Major technology failure!
Imagine your email and websites are suddenly turned off by your hosting provider without warning. How do you react?
I experienced this scenario over the holiday break. Not fun. But using two late career insights helped me convert it from devastating to productive.
Keep Learning
First, tackling challenges like this, particularly in terms of learning new things, is essential in late career, a time when we might be conditioned to think “I’m too old to learn this!” Just as physical weights build and maintain muscle, cognitive “weights” like this challenge are essential to build and maintain your brain.
A sidebar to the importance of learning is the importance of keeping current with tech. Evidence suggests it has neuro-protective effects in late career. Even having to re-learn things (common for me in tech) is a positive brain challenge. This “learning” mindset helped me reframe my tech failure. I found more patience and let go of some (not all!) frustration.
Use AI
Second, where this kind of technical failure could have led to days of frustration and exasperation, AI now makes solving digital technical problems quicker, more tolerable, and even informative. It’s still frustrating, but it’s manageable; hours not days. AI can supercharge our use of tech by supplying precision information, mental models, and troubleshooting.
Morals of the story
My tech failure episode ended with restored email and websites…and some strategic insight. Have better backup strategies in general. Make more strategic use of “local” email backup (on my own computer) for example to avoid mailbox storage limits. Beware downloaded email disappearing in a scenario where my email’s been turned off and then gets re-started. My computer synchs its full mailbox to the hosting server’s newly created empty mailbox and the result is an empty mailbox on my local computer (all synched!). Most powerfully, this episode triggered an overdue review of my digital portfolio. I’m pruning domain names and websites I don’t need any more, revising my email list, and re-evaluating hosting service options.
What does it have to do with late career? Well, what’s your impression of me from this story? I probably sound adaptable, maybe even competent with digital technology (unless you’re an IT professional). The strategic update of my digital portfolio might sound dynamic. Adaptability, tech fluency, and dynamism are all characteristics that signal professional currency in late career. They challenge the outdated stereotype, where people assume I need to call my college-age son to sort this out for me.
This tech failure story illustrates a key intention behind Late Career Labs: to help people formulate late career as a time of growth, capability, and creativity; to think of challenges as your “laboratories” full of opportunity for building and demonstrating confidence and capability. Late career is rapidly changing thanks to longer health spans and digital fluency. Make it a time of lively invention rather than stagnation or decline.
Tell us in the comments: What’s your approach to tech fluency in late career (e.g. what are you learning, dropping, adding, avoiding)?
Notes:
In an analysis of 57 studies of older adults involving more than 400,000 individuals, almost 90 percent found that technology had a protective cognitive effect. Kaiser Family Foundation in partnership with the New York Times, August 2025.
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/tech-apps-ai-older-adults-health-benefits/
In a study where older adults took three college classes during a quarter, they increased their cognitive abilities to age-equivalents 10s of years younger, an effect that persisted, and in some cases accelerated. From “Speaking of Psychology” podcast transcript, episode 282, April 2024.
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/lifelong-learning
Offer:
Interested in tuning up your professional currency in dynamism, adaptability, tech fluency, creativity, and health? Join our course, Late Career Edge, for a guided, structured approach.