The Startup Guy and The Little Old Lady

Is there a place for an 80-year-old in the brave new world?

Sometimes it seems like the world doesn’t speak to me anymore.

How do I make myself heard?

I’ve had beginner’s luck. My first article here got curated, and I’ve beaten the odds in making $100 in my first month. But the longer I stay on this platform, the more alone I feel. And despite Michael Kevin Spencer’s excellent article, I don’t suffer from loneliness. That’s not what I’m talking about.

Medium reminds me how isolated I am in the world.

Not just because I spend so much time working from home. I can be a real party girl, but I’m also good at the hermit life. I always have been. I love to read and write. Since I discovered the Internet, you can’t get me off my computer.

So what am I talking about? Who’s ignoring me?

You. The brave new world. All you guys writing about the future I’ll never see. I’m past the stage where all I read are the articles that tell me how to succeed on Medium. I’m after the meat now, the juicy stuff that made Medium the platform of choice for folks like Jeff Bezos and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the tech, health, and data giants of Silicon Valley, Asia, and Europe.

I revel in the cutting edge articles that show up on my feed every day, as well as the poetry and humor, the passionate, personal essays.

But nowhere do I see me.

Oh, I see my past life as a struggling writer in pieces detailing the agonies of imposter syndrome. In my day, we just felt like frauds, even my friends fresh out of MBA programs and law school and getting their first jobs as new recruits complained about, so that’s nothing new. I heap loads of compassion on the authors, but it’s not my fight anymore. Where am I in here?

I’ve been finding new voices teaching us about advances in nutrition to help super athletes, as well as approaches to cancer prevention, even longevity. But my life is ending. Even if I stretch my life span another fifteen years, these preventive modalities aren’t for me. Either the damage has been done, or I’ve had the good sense to follow my own advice in the health books I’ve written.

I’m as curious as anyone else about the world of new data.

Blockchain, bitcoin, fintech. But I won’t see much change in my life. Okay, companies like AT&T are accepting the new currency. But I doubt I’ll invest in it so these articles describing the new world without centralized banks aren’t speaking to me.

Where am I in this world I keep asking myself? And last night I found out. I’m someone who still values language, and I know how to use it.

Recently, I’ve discovered a writer I like, a startup guy in the fintech space. He writes about cryptocurrency and data asset security. I’ve done enough reading lately that I can follow along. I’ve Googled him and looked him up on Twitter. He has a startup that he believes will help change the way we live. Maybe not in my lifetime–but he still has my attention.

I know I’ve outlived my usefulness in terms of consuming the next wave of data products, such as Global Coin.

But I still want to know about it. My joints may be shot, but my curiosity is still well lubricated.

So I read a few of his articles before bedtime. I’m not naming names because my point is not to embarrass him. I’m sure he’s not the only thirty-something hotshot whose ideas move faster than his fingers can type. But he was not writing for me, the casual consumer of ideas that likely won’t impact my life. He had bigger fish to fry. He was aiming high. For investors. And that’s why I sat up and read a paragraph two or three times.

And I caught a mistake someone in his position shouldn’t make.

My brain may be old, but I can still recognize a simple, declarative sentence that is garbled beyond recognition. He had an important point to make, and it missed by a mile. Was it my lack of comprehension or had he not thought through the premise for his startup? If he’d presented that article to me as a potential investor, I would have handed it back to him and said, no thanks.

But this being Medium, I asked him in a comment. My version of wassup?

I wasn’t playing gotcha. I just didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t expect an answer. The article had thousands of claps. He’s a big deal in his space. But I give him props. He got right back to me. My bad, he said, in so many words. He hadn’t explained himself clearly and had left out a few crucial words. When he explained what he meant, I got it, and thanked him.

I’m nobody to him. I’m not even his audience. He’s pitching to investors and such. Should his company go viral, it might change my daughter’s life, but not mine. But he did me a tremendous service, nonetheless, and I’m very grateful.

He’s spent his life mastering the new data sets. Stuff of which I have only the barest grasp.

But I’ve spent my life trying to master my data sets.

I’m a writer and an editor. For the past four decades, I’ve done deep dives on how to make complex ideas understandable to lay people. How to make stories and emotions come alive on the page.

My little exchange with the startup guy helped me understand how important he is in a world I’m leaving behind.

And still, in this world, where I’m still alive and kicking, my data set still matters. There’s still room for me to do me. And for that reassurance, I love me some startup guy.