A Semi-Luddite Looks at 60

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A Semi-Luddite Looks at 60

Reflecting on a life fully lived and mostly unplugged as a hazy shade of winter deepens

(First in a series about growing old. Or maybe this is the second installment? Third?)

By Mark Cromer

Amid the big chill of late January 2025, I keep thinking back to the high summer of 1984 and of a particular afternoon I spent on a sun-drenched island halfway around the world.

I was on the island of Ios, a dusty speck in the Aegean Sea that had beckoned my friends and me that summer during the table tales that we’d heard from fellow travelers of its lowkey atmosphere and ad hoc pleasure faire that was well off the Fred & Ethel traditional tourist path yet with a reliably ample itinerant population of European hippie chicks that enjoyed casually hanging out, expressing their sexual agency and making time with young men like us.

It all sounded very good.

We had spent weeks wandering across a continent bifurcated by the Cold War and still buffeted by the wave of terrorism that had rolled across much of Europe in the 1970s and into the 1980s, watching NATO warplanes shriek across the skies at low altitudes in preparation for an aerial ballet with their Warsaw Pact dance partners. Marxist social clubs like Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades were still on the tips of peoples’ tongues while the major league players of the IRA and the PLO were still out and about and doing the town, leaving save-the-dates, gifts and greetings cards.

I was the lone young American among my crew of Irish friends and fellow writers and while we all harbored sympathies for the national liberation struggles of the era—and particularly the Provos in Belfast and the Palestinians in Palestine—we weren’t spending a summer in Europe in pursuit of revolution or political activism or ideological enlightenment. Far from it.

Ours was a liberation of the Id and the only things we were interested in bombing were our livers.

Sun-kissed and booze-driven on the Island of Ios in the summer of 1984 during a tour of Europe with my Irish friends. I’m on the balcony of the place where I was renting a cheap room that was a great place to crash after our adventures.

Without smart phones, credit cards or laptops, we jaunted across the continent on our own tour funded via a colorful array of fiat currencies and Thomas Cook travelers cheques, hitting cities in the same tradition of the rock bands that we admired; hungry and hellbent on rolling from one good time to another, sampling and savoring the women, booze, party favors and various cool places to check out that were sometimes historic but often overlooked and relatively undiscovered.

Something about the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom.

Our youthful adventures that summer began with a long soiree in Paris that we converted into a happening that unraveled over a week or more as we slunk and bounced between the intriguingly seedy invitations of Pigalle and the gray canyons of Père Lachaise, where we enjoyed the then-perpetual bacchanal unfolding at Jim Morrison’s gravesite. Avoiding a few brushes with the law and dodging disaster at the hands of underworld doormen and shady maître d’s at the cabarets we habituated and the Moroccan hashish peddlers we somehow seemed to keep running into, go figure, we managed to slip out of the City of Light mostly in one piece and make our way steadily toward Athens and then in the Aegean Sea beyond, the island of Ios.

To our good fortune we found Ios to be pretty much just as the traveling hipsters had painted it for us in their quiet recommendations; a sun-kissed stretch of rock and sand less than a dozen miles in length with a couple whitewashed villages that was apparently far enough off the beaten path that seemingly led most everyone else to Mykonos and leaving this outpost in the Eastern Mediterranean to a pleasant population blend of artists and writers, vagabonds, second-wave bohemians and the evergreen hippie girls whose company we’d come to favor keeping during our off hours, which was most days.

Our stay in Ios offered a string of afternoons that were remarkable for their sameness and even more remarkable for how lovely that sameness proved to be; the late rise and slouching toward an American breakfast at a little joint we discovered run by an expat who understood the vital importance of bacon and eggs and hashbrowns served along with the opening rounds of drinks for the pick-me-up followed by the slow drift down to the shoreline or perhaps someplace up the hill for a nice view, quiet conversation or a window of solitude somewhere before dinner and then off to a party at one of the places that passed as a club or an even more informal gathering somewhere on a deck or roof.

One afternoon my friend Ian and I had sauntered down to an outcropping of rocks with an Italian girl that I had become entangled with at a party up the hill the night before. She was familiar with a spot where we could cliff dive and offered to take us there for some mid-day play. Not the death-inviting leaps of the sort seen in Acapulco, but a far more tempting plunge of perhaps 25-feet into the crystalline azure below.

Nothing to it, she said, claiming to have done it before.

Ian and I looked at each other and then smiled back at her: “Terrific. Ladies first.”

She offered a little laugh that was comprised partly of understanding with a dash of dismissiveness thrown in as she kicked off her sandals and doffed her shirt but she didn’t blink. Poised for a moment at the ledge, she leapt forward from a semi-crouch and arced gracefully through the air and down into a splash that thankfully didn’t immediately roil red.

