Elderware: Story Work and Aging in the Mid-21st Century
Elderware is a public experiment in thinking about aging through story.
It begins with a simple observation: we do not age only as bodies or brains. We age as narrators. As meaning-makers. As people whose lives are held together by the stories we tell about who we have been, who we are becoming, and what still matters.
In the early decades of the 21st century, that story-making is being quietly but profoundly reshaped. New technologies promise assistance, memory, companionship, efficiency, even wisdom. Some of these promises are useful. Some are inflated. Some may turn out to be dangerous if we don’t ask better questions.
Elderware exists to ask those questions—slowly, humanely, and in public.
Why story, and why aging?
Across a lifetime, story does real work. It helps us metabolize experience, integrate loss, make sense of change, and stay in relationship with one another. As we grow older, that work doesn’t disappear—it intensifies.
Aging brings with it longer arcs of memory, more layered identities, and often a reckoning with time: what’s behind us, what’s ahead, and what we want to pass on. It can also bring isolation, diminishment, and a cultural tendency to look away.
Story work offers a counterbalance. Not as nostalgia or self-indulgence, but as a practice of attention: listening carefully to lived experience and allowing meaning to surface in community.
This project approaches aging not as a problem to be solved, but as a life stage rich with narrative complexity—one that deserves care, curiosity, and ethical imagination.
Why technology, and why now?
Technology is already shaping how we age.
From health apps and memory aids to voice assistants and generative AI, tools are entering older lives at a rapid pace—often designed by people far removed from the realities of aging itself. These tools can be helpful. They can also flatten experience, replace relationship with simulation, or quietly erode agency if we’re not paying attention.
Rather than asking, What can technology do to older people?
Elderware asks: How might technology be shaped by older people—and by the stories they carry?
This project sits at the intersection of story work and emerging technology, with a particular interest in ethics: whose values are embedded in these tools, what assumptions they make about aging, and how they might support (or undermine) dignity, memory, and care.
Three intertwined paths
Elderware unfolds along three overlapping tracks:
1. Personal experimentation
I approach this work not only as a facilitator or observer, but as a participant—an aging person in 2025, experimenting with tools that assist in storytelling, memory, and reflection. I sometimes refer to this strand as The Story of AI Joe: a candid look at what it feels like to age alongside machines designed to help us think, remember, and narrate our lives.
2. Conversations and field notes
Through interviews and dialogues, I listen to researchers, designers, artists, clinicians, and fellow elders who are working at the edges of aging and technology. These conversations are less about product launches and more about questions: What are you noticing? What worries you? What gives you hope?
3. Speculation and foresight
Finally, Elderware allows space for informed speculation—sketching scenarios about where story, memory, and aging might be headed in the coming decades. This is not futurism for its own sake, but a way of staying ethically awake to what we are building now.
Together, these paths form something like a detective tale: What is possible now? What might be possible later? And what kind of elders do we want to be as these possibilities unfold?
What Elderware is (and isn’t)
Elderware is not a self-help program, a productivity guide, or a manifesto for technological salvation. It is not optimized for virality or speed.
It is closer to a listening practice.
The writing and podcast conversations here are meant to be thoughtful rather than authoritative, reflective rather than prescriptive. Some posts are exploratory. Some are skeptical. Some carry a note of humor. All are grounded in the belief that aging deserves more than silence or simplification.
You’ll find essays published regularly, alongside a podcast series of conversations that wander—intentionally—into memory, ethics, culture, and lived experience.
Who this is for
Elderware is for people who:
- are growing older and paying attention to it
- work with elders and care about story, dignity, and agency
- are building or studying technologies that touch aging lives
- are curious about how narrative shapes memory, identity, and care
You don’t need to agree with everything here. You only need a willingness to listen with curiosity—and perhaps, as I like to say, with a smirk.
An invitation
This project imagines a relatively small but thoughtful audience: peers, fellow travelers, and collaborators who believe that how we age—and how we tell stories about aging—matters.
If you find something here that resonates, I hope you’ll linger, share it with someone who might appreciate the conversation, or reach out. Elderware is not meant to be finished. It’s meant to be joined.
Aging, after all, is not a solo act. Neither is thinking.
—Joe