On My Way To Worldcon

My bag is mostly packed, except for last minute things like my recharger and my neck brace. Again, my panels are Oral Tradition and Neurodivergent Writing at 1 and 4 Thursday, and K-Pop Demon Hunters followed by Healthy Aging Brains at 1 and 4 Friday. 

My Labubus have their outfits all ready. I’m actually kind of glad the fad is fizzling so I can make them my own special unfashionable quirk. I’m not like those silly old ladies who collect Precious Moments and Hummels, I’m into fuzzy monsters. 

Saturday my plans are to wander randomly around, and take naps, with sporadic socializing, and then once I get through that I’m going to Disneyland. 

I don’t really have anything to sell or promote this time, and I don’t have a lot of expectations, so I’m thinking of just wandering around being present in the here-and-now, just to see how it feels. 

My body is being a wee bit difficult. I’m on a new med that works wonders for the nerve pain but makes me relatively lethargic, so instead of charging out of bed at 6 am and writing a couple thousand words before sunrise, I’m … napping. And sleeping late. And changing size, as I drop fat and gain muscle, in a quest to have something vaguely resembling the body I had in my 20s – in cubic displacement if nothing else. 

But I’m optimistic, and looking forward to connecting with other fans of things like Dungeon Crawler Carl and K-Pop Demon Hunters. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Official AI Policy: Not In My Art, Thanks

Recently there was a brouhaha in the writing community when Sephera Giron wrote an unpopular editorial and faced backlash – here’s File 770’s write-up.

I’ve written before that the only permissible opinion about AI in this community is that it’s all-bad and shouldn’t exist. 

My own opinion runs more to “it’s good for quite a few applications, such as medicine” and “latest permutation on punk collage art like Robert Mapplethorpe used to do” but my feeble room-reading skills are adequate enough to not allow me to go around accusing detractors of being ignorant Luddites. And yeah, I did do a book cover in AI, and the essay starts out by informing everyone that people who do that are not the enemy. 

Then I basically gave up on that last book, and speculative fiction apparently. I spent the next year or so unable to get any writing done until I decided to ditch SF entirely and write something based in the real world. 

Meanwhile, I have discovered people who actually prefer AI writing. 

One of my social media women’s groups has been plagued with AI slop essays, usually along the theme of “inspiring moments when women rose above sexism.” A couple months ago, one of them complained that she saw a movie about an inspiring female hero and it didn’t contain any of these inspiring moments – and that was the whole reason she had watched it, hoping it would be a fertile source of inspiring moments. 

I’m pretty sure the future will have plenty of streamable AI-written movies of AI-rendered people enjoying a steady stream of inspiring moments. And this is supposed to make me feel enraged, according to a lot of the other people I follow, who ceaselessly post essays about how AI and data centers will destroy humanity. 

But I try to avoid outrage. I mean, c’mon, I work with trial lawyers, that “inflame the jury” type arguing doesn’t really work that well on me. I have a pretty substantial resistance score in relation to bullshit arguments in general. 

Right now I consider myself more of a futurist than a science fictional type person. A futurist looks around and says “based on the evidence, I think this probably is going to happen.” Science fiction these days seems more about replacing that “probably is going to” with “should.” 

Other than a general blanket hope for minimal harm, I don’t really have any opinions about what we should or shouldn’t do. I have opinions about what I personally should not do, and the obligatory sharing of mass produced political opinions is right there on top. 

So with that in mind, I have No Opinion about AI, or data centers, from a “should” perspective. Mostly because if I did have opinions, expressing them wouldn’t really sway anyone capable of making changes. From a probability perspective, they’re a huge trend right now and will proliferate; learning about them is advantageous. 

Last time I had an emphatic opinion, it was about climate change, and it happened in the ‘80s, when I gave up my Cadillac, moved to a walkable city, and learned to embrace recycling. All my peers thought I was ridiculous as they moved to minimansions in Outer Burbaria and invested in gigantic SUVs. 

It wasn’t a moral opinion though. It was more like a probability, like data science – trying to figure out what’s going to happen anyway, and where to stand to avoid the worst of it. And I’ve been living in my walkable city, where the average temperature is in the sixties, going “yep, getting pretty warm out there.” And lately, “sure are a lot of robot cars and AI billboards around here.” 

