And so, another year.
To be honest, 2000 doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but between then and now, people have been born, learned to talk, completed their education and started real jobs that might well pay more than mine. The offspring of friends, who were babies just yesterday, are now actual people who could conceivably have their own babies, although my thought process stops right there.
My birthday is in January, so the new year always sets off a fit of the existentials. Back in the Middle Ages, people measured their age by how many teeth they had left; these days, it’s the rapid turnover of tech and whether you can adapt.
My mental age is currently around 38 (it has to be an even number). I like to think that putting together my own website, along with all the trimmings—that newsletter sign-up link was hard-won—cranked the dial back from 42.
When I arrived in London at the age of 30 and needed to buy my first mobile phone, for the purposes of temping, I couldn’t get my head around ‘line rental’, as (very poorly) explained by the young man in Carphone Warehouse on Tottenham Court Rd, who obviously considered any ‘older’ woman to be a moron. By definition, a mobile phone was not connected to any physical phone line, so how could I be charged for this? I had a horrifying sense of having prematurely aged out technologically, like someone’s granny who didn’t understand the internet and needed her grand-sprog to get her online. (Here’s a techno-granny who blitzed calumnious stereotypes about female ageing.)
Happily, I got the hang of mobile phones, although I didn’t make the leap to a smart phone until 2012, when I moved into postgraduate accommodation with no landline, because what I still considered ‘normal’ telephones were redundant for the student population. Until then, being both cheap and kind of poor, I’d run a PAYG dumb Nokia as a secondary device, an away-from-home friend-locator and facilitator of real-life meetings. It cost too much to actually have a conversation on the damn thing.
If a mobile was going to be my one and only, I needed to upgrade, sharply, so I did: to the already outdated but bargainous iPhone 4.
(Sidebar: Japan had its own, unique smart telephony a decade before the rest of the world. I briefly had a bottom-end PHS in the 1990s, but it was so frustratingly small and dinky I could barely use it.)
Taking up smart telephony in the early 2010s, I had the disturbing realisation that I no longer belonged to the category of Young People, who were in fact becoming increasingly distant, both in age and mindset. This is when you know you’ve hit middle age, even though you don’t feel it. Nobody EVER feels it, unless they go into a sudden squat to get something out of the cupboard under the sink.
One way of measuring mental youth is how much a person ‘keeps up to date’. The main markers used to be music and fashion, although both have stylistically fragmented. The last decade to have a distinctive sartorial look was the 1980s. In the 2020s, for affordable, well-made and interesting clothes you go to a vintage boutique or website or rummage a charity shop. (NB Karen Millen dresses on Vinted and eBay are very popular among tango ladies.)
These days, the critical demarcation of mental age is tech.
My attitude to tech is strictly instrumentalist: I’ve never been interested in it its own sake. It has to be useful to me—and affordable. This puts me towards the end of the technology adaptation scale, which apparently makes me ‘below average social status’ (thanks, social scientists). If I have disposable income, it goes on the mortgage, travel or old but evergreen tech, like a washing machine. I can’t imagine queuing up for the latest iPhone (holds self back from gendered snark about Gadget Man). I keep my tech going until it’s no longer supported. This means I’ll have to upgrade to a new laptop in 2025, when Windows 10, supposedly the last-ever Microsoft operating system, is finally cut loose.
The latest world-changing tech is AI. There’s buzz in indie-world about how it can boost your productivity, but I have more ideas than I can deal with in one lifetime, and I have no problem coming up with stories, plots, situations, characters or worlds. Also, I enjoy writing. It’s an expression of me and not something I want to delegate to artificial intelligence.
Some writers use ChatGPT for lower-order tasks, like creating marketing materials. Thinking I should finally give the thing a go, I experimented with my annual Personal Development Review, widely resented and loathed in the modern workplace as a complete waste of time with no positive outcome other than the employment of HR administrators.
Unfortunately, but also hearteningly, I did a much better job of my PDR than AI. I am not yet redundant in my own life.
I know I’ll have to get to grips with AI eventually, probably sooner than I want to, but for the moment, it’s on my list of things do—later.