Hey seniors! Ever forget where you put something? Don’t let it bother you. You’ve lots of company.
Read and relax. Help may be on the way.
If I had a nickel, no make that a dollar (inflation), for every time one of my senior friends complained about misplacing or losing something, I’d be able to take all you folks who read and respond to this post out to dinner.
I was discussing the topic with a 75-ish-year-old friend the other day. He mentioned that his wife reassured him of his concerns about cognitive decline by joking:
“Honey, if you forget where you left the pencil that’s okay but if you forget the pencil is used to write, then we’ll start to worry.”
Let’s face it, like or not, I’m not the Jeopardy player I use to be. Similar to many people my age, I take notice of the Prevagen ads on TV and speculate on whether it works or not.
A 2017 article by Kathryn Schultz in The New Yorker magazine reports:
Data from one insurance company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things…
In the course of your life, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects; here in this country, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching a day. And there’s the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, thirty billion dollars on misplaced cell phones alone.
Now that’s probably a daily hit to the economy equal to the GNP of a small European country.
Technology is evolving to meet the need, helping humans in their seemingly endless search for lost objects.
The other day I treated everybody in the Walmart parking lot to an earsplitting BEEP, BEEP, BEEP in my successful attempt to find my car that must have levitated from where I’d originally parked it.
Item trackers such as AirTag and Tile Mate are becoming more and more popular.
What’s a retired man or woman to do? Our kids are grown with families of their own and the grandkids are in school every day. Think of all the additional time seniors have to continue misplacing things!
With recent technology seeking to minimise the challenge of searching for missing objects, is cognitive decline more or less of an inevitability?
What will we ever do with all that brain space?
When did you say Jeopardy was on?