Besides AI, there are a whole slew of things I have no “should” type opinions about. Religions, and people who follow them. Countries, and people who live in them. Orientations and genders and pronouns. Musical styles that I don’t follow. Sports. Whatever today’s ragebait is about. Things I can’t talk about due to my NDA. Things I won’t talk about because I am uninformed. 

Now I’ve been known to have an aesthetic opinion every so often, and I haven’t seen anything AI-produced that fits my definition of art. My sole involvement with AI “creativity” had to do with the desire to create a face that only existed in digital reality rather than trying to find a model to take a picture that I could digitally manipulate. Oh well, that certainly backfired. Still, I have no quarrel with those who object to AI attempts at visual and prose art. I tend to block it when I see it … but I also tend to block long bossy essays telling me why I should hate it more. For aesthetic reasons. 

At the end of the day, we’re going to be sharing our planet with some lying robots for the indefinite future. It’s a good idea to learn about them, since the window for “let’s just not invent them” appears to have passed.

We can choose when to involve them, however. I refuse to use AIs in my fiction. Or my music. 

Or in my fabric art, now that I think about it. Fabric art groups have been plagued with splendid photos of projects that can’t really be completed in the real world. Having to repeatedly explain that’s AI, if you bought a kit you got ripped off, you can’t make it, not possible. 

And that’s pretty much my opinion on AI. It doesn’t belong in my art the same way sardines do not belong on my pizza or sugar does not belong in my coffee. 

As far as the packaging … I tried it. Unsuccessful. Won’t try that again. 

As far as stern, sweeping opinions … fresh out. Try asking me something important, like which member of Ween is my favorite.

Worldcon schedule: the graphic

 

Author Bio -- The Long And Pertinent Version

 I temporarily unpublished the Worldcon entries until the schedule is finalized, and should have read more of the fine print; in my defense I’ll just say that I’m an obscure self-published writer who doesn’t attract much attention, mainly because I’m hesitant. 

My writing career goes like this:

Until age 50 I never finished a novel, and the only fiction I published was occasional informal fics (some of which might now qualify as LitRPG) for my assorted subcultures -- plus I also did things like walkthroughs and reviews under pseudonyms. It had to do with pessimism regarding my ability to mesh with the speculative fiction crowd – why put a lot of energy into making art for a subculture I don’t get along with? There were other factors too, like not wanting to squish myself into a genre, and not wanting to write anything too outrageous that would complicate my relationships with the non-writing world. 

Finally, after way too many circular re-writes, I finished the Sonny Knight trilogy (One Sunny Night, Retrograde Horizon, A Dark and Stormy Day), which is about a far future with a changed climate, and humans setting up very different “utopian” societies in different regions, with travel between them being quite difficult, except for this one unlucky boy who stumbles into a political plot involving a country entirely made up of clones. 

It wasn’t really a “good” story, but it’s compelling in places, and most importantly, it contained most of the checklist items I decided should be in my first novel. Once it was out of the way I felt more free to experiment. 

The second one was a collaboration, and that’s why it fell apart. I wouldn’t recommend collaborating, but I thought it was a good idea at the time. Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler still isn’t technically in final according to my co-author, but she won’t give me her final edits either, and I wasted lots of time trying to work on sequels. I’d still like to give it one more round of editing – for one thing, I want to get rid of this one character named after Lizzo per my co-author’s request. It’s a fantastic story, very “page turny” and fun, but I’m still kind of salty about having IP battles over Baz Rose, my personal Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

After that I tried working in the horror genre, and a novel about a girl fighting a qanon cult. It’s out of print for lots of reasons, mostly because the qanon cult won and is currently in power, plus I had more personal complications with the editor I worked with to the point where I didn’t feel like compunding it by complicating either of our lives with a crappy horror novel making fun of conspiracy believers. They told me the dark fantasy aspect was actually the best thing about this book, so I might try that at some point.

I wrote a non-fiction book, about astrology, explaining things like its origins and cultural history, how people have used it in lots of ways from art to con artistry, how the symbolism has evolved over time. I pulled that one too, because it’s too nuanced – people wanted either an endorsement or a condemnation, and not a meditation on all the deeper nuances involved with superstition.

And finally, the nail in the speculative/horror fiction coffin was Star Language. Which is a first contact with aliens story based on the relationship between Malinche and Cortes. I made the mistake of involving AI image generation in the cover (I used different AIs simulating different art techniques to process the image of a girl’s face that I kept revising and feeding into new prompts), as well as standing up for the idea that AIs don’t necessarily represent the end of the world. Unfortunately, the spec fic community has come together for the idea that AIs are the end of the world, there is no permissible level of involvement with them, and they should be uninvented.