She surfaced like a seal on a lazy day enjoying shark-free waters, waving up at us with an ebullient smile as if to say: ‘See, I wasn’t trying to kill you.’

I followed her and Ian followed me and she lingered along the rocks to show us where and how to climb back up to our spot.

We leapt off the cliff in that succession a few more times, I think we weren’t too far from the old Ios lighthouse, it’s hard to say now, but I remember that knifing through the air between terra firma and mother sea for an extended two or three seconds that afternoon provided a sense of the exhilaration that comes with falling while knowing you are probably going to be just fine.

A poor man’s skydiving.

And I remember after my last dive I lingered in the sea for a while longer, taking a little more time to appreciate the clarity of the water and the gentle swells of the sea which rolled and rose around me in a comforting embrace. I swam out a little further to look up at Ian and the Italian chick and take in what I could see of the island’s horizon.

I just wanted to look at it for a spell, floating just off shore, feasting my eyes on the iconography of a moment that I sensed was important, the invigorating feeling of escape and discovery all at once. The young man and the sea.

I rejoined Ian and the Italian girl back on land and above the cliff, and as Ian prepared a snack for us from our rucksacks our little dago sweet roll had freed herself from her top and reclined with a green bottle of goodness in hand, offering up her own soft swells to the sun and prompting me to think ‘God, I love Europe.’ And I liked her plenty too, same as I had the night before when our casual conversation and escalating flirtations and dancing had finally dissolved in the wee hours into a fleshy enmeshing of our limbs and lips, but four decades down the road and her name has flitted away like a butterfly through the tangles of time and disappeared from sight into a memory almost full with a rather satisfying array of names, dates, places and events.

I was writing a lot of things down that summer in my notebooks, but her name was evidently not one of them. And this far down the road, that feels rather oddly right. She was part of an experience that perhaps surpassed name recognition, elevating her to that status of simultaneously very real and yet somewhat ethereal in the rearview. She just was.

That afternoon held an air of familiarity of sorts for me as well, as I kept flashing back to the fall and winter of 1982, when I had been reading the assigned selections from a curation of short stories entitled Identity: Stories for This Generation, a collection that had first been published back in 1966 but was still in circulation for honors English curriculum as the 80s got underway. Irwin Shaw’s short story Then We Were Three held my attention and stoked my imagination with its account of two young American men taking up the company of a rather lovely British girl on a trip across Europe.

There was an inspiring allure to their continental drift and the undercurrents coursing between the three of them.

But Ian and I weren’t exactly Bert and Munnie, we were just starting our collegiate run in America and Ireland whereas Shaw’s characters had already finished their studies, and our Italian number certainly wasn’t Martha, but she may have been even more fun in our real life than Shaw’s fictional object of competing affections was in his literary construct. Ours was destined to be a threesome of sorts for just a day or so, there wasn’t time for much more to play out before Ian and I returned to prowling and howling elsewhere on the island and then back on the mainland with our friends John and Garret.

The wonderment that washed over me that particular afternoon came from a sense of self-awareness of the moment, a heightened perception that allowed me to see that day as it truly was, a golden intersection of youthful vitality and seemingly endless possibilities of what lay ahead in life.

And that was a perspective blessedly unpolluted by the technology that humans have self-infused into their lives today.

Ours was an awareness unshaped or distorted by the omnipresence of tech gadgets and the so-called social media which they feed. We spent that afternoon diving off a cliff and lounging about and sharing lunch and a couple of bottles completely uninfected by the contagium of the feverish desire to relentlessly post to whatever digital platform that’s in vogue and then staring into the screen waiting for insta-validation as some sort of proof of life.

To crib a popular phrase these days, our authentic lives were based on the principle of living it and being aware of all the glories of the moment—and perhaps ignoring some inglorious aspects of it as well—not obsessing with relentlessly staging, producing and promoting it.

From the late 1970s, throughout 1980s and into the early 1990s I saw an amazing array of major rock bands for an average of probably twenty bucks a ticket and my fellow concertgoers and I organically savored the holistic experience that those rock shows bestowed upon my generation. In some respects, those experiences were powerful enough to have shaped and informed our lives.

So, I have to contrast that with the drones of today who I’ve seen put $2,500 on a credit card to buy a Concierge VIP Package to see artists milking the nostalgia circuit well past their primes and yet they still spend most of their time at the show and backstage clutching their iPhones like a Jesus handle and viewing the so-called experience through its screen.

But that’s not an experience at all. It’s a trance, a tech-induced stupor designed to succor the lemmings and at the same time keep them distracted. If they don’t record it on their iPhones they may as well not be there as what’s the point if they can’t post it?

