Member-only story
An Old Guy’s Search for Purpose and Meaning in the AI Era
And why I just spent four months NOT doing the thing I love most
If you’ve never faced a scary, challenging, major life transition, you will. Odds are you already have. Divorce, financial squeeze, job loss — just a few of the ways life can suddenly pound an otherwise well-adjusted, happy human into submission by stripping away purpose and meaning. That’s especially true for older people, like me.
My latest transition — my main writing gig evaporated suddenly, like raindrops on hot summer pavement — crushed my psyche.
Not because I have no experience with transitions, not because I’m afraid to try something new, but because I’m in my mid-60s now and the opportunities for someone with my skills, at my age, seem thinner than the odds of me playing in a World Cup game.
In my 20s and early 30s, I welcomed major transitions, seeing each as a risky experiment well worth taking: entirely new professions, different states, another country for a while. Then quitting a great newspaper job to chase my wife-to-be, dabbling in fiction and then starting my own online science news website (1998!), then selling it and going to work for a larger online media company.