At the same time, I entered Star Language in a literary contest, where it was doing all right, and one of the reviewers actually … 

 … got me. 

That doesn’t happen very often in my life. That's my goddamn grail. That's why I keep writing this stuff, like that whale who finally found another whale in her obscure frequency. 

Then the contest organizer went down in flames due to some sex scandal.

And I gave up on Star Language. It’s still in print, but it feels to me like one of those accursed Lovecraftian books that just exists to mess with lives. Maybe I’ll unpublish it but for now I’m kind of in denial.

After that I started working on a book called Lahaina Noon, another horror tale, involving a Maui new age cult run by haoles that conjures a supernatural monster, and an unlikely Scooby gang made up of local types and sympathizers who fight it. Recently a Hawai’i cult similar to the ones that inspired me was in the news, and you can read about it by googling Tulsi Gabbard. 

That one fell apart too. It was a reaction to an argument I had with an absolute cunt from the East Coast, who started attacking me online because I was expressing sorrow for the Lahaina fire as a kama’aina haole who was born there, and according to their political worldview (which was shaped by a qanon meme that was going around, circulated by a real estate developer trying to get people to sell cheap), this makes me a problematic colonizer. 

I got a few chapters done but I stopped, assuming I'd just get more cancellation type screaming if I tried to write about the place where I grew u p. Getting cancelled for being sad about Lahaina made me think long and hard about continuing to write speculative fiction. 

The main reason I write is so I can be part of the greater community of writers and readers, and find intelligent conversations with other humans. I started out with YA, realizing that would hold me to a higher standard about avoiding mature subjects, but I felt it was workable and started crafting kind of an experimental “dizzy blonde lady who writes YA” persona to see if I could pull it off. 

Didn’t work. For one thing, chronic pain combined with lots of other things to make me a lot more solemn. For another ... it's a hostile environment, and I assumed it would just result in more people raging at me for ostensibly political reasons. 

Sometimes with real consequences – there was a story I pitched to someone that had artificially gestated babies as an element, and she had a major conniption in which she denounced me as sexist and demanded I inform myself on the history of science fiction … and a story about that’s up for the Hugo this year. I voted for it. I wonder if my story about the same thing would have come out any better. 

It all combined to make me think seriously about putting any energy into the SFnal ecosystem. So I moved out of spec fic, and right now I’m writing a courtroom drama about a novice lawyer with a wrongful death claim resulting from an enthusiastic fan who got electrocuted when she encountered faulty wiring while hanging around outside a K-Pop idol’s rented house. She’s up against a ruthless tech bro representing the rental agency, a handsome idol whose fans are willing to leave retaliatory glitter bombs on her front porch, and Bunky Woodcock, allegedly negligent homeowner and author of several western novels as well as beloved regular on the western novel convention circult. He might be partially inspired by a science fiction writer. 

When you write speculative fiction, you’re open to anyone and everyone condemning you, with their best performative rage displays, for not envisioning an future in accordance with their utopian visions, which constitutes harm. There was a time when the performative rage was more aligned with speaking truth to power, but now it feels a lot more like what Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill describes in her biography, where scenesters with trust funds were using punk purity tests mainly to gatekeep working class blokes like Kurt Cobain. 

But when you write in the real world, about lawyers and witnesses, you can describe what you see, and what you know, and what you can reasonably infer. You bear no responsibility for problematic worldbuilding or unvirtuous role models. And even better, you can write about all the godawful people you met in speculative fictionland as thinly-disguised-yet-fully-conforming-with-applicable-slander-and-libel-laws parodies, and caricatures, and muses. So I’m going to take the basic writing advice, and write about what I know, and I’ve spent something like forty years working in civil litigation. Instead of trying to make up science fictional worlds where I can escape from it, I’m going to lean in. 

And that’s kind of where it stands with Worldcon this year, and why I’m not actively promoting my books, or myself. 

I feel like I’m a legit member of this population, my best book sold more than the 15 copies (the rumored threshold for most trad published books), I’m in SFWA, I’ve an experienced panelist, and I know enough about science fiction to have a discussion with other nerds about it.