Back in the mid-1980s, that lovely space where youth and opportunity meet remained a natural garden of optimism and one largely unchanged from what it had been in the mid-1950s. It had been restored at least in some measure by Ronald Reagan’s powerful appeal to the American psyche, though the world was also certainly far less cluttered with distracting techno-crap and far less cramped with swarthy hordes of people than it is today. In 1984, the planet was about only half as populated as it is in 2025, meaning there were 4 billion fewer people on the planet that summer and the difference was tangible.

Ronnie & Me 1985: In Manhattan with a cutout of the prez. I’d actually first seen him in person as a kid when he was the governor of my home state of California and I would run into him again at Nixon’s funeral which I covered as a journalist.

I was keenly aware of just where I was standing at that moment in human history and how unique it actually was to have the good fortune to be an American casually cliff-diving on the small island of Ios into the Aegean Sea at just 18-years-old as the 20th Century began to wind down amid simmering guerrilla wars and the omnipresent frozen conflict with the Soviets that could instantly ignite to incinerate humankind’s global enterprise in one big flash bang.

And more than just a young American, I was a young American from Los Angeles, California, that Western mecca which then still carried a certain creative resonance, an almost magical appointment that was born of actual material facts and admittedly polished with some genius Hollywood PR that created the great mythos of The Golden State. California’s current evocation of mass-scale dysfunction and its soul-crushing despair that are grimly offered as the unholy sacraments of the progressive cult rituals to consecrate the fallen City of Angels and sanctify this poisoned Promised Land with a veil of misery would simply have been unimaginable to me that summer.

And believe me, I could imagine a lot.

That particular afternoon on Ios provided me with a template of sorts of what I wanted from life on a variety of levels, a distillation of the individual freedom I intended to exercise and the casual pleasures I intended to prioritize. I wanted a life centered more around curating experiences than one dedicated to hypnotically amassing ‘stuff’ and I considered my indulgences as an intentional rejection of a generational stamp press future waiting for me as it did for so many of my peers who seemed willing to accept walking into the freeze-dry machine to be sentenced to serve forty years of working forty-hours-a-week broken up by two-week ‘vacations’ before finally being let go with a gold watch inscribed with ‘Thanks!’—a token of appreciation for expending the most universal precious commodity of time in pursuit of more consumer crap and more profits for someone else.

Three Phones & A Quarter of a Century: I used these three cell phones over 25 years, never sending a text. I don’t see the need to own or use a ‘smart’ phone and I don’t need to text or look at anything on my phone or ask an AI bot for anything. Its worked out fine this far down the road.

Perhaps that’s why I have never owned or even used a ‘smart phone,’ rejecting its digital leash and its vortex of perpetual distraction, content to carry on with my life with the convenience of a flip-phone in the event that I actually needed to call someone or be reached in an emergency while I was out and about. Over the course of a quarter-century, I have only owned three flip-phones and I don’t text. My 2G phone was finally declared officially extinct in December 2022, I upgraded to a sturdy 4G flip-phone and when the helpful associate who looked considerably less than half my age offered to transfer the ‘Contacts’ from my old phone to my new one, I told him there was no need since there were no contact numbers, or anything else, stored in my old phone.

“So, you don’t have any contacts?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” I said. “Lots of them.”

“Where do you keep their numbers?” he asked.

“In my head,” I said. “If it’s someone I really need or want to speak with, I know their number.”

“Wow,” he said, adding a seemingly sincere afterthought of: “That’s cool.”

I also didn’t really envision being behind any desk that wasn’t located at my own home for very long periods of time at all. I already knew that I considered the hedonistic slogan ‘wine, women and song’ to be a desirable treasure map and/or to-do list and I was determined to write my way into, through and out of as much adventure as possible as long as I had a pulse, a sufficient blood oxygen level and enough remaining mental acuity to make it work.

And pretty much I did make it work, laying a solid professional foundation that began in the traditional newsrooms of the late 1980s and through the 1990s as a newspaper reporter—back when newspapers were still vibrant powerhouses that paid fairly well before multiple cancers killed the industry—and then moving into corporate communications and magazine editing from a nice office in Beverly Hills (more on that later) and landing writing fellowships at think tanks before moving into the more clandestine world of business intelligence and investigations for global heavy-hitters like Kroll. I have been working from my home office for the past two decades.

It was a helluva run and a lot of fun.

And fundamentally, if we’re not here for a good time, then what are we doing here at all?

Running on Empty: Working from my home office for more than two decades has the added benefit of not only a private shitter and an open bar but an amazing commute of zero miles. Thus, the Saturn VUE I bought new two decades ago took almost 20 years to finally hit 100,000 miles. It’s still a solid vehicle and not having a car payment in 15-plus years has been nice, too.

