Confused old folk

Been thinking about old people lately. Not retirement parties and going on cruises old, but the confused, vulnerable years that follow.

I’ve run an IRL writers group for about 7 or 8 years. We’re listed through meetup.com. The Nashville Writers Meetup used to be enormous. Only two groups survived the pandemic shutdown, and the other is online. If you are looking for a Nashville public fiction critique group, we’re it.

I love the diversity of writers this has drawn, especially the span of ages. We bring different experiences to the table, and can offer a wide range of feedback. But every now and then, someone unmoored to reality shows up, and it’s awkward. There was one man who I suspect someone dropped off, because I hope he wasn’t driving. When it was his turn to comment on someone’s excerpt, he looked flustered and began talking about his own work instead. Granted, it was a loud location we were trying out, but he had a printout of the story in front of him, and was not the first commenter. When his story’s turn came, he rambled about what he was writing, and just read bits and pieces. He was lost.

In my parents’ later years, my father wanted my mother to attend a yoga class at a neighborhood community center, to be with other people. She refused. After she passed, my brother kept looking for activities for my Dad, which he also refused. My guess is that they both knew they weren’t capable anymore, even if they covered it. In Steve, the confused man at the writers’ meeting, there may have been a son or daughter looking for activities Dad could attend, signing him up, printing off his pages. I felt bad for him.

Last Sunday’s meeting brought a woman who wanted to talk about using ChatGPT to edit. We aren’t a discussion group, although people sometimes stay after the critiques to discuss writing. She either didn’t understand or didn’t accept that, even though I gave her my usual “new people spiel” at the beginning, explaining how we do things. I didn’t know how to handle it. I never want to make elderly people feel irrelevant. I wasn’t going to tell her to be quiet, and let us move on the next writing excerpt.

After her ChatGPT discussion, she launched into telling everyone they should be on TikTok, and if she could do that at 85, everyone can. And should. At 85, she’s not looking for a writing career. Except for the ecological issues of AI, her using it to write a novel isn’t hurting anyone, even though there is a world of difference between genuinely writing, and feeding your novel page by page to AI to rewrite. But confusion?

Every now and then, a local news station runs a story about someone who got scammed out of their savings, taken by thieves who insist on getting paid with gift cards even though they are pretending to be the IRS. I watch these shaking my head, thinking “how on earth does this not raise red flags?” But the victims are old and often rural, people who were raised at a time when they knew the people at the bank, a time when they weren’t in contact with people they couldn’t trust. They can still shop, bank, attend writers’ meetings. They don’t appear vulnerable until you scratch the surface. Not only are they confused, they are trying not to be, to still be who they once were, and that gives the scammers easy targets.

The text in the picture was sent to my phone today. I checked my Apple Pay account and the card associated with it. The one thing I didn’t do was call the number they sent me. I know better. But there will come a time in everyone’s life when they are the old confused target, and the game will look different, something we aren’t looking for, while younger people shake their heads, wondering how anyone could fall for that.

Take care of the old confused people, both the ones in your own family, and the random ones life throws your way. Peace.