But I'm old, and will die before long, and don't want to spend the rest of my life on the fringes of some subculture full of people who actively seek out rage bait. I had a brief period during my teens where I was interested in science fiction and gamer conventions but the sexism put me off; now upon my return it feels like I don’t really thrive in a Mama Bear environment either. 

So this Worldcon is a lot about doing a reality check to see whether I feel even slightly at home in this crowd, or whether I end up bouncing between weird little microaggressions like the last time I went to Baycon, or hooking up with the kind of frenemies who are liable to detonate into drama bombs for random reasons, if any. 

I’m an awesome futurist though. I totally called it with regard to K-Pop Demon Hunters and I’m going to be crowing about that. As long as I can continue being a futurist it doesn’t really matter whether or not I’m a science fiction fan.

Ragebait (a poem) (by me)

(I'm kind of a poet now, or possibly a lyricist)

Ragebait

© 2026 by Charon Dunn

I acknowledge transmission of the ragebait
You generously have shared with me
I validate your ragey expression
And assure you I quite agree
That this ragebait is indeed rage-inducing
And you are rightfully appalled
You must be exquisitely sensitive
Since you posted this bait on your wall
You have assured all of us onlookers
That your righteousness is beyond compare
Your moral goodness is a bright shining beacon
When held up to the ragebait you share
All of us here in your audience
Stand in awe of the saintliness you exude
We agree this person in your spotlight
Is simply catastrophically rude
We’re so glad you called our attention
To the fact this asshole exists
They deserve no less than an agonizing death
Beaten by bludgeons and fists
Drawn and quartered, broken on the wheel
Sent to the iron maiden’s embrace
Shot from a powerful cannon
On a one way trip to outer space
While you deserve canonization
For your bad-person-singling-out skill
We applaud your refined sensibilities
And the way you’re so admirably shrill
Your sources are always impressive
Such philanthropists they must all be!
Steadfastly programming AIs and bots
To provide you with ragebait for free!
You only post quality ragebait
The finest that I’ve ever read
I hope your ego is appeased now
From this patting I’m applying to your head
Such a good good person you are!
Hope you have all the empty flattery you need
So you can switch to doing something productive
And quit posting your shit on my feed

Panel 4 – Oral Tradition

I have a lot of unusual background traits that made me think about signing up for a panel about Oral Tradition:

• I spent several years working as a legal transcriptionist dealing with audio such as witness interviews, first responder recordings, and psychological exams.
• I grew up around Polynesian people who come from a tradition with no written language, where it’s common and routine to memorize long stories and recitations. 
•  I’ve spent much of my life working with multilingual people, and although I am monolingual myself, I really enjoy texting with people who don’t speak my language using autotranslate. 
• I just lost my audiobook virginity with Jeff Hays’ rendition of Dungeon Crawler Carl, which I have already read in the text version. 
• The last book I published, Star Language, involved a multilingual girl who ends up being official translator for the alien invasion. 

I am primarily text-based. I was a precocious reader and have always been more of a bookworm. I went through a cinema nerd phase but I don’t really like to watch video, I have never listened to a podcast, and I only get through a handful of movies every year. I like music of various types, and I also really cherish my urban version of silence, where I can hear the constant flow of traffic and other background but my blackout curtains keep the overall decibel level low.  Depending on how busy I am at work, sometimes I might go for a week or so without talking to anyone (although I’m probably texting and emailing). 

In fact, I’ve noticed that when I don’t speak very much, I tend to occasionally have difficulties with things like aphasia, and occasionally forgetting my own native language, and since this is my first panel, I’ve been blathering with anyone I can find to get my loquacious muscle toned up, so hopefully I won’t forget any important words as I shift from eyeball mode to voice mode. 

I’ve noticed the world around me gradually shifting from being text-based to relying more on video and audio, while text becomes the place where you run into unpleasantries like trolls, catfishers, people who post those soppy AI glurge stories. Some of my discussion groups have completely mutated into Tik Tok and Instagram videos, and my job tends to use videos for training and continuing ed. Audiobooks are just as popular as print books, and if Dungeon Crawler Carl is any example, they’re lots of fun.

I’ve been hearing people say that maybe literacy was a fluke, and perhaps the future belongs to speech. However, we’re not really reversing back into oral tradition because we can record speech, which saves us from having to memorize entire books, like in Fahrenheit 451. Most people do seem to prefer speech over text, aside from a few weirdos like me, and text-based composition might end up being an artisan skill, like maintaining wooden ships, or writing in cursive.

