A session a week for a month for around $500 (AU$760) is common. But these usually have less structure. Less guided study. And much less critical feedback.

I started the workshop with a very poorly defined idea for a memoir. I finished with a highly polished piece of work – the first section of a book – along with a ready-to-go proposal I could pitch to agents or publishers, and a few other essays I can send to journals.

I couldn’t have got there in the same amount of time on my own. I might never have got there. My past is littered with so many unrealized ideas.

Final Thoughts

I found the Granta Writing Memoir Workshop a compelling learning experience. Thoughtfully constructed and carefully taught, it helped me advance a project from almost scratch to the point of viability. I had a few frustrations. Some things I’d like to see changed, especially making the live events available to participants around the world. And the price is steep. But the investment feels worth it. I’m glad I was able to take part.

NOTE: Like EVERYTHING I review on this site, I paid full price for the course. I applied like everyone else. And was in no way compensated for this review.

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Is There More To Growing Old Than Downsizing?

Instagram surprised me recently, with an ad for what looked like a new luxury apartment complex called St Clare. The look was clean and contemporary, with interiors full of minimalist design and mid-century modern furniture.

I’m looking for a new home. So getting this ad wasn’t the surprise. I currently follow a few real estate agents on Instagram and even a company that photographs homes.

I click the link. The apartments aren’t cheap. The smallest ones start at $1.3M; the three- bedroom penthouse suites with a butler’s pantry and TV room are priced from $4.6M. The Australian property market being what it is, you can assume the prices will rise quite a bit from there for the best apartments with the nicest views.

However, the surprise isn’t the price.

St Clare isn’t simply a luxury apartment complex. It’s a retirement village, one that clearly aims to cater for people with a lot of money and an interest in “luxury finishes” which are “designed with both beauty and practicality in mind”.

Even more surprising is St Clare’s description of retirement living. Sure it’s expensive. And it looks like it’s been cut and pasted out of a magazine like Dwell or Monocle. But there’s something fascinating about the way retirement is described.

“St Clare offers discerning downsizers a wonderful lifestyle.”

This euphemism, where retirement is called downsizing, is repeated over and over.

“Downsize without compromise.”

Since moving back to Australia, I’ve been shocked by how often people here speak in euphemisms. It’s as if the abstract and impersonal nature of business speak has leaked into everyday discourse.

I’ve heard this way of talking, describing retirement as downsizing. The tone implies a reluctant acceptance. It’s kind of strange, because for a long time I heard those older than me, the boomer generation, talk longingly about retiring, or even the ultimate prize of retiring early. That’s why I wrote about retirement before, in 2005, and again in 2012.

But now I wonder if the boomer generation have reached retirement and found it isn’t everything they imagined it would be.

The Problem with Talking About Retirement

St Clare alludes to proprietary research into recent trends in aging, though they don’t specify what that research is.

“Our research shows that people aged over 60 are not ‘retiring’ in the traditional sense. They are entering a thrilling new phase in life where they have more time to focus on themselves – they’re more active, more engaged and even more indulgent than generations before.”

Interpreting marketing copy is sometimes like trying to making sense of dreams; you feel like this means that, but you’re never really sure.

That said, the idea of retirement as some kind of sedentary and selfish existence is out of date. A lot of people are delaying retirement, either because they feel healthy and able to keep working or because they can’t afford to stop. Others might work less, but still work. Or perhaps combine paid work with more volunteer work, community involvement, mentoring, or further education.

The Future Of Retirement

The New York Times has run a steady stream of articles about the emerging trend of luxury retirement complexes. Articles like Boomers Create a Surge in Luxury Care Communities (2018), Growing Old in High Style (2021), and The Next Retirement Communities Won’t Be Just for Seniors (2023) highlight the changing face of living options for the elderly.

Disney has even entered this market, with a series of developments under the brand Storyliving. They are “envisioned as enriching enclaves conceived with the simple notion of bringing people together.” While the Storyliving developments are not exclusively for seniors, they have residential zones and amenities that will be exclusively for those over 55.

This answers one of the criticisms of the old model of retirement villages – that they sequestered older people away from the rest of society. The model provided little opportunity for intergenerational mixing outside of family visits.

While living in cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo, I would often see older folk out and about. In Tokyo, particularly, I’d regularly see seniors riding bicycles, volunteering for local cleanup activities, doing exercise in the park, painting or taking photos, or carrying groceries home from the shops.

What Does A Good Old Age Look Like?

Rather than an idyllic or natural way to spend our later years, retirement is conceived of as problematic and potentially unhealthy.

