The new bracket: those of us who chose not to age

The other night, at a dinner in Marbella, a charming guy in his fifties asked what I did for a living. I told him I run a travel agency. He nodded with that condescending smile people reserve for grandparents who still “keep themselves busy with something.” Then he asked:

—Do you run it yourself, or have your kids taken over?

I explained that I run it. Alone. With nine websites, three AI agents, a CRM with 164 client files, and a Mac Mini that works while I sleep. He looked at me as if I’d just told him I fly F-16s on weekends.

I’m 73 years old. And that kind of look no longer offends me. It amuses me.

The bracket that didn’t exist

If you look carefully, there’s something new in the social landscape. Something that wasn’t there twenty years ago. A bracket of people between sixty and eighty has appeared that simply doesn’t fit into any known category.

We’re not old. We’re not “young at heart” either, which is the phrase people use when they don’t know what to do with you. We’re something else. Something that still has no name.

It’s a phenomenon similar to what happened with adolescence. Before the twentieth century, that bracket didn’t exist: you were a child or you were an adult, and the leap was a day’s work at the factory. Then a mass of overgrown kids appeared who didn’t know where to fit in or how to dress, and someone had to invent a word for them.

Well, here we are. The sixty, seventy, eighty crowd. A generation that has banished the word aging from its vocabulary, because it simply has no room for it in its plans.

And it’s not denial. The mold just broke.

Infographic: The Rewired Generation — Why 70 is the New Digital Frontier

The toys change, the curiosity doesn’t

They say the difference between a child and an adult is the price of their toys. I think that’s the most accurate definition I’ve heard in decades.

My current toys: a Mac Mini M4 running Claude Code that writes travel proposals at two in the morning. A BMW K1200 that still makes me feel thirty years younger. A Specialized bicycle I ride more than I drive. Nine websites, live and running. An Obsidian vault with over 148 research sources. And a blog — the one you’re reading — that started because diabetes took away my gin and tonic and YouTube gave me artificial intelligence.

The impulse is exactly the same as when I was twenty and boarded a plane to Tel Aviv with no return ticket. The same itch of let’s see what happens if I try this. Only now the ticket costs more and the adventure is digital.

Youth is carried inside. It always has been. The thing is, at seventy you no longer need to convince anyone of it. It’s enough to know it yourself.

Every morning is a celebration

My routine ten years ago: wake up, read the newspaper, go to the office, wait for the phone to ring. Travel sold slowly, clients came through word of mouth, and afternoons dissolved into emails and coffee.

My routine today: coffee, open the laptop, check what Claude built overnight if I left something running. Check Airtable for new leads. Write for a while. Update a destination page on the Scubapedia. Answer WhatsApps. Go for a bike ride. Come back. Keep going.

It’s not that I have more energy. It’s that the tools handle the mechanical work and I’m left with what I always wanted to do: think, create, talk to people who want to go scuba diving on the other side of the world.

And the truth is I work more than before. Much more. The difference is that now every hour counts. Before, there were whole days of inertia — paperwork, waiting, tasks that added up to nothing. Not anymore. Now every morning I start with a fresh notebook in NotebookLM to research a destination, or with Obsidian open connecting ideas I didn’t know were related yesterday. I work longer hours and enjoy every single one with infinite pleasure. Because after years of hardship, sleepless nights, and events you never saw coming, what you want is exactly this: doing whatever you damn well please, at your own pace, with tools that give you superpowers.

Sit by the sea and stare at the horizon? Sure, sometimes. But with the laptop next to me. There are things to do.

It’s not technology. It’s stubbornness.

There’s a romantic idea that people of my generation “handle technology naturally.” That’s not true. There’s nothing natural about what I do. It’s pure stubbornness.

I don’t know CSS. I don’t know what a webhook technically is. When Claude talks about “endpoints” I have to stop and think whether that’s something you eat or something you install. But that doesn’t stop me. Not knowing something never stopped me — not having anyone to ask did.

And now I have someone to ask. At three in the morning. Without being judged. Without being told “I already explained that yesterday.” Artificial intelligence didn’t turn me into a programmer. It turned me into someone who no longer accepts “I can’t” as an answer.

We’re a generation that found the work we love a long time ago and makes a living from it. Some of us don’t even dream of retiring. Why would we? What we do every day is exactly what we’d choose to do even if nobody paid us.

The secret isn’t being digital. The secret is being stubborn.

What’s mine and what’s the machine’s

There’s a question I keep asking myself lately, and I think it defines this bracket: where do I end and where does the artificial intelligence begin?

I’ve spent weeks building what I call my AI OS — a personal operating system made of plain text files in Obsidian. The idea is simple and radical: everything I am, everything I know, everything I’ve learned in 42 years selling travel, lives in my files. Not in ChatGPT’s custom instructions. Not in Claude’s memory. Not in some cloud that might shut down or change its pricing tomorrow. In my folders. On my disk.

I have a file called me.md. It contains who I am: founder of Viajes Scibasku, scuba and ski specialist, 73 years old, how I want the AI to talk to me, what mistakes I won’t tolerate. I have 16 Skills — plain text instructions that teach any AI how to build quotes, morning briefings, marketing campaigns. I have an Obsidian vault with 148 sources where the rule is clear: there’s a human brain — my clients, my experience, my contacts at Golden Dolphin in the Red Sea — where the AI doesn’t write. And there’s a machine brain — research, ideas, drafts — where the AI works alongside me.

The boundary between mine and the machine’s isn’t blurry. It’s a directory. A folder that says “read only” and another that says “we play here together.”

Because no AI in the world knows that you shouldn’t recommend Sharm el-Sheikh to an Advanced Open Water diver — you recommend Tubbataha. Or that you send a nervous client their quote at night, when they’re relaxed, not at ten in the morning when they’re at the office. That’s mine. Forty-two years of fine-tuned instinct that no language model will ever replicate.

And yet, without the language model that experience was trapped inside my head, useful to only one client at a time. AI doesn’t replace me. It amplifies me. And my files guarantee that if Claude disappears tomorrow, or Obsidian shuts down, or Google changes the rules, I still have everything. Because file over app. File over AI. Always.

Adapt or perish, as the saying goes. I prefer the first option.

The missing word

So here we are. Smiling to ourselves without needing an audience. Remembering youth without nostalgia, because youth was also full of falls and fears, and we know that now.

We are the first generation of sixty, seventy, and eighty-year-olds breaking in an age without a label. Those who came before were old at this age. We are not. Not out of denial, but because what defines an old person isn’t age — it’s the moment they stop being curious.

And curiosity is something I have in spades. I’ve had it since the night YouTube’s algorithm decided I was interested in artificial intelligence. I have it every time I open Claude and say “let’s try something.” I have it when a client writes asking to go scuba diving in Sipadan and I put together a proposal with a built-in chatbot that five years ago would have required a team of four.

Someone, someday, will invent the word for what we are. In the meantime, I’ll stick with the one I coined myself:

Rewired.

A veteran who refuses to stop learning. Who trades gin and tonics for prompts, meetings for bike rides, and “I can’t” for “let’s see what happens.”

And best of all: the price of my toys keeps going up.

Giora Gilead Elenberg — 73 years old, 9 websites, 0 intention of retiring. Rewired since 2026. Young at core since forever.

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