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Oh please, your son was 7 years old. We were talking about staying informed in our retirement years.
The point is not LITERALLY "Al Roker" (although I did just ask my mainly-clueless 30-something son if he knew who he was -- he did.) The point is (I repeat), keeping up with the world around you. My mother's siblings (the ones who eventually got dementia) lived in a world-gone-by -- old music, old movies, nothing of "today's" culture or current events. I see a direct correlation between their living in the past to their slide into dementia.
This is a good point. Maybe some of the world today seems to be distant from experience, or going a way you don't much like, or your music is still what you listened to when you were fifteen, but the world is out there, and its not ever good to ignore your surroundings. If you are walking down the street, even if you don't plan to go in them, you notice there is a store and a landromat and a place that sells icecream. Its normal to do that. Its how we are wired to scope out life. If its a street where you need to pay attention, you listen to your inner senses too. That the group sitting by the building should be avoided. Don't ask why, but do. You don't just walk past them and not see they are there.
In a sense, we do that with the wider world. I use the tv as background noise sometimes. I don't and never really have felt much of a connection with a lot of it, but I do know its there. I really surprised my son when I said I liked some of the new young rock bands they have on Jimmy Kimmel. They remind me of rock when I was their age.
I think the worse thing you can do is draw the curtains and make your own world and shut out the rest from view. It makes you vulnerable. You can't stay there and I think when people try to its when they make that final retreat.
I'm not saying anyone has to be part of the stuff out there, but awareness is important. In your *personal* space it *is* your world, but know its yours.
And its good to find things you like, like a rock band of 20 year olds that you enjoy, because there is a great deal of variety out there, and when you pull the blinds and say 'all new movies are junk' your shutting out a lot more than movies, and might find that while most aren't for you there's some reall jems you'd miss.
And never EVER use the word 'ALL'. It means you just pulled the blinds and have started to shrivel, no matter what age you are.
After you retire, do you relish the fact that you now have all the time you could wish to fully read the morning paper?
Or is the opposite true--now that you're retired you don't feel a desire to read a newspaper at all. Maybe you don't want to keep up with the news anymore. Or maybe, after you retire, you realize the real "news" isn't what's written in a newspaper.
Or, maybe you've grown tired of newspapers (just one more thing to have to throw away), but enjoy news programs online or on tv?
How have your media habits changed since retirement?
I'd always pick up the Washington Post on the way to work during the week, and I'd walk up to the corner to get the Sat. and Sun. papers as well. In retirement, I still read the paper in hard copy - the only difference I've noticed is that I tend to read more of the paper than I did while working.
The news available in a good daily paper may not be as "new" as the news available online, but I find that it tends to be more detailed, more informative, and more professionally-written (although the editing, if it actually happens anymore, can be really bad).
Pre-retirement, I'd watch at least 30 minutes of local TV news, and 30 minutes of national news. Since I retired, I don't watch ANY TV news. In fact, I watch less TV these days ... more sports, since I've been following the Caps and the Nats, and far less network programming. The shows that I have any interest in I'll catch on demand (usually, that means no commercials) or on Netflix.
I don't listen to the radio - haven't listened to the radio on a regular basis for many, many years. And it's been my impression that the more that people listen to talk radio, the dumber they get. I only have so many brain cells - I don't want to lose them to talk radio.
I'm online more these days. There are websites I check at least once a day, and several that I check more frequently. Some are for information (news, sports, weather) and some are entertainment (Netflix, City-Data, the Kennebec Journal ... I like their sudoku).
Oh ... although I am aware that he is some kind of TV personality (hopefully, he's someone who is famous for being something other than "famous" - you know, like so-called "reality" people?), I don't believe I've ever actually seen Al Roker on TV.
Guess I'm kinda a news junkie. Print and online. So much of it is slanted to one political spectrum or another.Difficult to tells what's true or false. Just a bystander watching the world go by .
I read 4 newspapers (online) daily, a legal paper on weekdays, a professional Social Security blog daily and occasionally, a foreign national newspaper. CNN daily, CNBC several days a week. I also follow up by researching the news items that pique my interest.
I never heard of Al Roker. I'm not sure I ever knew that Bon Jovi was a band versus an individual; I simply can't remember.
Hopefully, my brain will continue to process the important information and dump the trivial stuff. If not, I guess I'll have to turn on the television to get the Reader's Digest version of the news. At that point, I will know for certain that I am heading towards dementia.
I know about Bon Jovi because maybe 20 years ago I took my daughter and a gaggle of her little friends to a Bon Jovi concert. My hearing came back by about noon the next day.
I know about Al Roker as a result of his gastric bypass surgery - and loved Jon Bon Jovi when he appeared as Carrie's boyfriend in Sex and the City. They are both over 50 - not exactly "new news". Robyn
It's funny to read the comments about Al Roker. Yes, I get the point that was being made , that it's important to be able to discuss current events and people in the news. But as a side note, I think it's funny that Al Roker is still considered a current person in the news. I think of Al Roker as a person in the news during the 70s.
LOL, am I getting old or what? When I think of Al Roker, I remember when the Mary Tyler Moore show had a character called Gordy, and there were people who thought it was a dumb joke to have this character because a whitebread city like Minneapolis would never have a black guy who wasn't the sportscaster. Then a year later Al Roker gets the weatherman job in Albany. It seems like just yesterday we were standing around at work laughing about the significance in all this. To me that was one of those "quintessential moments of the 70s."
I don't listen to the radio - haven't listened to the radio on a regular basis for many, many years. And it's been my impression that the more that people listen to talk radio, the dumber they get. I only have so many brain cells - I don't want to lose them to talk radio.
I listen to a lot more radio (although almost no talk radio, except for some stuff on the BBC), but because of things like Pandora and Spotify I listen to several hours of music daily. In the 90s and early 2000s I'd pretty much stopped listening to music altogether because I hated a lot of what was on the radio and the heavy song repetition, but with the "personal radio" stations that the two music services offer, you can put in an artist or a song you like and it'll play similar music - often artists I'd never heard of before, way out of Top 40 radio. In the last couple years I've discovered Eilen Jewell, Paul Thorn, Slaid Cleves, The Civil Wars, The Decemberists, and a host of new names across many genres. I'm very happy to have music back to being such an important place in my listening day and it really took technology to do it.
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