Retirement can have a negative effect on health, especially if people become less physically active or don’t have as many opportunities to interact with other people.

In fact, retirement can be lonely and isolating. It can undermine a sense of personal identity and reason for living. We associate old age with cognitive decline, but this reduced sharpness can be fueled by lack of activity, stimulation, and opportunities to learn.

Retirement was an urgent social problem in the industrial age when people’s bodies could no longer cope with the stress of hard physical labour. Retirement was the equivalent of putting old work animals out to pasture.

Moving to a retirement village often means relocating away from a familiar neighborhood. It can mean reduced privacy and independence. Retirement villages can promote ageism and even an unhealthy concept of what growing old should be like.

There is also the broader economic reality that many countries simply will not be able to afford to fund retirement as they have done up to now. A combination of extended longevity and the size of the boomer generation means people are retiring in record numbers, and the cost of paying out pensions is becoming an increasing strain on many societies.

Especially if we start siphoning people into retirement living at 55 when they still have another 40 more years of life left. Or, to put it another way, the season of life being retired and withdrawn from productively contributing to society will be longer than the amount of adulthood spent working.

A Healthy Old Age

What does it mean to live a healthy life as we get older? Two concepts can help guide our thinking: mastery and generativity.

When you set out to master something, you are orienting your life towards understanding yourself and the world better. It’s a lifelong journey if you want it to be. Mastery isn’t just about becoming good at something. It’s about learning to enfold the mistakes you will inevitably make into a healthy life. Mastery is also essentially social and ecological because we don’t learn alone, and we always grow in the context of an environment around us and things that come from and shape that environment.

This is because we’re attuned to our own mistakes, willing to help others since we master nothing alone, and accepting of how we will age and the limits of our ability.

And if we’re aging well, our focus isn’t just on our own mastery but also the mastery of those who are younger, along with their ability to craft meaningful lives and build healthy societies. This generative focus can flourish only if we cultivate vibrant and fertile cross-generational relationships.

Luxury developments like the ones mentioned above, for all their luxury features, aren’t designed primarily to facilitate generativity and mastery.

Mastery and generativity not only help us think more constructively about old age; they give us a clear sense of what seniors can contribute to society. This can also help us overcome ageism.

Is Retirement An Outdated Concept

Does the concept of retirement even make sense if our lives are oriented towards creativity and making art? The older we get the more it feels ridiculous to say 65 is too old to make music or art, or compose poetry or write books. We might look physically less powerful. But the strength of our ideas isn’t diminished.

Even as our hearing starts to wear, we can hear music more clearly. Our eyes might not be what they once were, and yet colour and contrast seem more sharp. Our stamina and memory might be reduced, and yet the words flow more freely and we feel braver wielding them.

In 2020, Willie Nelson, then aged 86, got four Grammy nominations and came home with two awards. This past year, Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann, both aged 81, directed box office hits. Roy Hodgson is still coaching Premier League football with Crystal Palace at the age of 76.

Angela Álvarez’s story is one of the most remarkable examples of the enduring power of creativity. In 2022, she became the oldest person to win a Latin Grammy. And in the Best New Artist category. She had been writing music and singing for years but never put her work out until her grandson produced and recorded an album of her music.

Undiminished

The popular idea of retirement implies not having to work anymore so you can “enjoy life” instead. But what if the work you do is fulfilling and fun? What if working gives you purpose, meaning, and structure in your life?

The challenge of retirement is that you have to stop working because you are no longer allowed to. But what if your ideas are still powerful? What if you are still growing and improving? What if you still have something to contribute to those around you?

Too much of the focus on growing older is centered on what gets diminished. In a culture that worships youthfulness and physical perfection, that’s not surprising. And add to that the way that so much work culture is obsessed with relentlessly grinding and hustling.

But we miss paying attention to what doesn’t diminish. Or what even gets enhanced as we age. Clarity, insight, and wisdom, in particular. As we get older, we can become better at seeing what matters most in life, picking the infinite games from the finite ones.

Unbounded

A natural amount of right-sizing comes with getting older. A big home suited to raising a family might not be suited to the needs of an older person or could become too much of a burden to maintain. The many belongings we can collect over a lifetime might no longer be useful or interesting to keep.

However, this task isn’t the complete template for growing old.

As we get older, our lives should also become bigger in some ways. Mastery and generativity remind us of that. We can chase bigger ideas. Remind those around us that craft and context and history matter. We are naturally more attuned to the things that matter most.

Rather than retreating, we can echo through eternity via the lives we touch.

Don’t downsize. Embrace eternity.

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