In an oral culture with no way of recording language, people use memory tricks to help them stuff pages of information into their minds. Polynesians would often anchor everything to a geneology. Westerners had a tradition known as “memory palaces,” where you imagine yourself filing away each new bit of information in your own imaginary castle, so you can access it later. I knew a hippie who had a memory spaceship where he would go when he meditated.

But now we have an active spoken-word-based culture, plus we can record it. We no longer have the advanced memory training practices required by those who seek to master knowledge in a world without books, so we’re more like Oral Tradition 2.0: The Sequel. 

Some of my other panels touch upon neurology – neurodiversity, and keeping your brain healthy. I suspect a preference for speech over text is another one of those things that is more about neurology than conditioning, since hardly any of us grew up in an oral culture, but a bunch of us decided to create one the moment technology made it possible, and lots of others decided to follow. 

I don’t think oral culture will “replace” written culture, in the sense that every human suddenly develops a preference for it. There will always be bibliophiles, and people with impaired hearing, and people who tend to zone out when people are droning on and on until they start to sound like the teachers in Charlie Brown cartoons. 

But I can see a day when people can get through college without reading, or writing. And I don’t think that’s something to be alarmed about. Not everyone has to be bookish. Diversity and inclusion extend to neurodiversity. 

Just as long as text-based people like myself can still fling walls of text at each other (like this one) I’ll be fine.

Panel 4: How to be Old and Smart At the Same Time

I live in a big city but I spend a lot of time alone, because I enjoy solitude, and occasionally I wonder if I have dementia, but am not aware of it, because I don’t have anyone to report whether I seem more demented today than I did yesterday. 

I’m in my sixties, which might actually be considered young in a lot of crowds, but I’m at the age where people my age and younger suddenly expire of things that are collectively thought of as age-related, heart issues and cancer and stroke. I’ve also got friends that are close in age who are experiencing major health challenges, and I have my own issues related to my back and neck. Sometimes I wake up and my muscles are all stiff and I feel like I’m a thousand years old.

Other times, I’m more positive. I’m strong enough to carry my groceries and laundry upstairs even though I can’t carry very much for very long. I can walk around for long periods of time at Disneyland, even though I need to stay away from Space Mountain. I’m doing better than a lot of people my age. 

I have a brain job. Not going to talk about it, but it requires me to deal with complex ideas and newfangled inventions and the like. Basically there is an amorphous concept known as “litigation” and I try to find better ways to squash it into a spreadsheet. Before that I was director of technology for a plaintiffs’ trial law firm in San Francisco, which was also a brain job. And I have side hustles like writing science fiction, where it helps if you occasionally sling big words and high-faluting concepts around. 

(I’ve always wondered why nobody talks about being low-faluting, but I guess that has to do with the mysterious nature of faluting in general.)

So I try to keep my brain in good operating order. 

I’m not sure I’ll be expounding on every one of my ten brain tips (fortunately I was able to come up with a nice round number). Most of them are common sense things you’ll hear from most experts: eat a good diet, get some exercise, address your health problems. 

In my case, I eat a lot of almonds, pumpkin seeds and yogurt, frequently at the same time. I try to stay on an anti-inflammatory diet, so mostly protein, not much sugar and/or carb. I have done some meticulous planning with regard to the churro I will be consuming on either Sunday or Monday, because that’s not something I often allow myself to do. 

Working out is also good, and sometimes you have to balance other shit like chronic pain to get your exercise. I’m a big believer in walking, although you might want to ask me again after two days of Disneyland.

Needless to say, take care of any health issues, even though it’s expensive. Fix your teeth. Lower your blood pressure and your blood sugar. “Healing” is for young people – we seniors aren’t going to get over a bad case of high blood pressure or grow new hip joints. We have to learn to manage what we’ve got. 

And learn new things as often as possible. I’m a great believer in constantly acquiring new skills. Right now I’m going through this Labubu obsession and part of that involves making clothes and props for them. I never had a daughter with a doll collection, so I learned that I really enjoy miniature fashion design relatively late in life. Making clothes for humans is laborious but making clothes for Labubus is much faster, so I’ve been teaching myself new sewing techniques and right now I’m doing miniature patchwork with squares that are about an inch wide. I’ve also learned how to make molds and cast things in resin, and have a sizable collection of tiki mugs in UV reactive colors related to this. 

