Patience: the secret weapon of old age
Reflections on learning new skills as an almost-boomer
Photo: from a video sending my younger brother happy birthday greetings. Notice over-tension on the left little finger...
Last week I spent much of my time with my head between earphones. There were four principal reasons. First, I had decided it was time to post a video here on the number of people from former Soviet Union countries in Cyprus—an update to my earlier one on the number of Russians. Second, a podcast on citizens’ assemblies and interspecies councils for my Figure It programme was re-scheduled from the previous week. Third, at short notice I was asked to come onto the Nicosia Uncut podcast to discuss what might be happening in Geneva in March.
My video-editing skills are baby-steps stage and my audio-editing skills are, at best, intermediate stage. This means that, while I can bang out an 800-word article in just over two hours if, like this one, it does not involve heavy research, it takes me two days or more to produce a short podcast or video. But videos and podcasts are the fashion, so this content-creator who is almost baby-boomer (you can tell because I use hyphens) must go where the market takes me.
YouTube, YouTube, YouTube
Thus, Monday was spent doing the research and preparing the visuals for the video. Tuesday was an hour or so to do practice recordings so that I could talk confidently without notes; eight minutes to record; then the rest of the day to edit those too-long pauses, or parts where I lost my place, or the ai-generated text which does not know how to spell Sapienta Economics but which needs three of four clicks for each word-change, or to go and look up endless YouTube videos to find out how to do that thing that must be in the software somewhere but I hadn’t found it yet.
Wednesday I was out all day. Thursday was the Island Talks podcast. Some of Thursday was also spent working with my logo designer to make sure that the images on YouTube would work. (It turns out that YouTube banners need to work simultaneously on three levels: mobile, desktop and television.) After my two days editing video, there was no way I was going to spend more hours working out how to create the banner on Canva or any of the other software out there. (If you like the result, my designer charges very reasonable prices and it won’t look bot-generated. Videos will be loaded there anon.)
Then for some of Friday, all day Saturday and half of Sunday I found myself back on the headphones recording and editing my own podcast episode. To my horror I realized that I had forgotten, for the second successive time, to check which microphone was being used before pressing record. While the voice of my guest was fine, mine sounded like I was talking to a mobile on the other side of the room.
Dear reader, if this ever happens to you, let me tell you from two lost days of my life each time I have done it, that the only thing to do is re-record immediately.
Alas, instead of learning my lesson from last time, I tried a number of different approaches in one software (Audacity), to try first to improve the quality of my audio track. I also edited both audio tracks completely for extraneous words and phrases etc, so that if I did have to re-record, I would have a clean script to work from. Only then did I try to put it back in the other software (Descript) that claims it can turn any quality of audio into “studio sound”.
Well, it turns out that you cannot mess with physics. It sounded like my throat had been invaded by sock-eating aliens. By now it was 7:50pm on Saturday evening and I was heading out for dinner. There was no avoiding it. I would have to re-record my part from scratch on Sunday.
At least Descript did create an ai-generated transcript, so I printed that out, set up two computers, one with the guest’s voice in my ear and the other recording my repeat replies, this time into the correct microphone. And then I spent just as many hours editing the new, combined recording as I had spent editing the original one.
“Patience is a virtue”—
Why am I telling you all this? First, if I am brutally honest, while I am trying to keep to a weekly schedule on this newsletter, my brain won’t go to tech-heavy or research-heavy tasks after last week’s travails.
Second, because I want to share my pleasant surprise that, while spending hours and hours on the podcast and video, instead of exploding into rage and wanting to break things (a certain Cannon printer did once get that treatment), I more or less took this all in my stride. I had spent most of the week going round in circles and earning no money because all of this particular output was for free. But I ended the week feeling satisfied that I knew a little more about editing than the previous time.
I wonder whether it is a by-product of taking up the violin a few years ago. It is extremely rewarding in those few moments when you nail it. But I had no idea until it was too late that it is considered one of the most difficult instruments in the world.
It is immensely hard to play in tune at speed. You learn, for example, that if your fourth finger on the D string keeps missing perfect intonation on the A string (probably happening in the photo above), then the only way to correct it is to slow right down and play it at snail’s place, while examining each element, often in the mirror. At what angle are my fingers hitting the strings? Am I bringing my fingers down from my bottom knuckles, as I should? Is my elbow angle wrong? Are my bottom knuckles too far from the violin’s neck? And that is just the left hand. All of this also requires endless YouTube videos in between lessons.
I therefore completely understand why people have a tendency to get cranky in their old age. I notice it in myself. You used to live in a world where you knew stuff and could do stuff. You even got quite good at it. Then along comes some new technology that you cannot avoid. You are suddenly less in control of your surroundings than you once were.
You really really need someone just to hold your hand, in person, and walk you through it. But even if you have the money to pay for it you don’t even know where to find that kind of person. Plus younguns these days, their culture seems to be not to acknowledge emails or messages. You have to chase them. Do you want to go down that road of being driven bananas by a person to avoid being driven bananas by technology?
No. So you are stuck on your own, playing YouTube videos at 0.75 speed to catch that really important thing they did with their mouse that your eyes are no longer quite sharp enough to see.
—and may be the only thing you can control
It would be dishonest to say that my violin-playing has not also resulted in occasions of rage and wanting to smash things. (I can’t because the violin is a precious gift from the widow of a good late friend.) But I do recommend learning an instrument as a way of handling the frustrations that come with ageing.
They say that the route to mental health is to focus on what you have the power to change. As you age, there is a lot going on in your body and in your environment that you cannot change immediately, or even at all. Your only choice is to learn, slowly and steadily, how to change it, or to learn how to live with it.
In short, you have to learn patience. It is the secret weapon of old age.
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Loved this, and cheering you on. Also, sock-eating aliens.