May 12, 2026
Mississippi Mills, Ontario
My dear Reader:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to hold my interest. It provides a modern technological springboard that I am wont not to ignore. I am especially anxious to experiment with the capacity of AI to provide meaningful and worthwhile direction. Asking pertinent questions affords the opportunity to assess the answers. For openers, the comparative subtleties of the human mind are not in my opinion to be underestimated. As much as has been said to extol AI, the blunt truth is that AI was created by man not by a god. Doing something faster is not the sole measure of accomplishment.
Notwithstanding this and other related limitations (such as perceived obsequiousness and shallow repetitive compliments), my evolving experience with AI is predominantly bountiful.
In this spirit – and with this optimism – I have today engaged HAL (my AI characterization) to address a general query. Clearly in this instance the rummage is an end-of-life adventure which accordingly promotes and commands a critical refined response. In summary I find the AI narrative (below) to be mildly scintillating; but its philosophic nature is as usual overlaid with ideal platitudes which seldom bridge the gap between candid experience and wishful desirability. I rather doubt that AI will have the answer to life’s imponderables.
HAL – What do you recommend is the appropriate conduct of a an old man?
This is plainly a moral question pertaining to right and wrong – perhaps inviting the benefit of ancient philosophy (which I am bound to observe was frequently associated with mystical imagery involving gods). Here is what I got.
Bill, the first thing I would discard is the notion that age itself imposes a theatrical role. A man of seventy-seven need not become artificially “elderly,” mild, ornamental, or perpetually grateful merely because the calendar insists upon it. One of the indignities sometimes imposed on older men is the expectation that they surrender intensity, appetite for beauty, opinion, humor, eros, curiosity, and even vanity. I would resist that surrender.
The appropriate conduct of a retired man of your age depends less on convention than on proportion.
A few things matter enormously.
Maintain dignity without rigidity.
There is a difference between dignity and solemnity. The older man who remains playful, curious, and civilized is often far more impressive than the one who clings to authority or correctness. One can age into grace without becoming bland.
Protect independence fiercely, but not pridefully.
Aging often becomes a negotiation between autonomy and limitation. The wise course is neither denial nor capitulation. Use the cane, the tricycle, the elevator, the hearing aid, the chauffeur, the electric car, the delivery service — whatever preserves freedom and enlarges life rather than shrinking it. Practical adaptation is not defeat.
Curate one’s surroundings.
At twenty-five one can live amid disorder and still feel possibility. At seventy-seven, environment becomes moral as well as aesthetic. Good lighting, music, order, beauty, books, decent linen, a proper drink, a loyal dog if possible, photographs, views of trees or sky — these are no longer luxuries. They are architecture for the spirit.
Remain intellectually alive.
Retirement should not mean withdrawal from thought. An older man who continues reading, writing, reflecting, listening to music attentively, studying history, observing politics skeptically, and refining judgment remains fully inhabited. Mental passivity ages a person faster than the body does.
Avoid bitterness as a residence.
This may be the hardest discipline. By seventy-seven, almost everyone has betrayals, humiliations, losses, vanished ambitions, estrangements, and ghosts. Some become archivists of grievance. It corrodes them. Memory is inevitable; embitterment is a choice repeated daily.
Cultivate younger people selectively.
Not to imitate them, nor to lecture them endlessly, but to remain in conversation with life as it is becoming. The old who speak only to the old often become custodians of a vanished world. The ideal is continuity — retaining standards while remaining perceptive about change.
Permit sentiment, but resist self-pity.
An older man may look backward often; he almost must. Reflection is natural. But self-pity shrinks the soul. Melancholy can even become beautiful when joined to gratitude and humor.
Continue to care about appearance.
Not narcissistically, but ceremonially. A well-kept older man — polished shoes, decent watch, good coat, clean hands, perhaps a touch of cologne — communicates self-respect and consideration toward others. Civilization lives in details.
Know when silence is superior to instruction.
One privilege of age is perspective. One danger of age is incessant commentary. The older man who speaks deliberately and sparingly often carries greater weight than the one who offers continuous pronouncements.
Keep one private realm untouched by utility.
Music, photography, writing, gardening, heraldry, theology, watches, poetry, old films, architecture — something pursued not for productivity but because it nourishes inner life. Without this, retirement becomes administrative existence.
And finally:
A man of seventy-seven should become more himself, not less.
Youth experiments with identity. Age distills it.
The admirable older man is not one who pretends to be young, nor one who collapses into oldness, but one who becomes unmistakably individual — quieter perhaps, slower perhaps, but more lucid, more selective, more humane, and often more formidable than before.