Assuming I don’t get dementia, I’m going to be a valuable asset to someone’s dystopia bunker, given my skills at fabricating and repairing protective gear, battle flags, machine parts and other things that I might be able to trade for almonds and chicken nuggets. Plus I can quantify any litigation data that’s lying around.

Appreciate music! Music improves cognitive function! People who are still listening to their teenager music when they have gray hair are boring! Find a new band you like and go see them! Learn a new instrument! Get over your fuddy duddy attitudes about what kind of music is “proper” or “meshes with your values” or “liked by respectable people” and just listen to everything until something clicks.

(Hopefully not as hard as it clicked with Stephen King when he got obsessed with the song Mambo Number Five; getting major cases of earworm/brainworm might be an occupational hazard for writers that may not even be limited to popular music, as anyone who has read Mark Twain’s bit about “punch in the presence of the passenjare” can attest.)

I go to a lot of concerts, and I tell people it’s because musical memories are one thing you’ll never lose, even if you do get dementia. Last concert I saw was Herb Alpert, who is in his nineties and still enjoying music. Before that I saw BTS, who are half my age and filling up stadiums with people of all ages, eager to hear their music. Concerts are the closest we get to heaven on this earth, so go experience them as often as possible.

And also ... consider that your teenager music might not be the absolute pinnacle of music ever produced. People who say things like that are silly. Others mock them when they're not around. 

For my last four brain tips … these are opinions. The ones above this paragraph are backed by science (and/or common sense). These are just my little quirks.

I have a big quirk: I have a retro urbanite lifestyle that’s out of the 1920s or something as far as most Americans are concerned – walk a lot, take public transit, don’t buy a lot of newfangled gadgets, stairs are good exercise. I don’t often watch television, I don’t have climate control, I can go months without laying eyes on a “freeway.” That’s definitely not for everyone, but it suits me, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom to the whole concept of walkable cities. 

Therefore I don’t spend a lot of time in the sun. I did when I was a kid in the tropics, getting burned – sometimes to the blistering point – more times than I can count but as an adult I’m an indoorsy type who lives in a fogbank, and I don’t get a lot of direct ultraviolet. People of my ethnic background are susceptible to melanoma if we get too much exposure, and I’m not interested in that.

There’s more sunshine out there now than when I was a kid. We don’t really know if it increases risks of things like melanoma, but as far as my skin is concerned, the tattoo I got ten years ago still has its bright colors and my face doesn’t have a lot of wrinkles. And while I can’t prove hiding from the sun has had any effect whatsoever on my cognitive abilities, it seems beneficial to me, and I endorse it. 

I also don’t drink much alcohol. Without going into explicit detail, I think cannabis and occasional psilocybin can be helpful for some people who enjoy being intoxicated and still want to be on top of their cognitive game. I also think there are some people who are just physically adapted to drinking large amounts of booze; they know who they are and I know my metabolism doesn’t work that way. 

And that’s an important point in all this advice giving: people are different. Some people tend to think of us as mostly identical, but different bodies age differently. Some people are more susceptible to things like melanoma, or can tolerate substances that would poison others. Not everyone is going to thrive on my almonds-and-yogurt based diet. Not everyone can just walk around, or climb stairs. 

It can be good to have genetic relatives that you can observe, so you can draw your own conclusions about what works best for people like you. Not everyone has access to that information, so sometimes you have to get creative. DNA services can tell you a lot about potential risks and so can basic data science --  just researching which risks are more likely for people like you based on where you live, and your other basic demographics. 

My last two suggestions are even more idiosyncratic: spend time with younger people and avoid cortisol spikes.

In spending time with young people, I do NOT mean in the context of giving them advice, instructing them, or otherwise acting like a wise adult. I mean talking to the other adults as peers, even if there's a 40-year gap.

Once upon a time, old people had a greater stock of information than younger ones, and a lot of their cross-generational interaction was in the role of wise elder sharing lore. As far as a lot of contexts are concerned, that ended recently. The idea of some old man explaining Cobol to people who are trying to generate a report in Salesforce is just a little bit ludicrous, although grannies are still good sources of advice as to things like why your baby would rather scream than go to sleep. 

Our social behaviors evolved over a long period of time though, as did our language, and our egos, are not completely adjusting to the change. Here’s a great example: I am also on a panel about neurodiversity, a word which was born in 2015 when Steve Silberman wrote NeuroTribes. 