Of course, I didn’t much anticipate growing old back then either, and part of me felt that the odds were at least even that I wouldn’t see life in this world after the age of 40, and I can’t say that I was particularly disturbed by the prospect of unleashing a blazing but abbreviated run that came to an end within a couple of decades from my vantage point of the mid-1980s.

But is living in dogged pursuit of longevity really living at all?

In 2025, as I close out the last months of my 50s and prepare to step into my 60s, I am under no illusion that today somehow ones’ 60s are now magically ‘the new 40s.’ That’s just New Age bullshit and psychobabble peddled by lifestyle grifters who have monetized a cultural fear of growing old and dying.  No matter how many supplements and pills they prescribe or whatever newfangled tech breakthrough they manage to achieve, aging is the human condition and growing old is still growing old and it’s neither particularly pretty nor does it offer anything much more useful to me than perhaps a perspective forged from experience and the pleasant elixir of potent memories from treading the path less taken.

Our European summer tour in 1984 would continue on well after we departed Ios to meander up the Italian boot and around the continent once again before the fall arrived and we’d return to our respective countries and the collegiate experience that awaited.

During that summer abroad I called home only once, from Paris, and I sent my folks a couple of telegrams and mailed a few post cards to friends. Other than that, I was in the wind.

It was an intentional and prolonged untethering.

After that summer abroad I began to realize and act upon the vision of my life that I had glimpsed amid that glimmering afternoon in the Aegean, breaking up my college studies with another summer-long adventure in 1985 as my Irish pal Ian and I embarked on an epic road trip that took us from Los Angeles through the American West and then into the lush redoubt of the Ozarks and the American South before running up the Eastern seaboard with stints in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia and more extended explorations of New York and Boston that mirrored our adventures in Paris the previous summer. Then we drove on to Montreal, Toronto, Detroit and Chicago before peeling off through the heartland of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas before traversing the Rocky Mountains and making our way across Utah and Nevada and into Reno before the crash landing back in LA just in time for the fall and a return to campus.

I still can’t believe my dad let me take his new pickup truck for that summer spent on the road. He probably can’t either.

Like that afternoon of cliff-diving on Ios in the summer of 1984, my first trip up to the rooftop observation deck of the World Trade Center’s South Tower in the summer of ’85 gave me another moment of an elevated perspective that I would always remember, one that again glimmered with boundless possibilities that seemed to beckon below even as the skies began to churn from a storm rolling off the Atlantic.

Summer of 1985: From the top of the World Trade Center’s South Tower the opportunities of life looked quite promising below. The collarless Spanish Wedding shirt was a bit much in hindsight, but back then it seemed just fine in the spirit of the time. The towers were always amazing to behold and I returned to the South Tower’ observation deck a few times over the next decade.

Much of Manhattan was still a rough and tumble place back then, as Bernie Goetz thankfully reminded us, but there was something electric in the air all over New York City that year and it wasn’t just John Gotti’s impending ascension to the Boss of Bosses.

We reveled in that energy from Greenwich Village to Central Park West, making a pilgrimage to The Dakota to pay our respects to John Lennon where he was felled, and we spent a few days drifting around Times Square well before it was ruined by Rudy Giuliani’s soulless corporate takeover. Our explorations there proved serendipitous for Ian, as I recall he was quite enamored for a spell with “a coffee-colored girl” he’d discovered in one of the Peep Shows.

I just laugh now when I think about that summer when neither one of us were quite 20-years-old yet but we didn’t miss a beat in driving more than 7,000 miles across two countries, a substantial portion of which was off of the Interstates and highways, making our way through various backroads and rural routes with nothing more advanced than a TripTik from Auto Club and talking our way into and out of some pretty amazing and occasionally precarious experiences.

And we didn’t break a sweat or mind much at all if and when we got lost. That was part of the journey.

I captured some of that summer on camera, having upgraded from the small Minolta AF-S V point n’ shoot (known as ‘The Talker’ for its audible voice cues) that I had taken with me to Europe to a trusty Pentax K1000, the ultimate workhorse SLR with a standard 50mm lens that I supplemented with an 80-200mm zoom and 62mm wide-angle. That camera and those three lenses went with me across America and stayed with me throughout my college years and throughout my career in journalism and business intelligence and I still have the whole rig today, four decades down the road, preserved in excellent shape. While I was glad to have that camera with me, I am equally pleased that I didn’t have a phone constantly at my disposal.

It wasn’t an inconvenience. It wasn’t even something we thought about and we didn’t just survive, we thrived.

Those days may well be long gone, much like the phone booths, highway call boxes and Thomas Guides that once populated them, but as I settle into the fact that I am facing the Third Act and Last Call of my life, it is comforting and sometimes even useful to recall the casual splendor of a time and a terrain that both cradled and rocked our worlds as my friends and I made our way through life mostly unencumbered and undistracted by the cold glow of tech.

It was a blessing.