Why You Should Join Me in Writing about Our Later Years

Writing about our later years affirms that our life lessons are worth preserving. Through words, photos, crafts, or art, I join a long human tradition, from the painters of Lascaux Cave to diarists like Samuel Pepys. Recording myself digitally is something I’m learning to accept as “an irreplaceable mark of existence in what many observers now call the ‘algorithmic era’, a time when automated systems shape what we share, store, and remember.” (How Algorithms Shape Our World)

Why You Should Join Me in Writing about Our Later Years

You, too, may have already asked: What’s the point of writing about my life when the internet is already overflowing with personal stories? People share memories, snapshots of childhood homes, favorite meals, even medical journeys. Will there still be space for my story?

Our stories do matter, and they are relevant. Yet as one voice among many, we worry our words might get lost in the online cacophony.

Even as I insist on the value of my story, writing, recording, and creating my life as honestly as I can, I am aware that I am not seeking fame or recognition. So what drives me?

In fact, anything that distinguishes me from artificial intelligence.

Our lives, our experiences, our voices, these are the antidote to robotic recording. Recording myself digitally is something I’m learning to accept as “an irreplaceable mark of existence in what many observers now call the ‘algorithmic era’, a time when automated systems shape what we share, store, and remember” (How Algorithms Shape Our World). And this, I believe.

We Are Part of a Very Old Human Tradition

Long before books or blogs existed, humans were already leaving traces of their lives.

Seventeen thousand years ago, people painted animals and scenes of daily survival on the walls of Lascaux Cave. Thousands of years later, the Romans and Egyptians wrote letters on papyrus, leaving traces of ancient lifestyles. After the Middle Ages, in the 1600s, an Englishman, Samuel Pepys, kept a diary of ordinary days. I have a copy of Pepys’ diary and I’m amazed that it records everything, from work, illness, and worries, to pleasures and even illicit affairs.

Life as it was lived was examined and recorded, pondered and puzzled over in these records. What we gain are details of survival in their times, our mortal and frail humanity affirmed and applauded in the annals. Leaving a human trace.

The Internet Is Noisy, But Senior Voices are not Prominent

Today, it often feels as though the young are more prolific in recording their days. Personal writing online seems to belong to emerging youth. But where are the seniors?

In our Filipino setting, many young people move fluidly across platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, or private messaging groups, while seniors are more likely to stay on Facebook. Facebook has almost become our digital tambayan. Yet even there, many of us scroll more than we share. The wider digital world still feels intimidating.

If we are not careful, we may miss telling our young people:
• How we survived difficult marriages
• How we lived our faith, stumbled, and rose again
• How we could have cared for our bodies more conscientiously
• How we might have stewarded money more wisely
• How we stayed loyal to old, faithful friends
• How we became jaded at times, and are now trying to let the glow return

There is no better teacher than experience. But young people rarely respond to sermons. They resist when lessons are forced. We must find gentler ways to tell our stories, not in preaching, but through loving. Not in lecturing, but in sharing a life.

Writing About Our Life Is Witness

And this is where the tone can begin to sound ominous. The apostle James cautions that not everyone should presume to be teachers. The warning is sobering. In the act of writing, we can be too careless, or too careful.

We should hesitate when the focus is only the self: projection, posturing, polishing an image. Sometimes this becomes a blind spot. The line between vanity writing and witnessing can blur if we are not attentive.

But there is a stark difference between vanity and witness.

Vanity says: Look at me.
Witness says: This is what I learned about being human.

You have been living your life, or perhaps you feel you have already lived it. For decades, there was no time to look back. You were raising families, earning, building, surviving, coping. Life was forward motion.

Now comes the great shift. The pace softens. The gaze turns backward. You begin to search for patterns:
• what lasted
• what changed you
• what mattered in the end
• what you wish younger people knew

Reflection is not indulgence. It is a natural turning. Every elder carries a version of it. Some speak it in conversation. Some hold it quietly. Ours becomes writing.

We pass meaning forward because we have meaning to pass forward.

Reflection does not end in solitude, but seeks an audience not for applause, but for communion. This is not only about remembering, but about living fully, and about dying in grace as well.

Telling A Singular Story About Aging

Themes repeat across humanity. Love, ambition, regret, hope, nothing is new under the sun. But whether our lives have an exact echo in another is not the point of storytelling. Each life is singular. History is never homogeneous. A so-called universal history is, in truth, a flattening. No one life can be historicized and declared the story of all.

Across generations, memory disappears as quickly as people are allowed to pass away. A person dies, and without a photograph, without a name etched on stone, it is as though that person never existed.

But stories linger.
• in objects
• in places
• in bodies still navigating the world

There are no abstract containers of memory detached from the tangible. Memory clings to material, to geography, to gesture. The next question is obvious. Who will hold these things on record if not the one who chooses to write?

Writing refuses abstraction. It embodies moments. It resists erasure and the slow dissolution of memory.

Seniors’ recollections will eventually fade, their imaginations thinning, names slipping from recall. But what has been written remains. And what remains can inform a new generation—not with an old history or a new one, but with the quiet record of how humanity sustained itself.

Every form of imprint, from cave paintings to stitched quilts, from handwritten memoirs to digital reflections, repeats the same declaration:

I was here.

Or more importantly:

While I was here, I learned something. Let me tell you about it.

Works Cited

“How Algorithms Shape Our World.” Pew Research Center, 17 Mar. 2022, www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/03/17/how-algorithms-shape-our-world/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2026.

“Lascaux.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, whc.unesco.org/en/list/85/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2026.

“Saint James the Just.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-James-the-Just. Accessed 27 Feb. 2026.

Pepys, Samuel. “The Diary of Samuel Pepys.” PepysDiary.com, www.pepysdiary.com/diary/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2026.