There are respected elders – at this very convention!! (gasp) – who have put me on ignore for things like telling them their information about neurodivergence is dated, autistics are not all nonverbal little boys, the term “Asperger’s” is no longer in use because he was a nazi, people with ADHD don’t have to be committed to a lunatic asylum, most people with schizophrenia are not serial killers, people with Tourette’s are not expressing their Freudian subconscious – in fact, Freud isn’t even science anymore, and your dick size joke that you think is clever and keep on repeating is merely body shaming. 

Meanwhile I was reading NeuroTribes and thinking “oh, this makes sense! I want to know more! This describes so many people I have known throughout my life!” I made some efforts to put neurodivergent characters in my stories, and I worked with neurodivergent sensitivity readers. I’ve got a lot of friends my generation who never got diagnosed but their kids turned out to be autistic and then they started the self-examination process. 

That’s just one example of how we old people really want the ego thrill of being considered a wise sage but are trying to back it up solely with experience . Frankly you don’t get as many ego thrills as you age out of being considered sexy, so this is one way people compensate. However, on the subject of neurodivergence, all the knowledge is new. You’re either conversant with the current science or you’re stroking your ego by making up bullshit. 

So I’m telling my fellow olds to put their egos aside. Accept that kids these days actually know a lot more about some things, such as recent developments in science. Don’t turn into one of those assholes who goes around saying shit like “in my day we didn’t have vaccines, we just ate an apple every day.” 

Instead, put yourself in a context where younguns are your teammates, peers, colleagues, associates, fellow members. This doesn’t mean to totally shun the benefits that might go along with being an elder in your family or community. It means don’t carry that role into all your interactions, instead learn to communicate with people from other generations as equals.

(And you should always ask for a senior discount, sometimes there is one! Also, you should let the young healthy people do the tasks that involve things like carrying heavy stuff, or running.)

And the final suggestion … cortisol is bad. 

This is a simplification, but the brain chemicals that start squirting when someone shares ragebait with you, or yells at you, or threatens you, or looks like they’re about to road rage – that shit will kill you if you keep on taking hits off the pipe. 

Probably everyone knows someone who is addicted to ragebait. You can’t even have a conversation with them that doesn’t involve them trying to provoke you into saying “yes, I, too. am outraged by this outrageous conduct you complain of.”

There was a woman in one of my groups who was constantly posting about books getting censored and removed from school libraries. Sometimes it was recent news, sometimes it was bait based on something that happened a decade ago and got overturned, sometimes it was merely the suggestion it might happen. It could be magas trying to ban books with gay characters, or liberals talking about problematic themes in the Little House books, it was all the same to her. If you tried to engage her with ideas like “well maybe that book does include some dated stereotypes” she’d blow up and rage at you, because that was the game – she posts bait, and either you pay the positive-reaction toll, or you’re in league with the outrage machine and she therefore has a good reason to get angry. 

I’ve lost friends over statistics-based ragebait. They’ll post a wild-eyed article claiming 117% of all women  will be slain by serial killers next year, and I have this bad habit of questioning that 117%. Which makes me basically equivalent to a serial killer. 

Cortisol is just part of the chemical reaction happening in your brain when you go on a ragebait holiday but it’s a useful phrase to encompass the idea that constantly reinforcing anger is bad for you. For lots of reasons. It’s addictive though, and lots of tabloids and even skeevier sources make bank pushing peoples’ emotional triggers. We even have robots writing it now.

And in fact, the robots are only going to get smarter. And more dishonest. People who have a high resistance to dishonest robots are going to be in a lot better shape than people who fly off the handle because they’re only raising awareness about serial killers and if you can’t handle that you’re probably a serial killer.

So manage your cortisol exposure. Unfollow friends whose entire personality consists of spamming doomer propaganda. Hide posts that trigger you. 

No doubt there’s someone in your life who will get angry and start ranting about how you have some kind of social duty to read and validate any and all ragebait. They’re wrong. Mute them. If they bother you in public, take them to court and get a restraining order. Nobody is obliged to provide a cortisol spike on demand. That’s assault. They’re being manipulative and dark triad-ish; either they’re malicious or they need therapy. 

That doesn’t mean you should stick your head in the sand and go into denial about the state of the world. You can deal with the cortisol-inducing stuff at your own pace, on your own terms. Maybe have an outrage hour on Thursdays before you work out. 

No brain, no pain!