Starts at 60: keeping our brains active!

After a couple of years, reading and contributing to Starts at 60 I’ve been wondering lately, just what is so special about the site? Why is the readership growing, week after week, why are so many of us now contributing to the content? What makes Starts at Sixty so special?

Well, when I think about it, there are so many reasons aren’t there.

For a start, it is one of the very few websites aimed fairly and squarely at old fogies like me, providing a wealth of information relevant to me, concerning pensions, lifestyle, computer skill, diet, world affairs and many other subjects, too numerous to mention here. Importantly, it has also encouraged many of us to take up the pen (or switch on the computer), and put our ideas out there, where anyone can either criticise what we say or agree as the fancy takes them. And this is a dialogue which can also create new friends for each and every one of us, drawing us into an arena filled with people much like ourselves, often lonely people, or shy, or even angry, all of whom have the opportunity to have their say and broaden their viewpoint.

I think it’s great fun to write about any weird or wonderful idea that occurs to me and do an article on it, just to see what sort of response I get. And I am just as happy to read other people’s contributions too, and to be a responder, rather than a creator. There are, after all, many clever oldies in the country (most of them with better ideas than I can dream up) and I would be the first to say that there is much for all of us to learn by this exchange of ideas and points-of-view!

I believe there is great advantage too, in the fact that the people who create Starts at Sixty on a daily basis for us are intelligent and hard working. They bring new ideas to us, they drag us out of our complacency and they make us think! They also have amazing ideas regarding the overall design of the site, making it interesting and easy to find our way about and making it colourful and quite exciting to peruse. They must be doing things pretty well right, after all it was only two years ago that there were just a few hundred 60-plussers reading the articles, but now the figure is more like 100,000 (going off likes on Facebook), and still growing at a phenomenal rate!

We all tend to forget, or not to realise, that we more senior citizens now form a quite large percentage of the population of this country and with a little organisation we could become quite powerful in the political arena as well. Not that I, and I am sure most other readers, would want to become politicians (especially with the reputations those people have), but I am certain Starts At Sixty helps to weld us into an important faction, to whom the government should be starting to take notice. We have all worked for many years, to help make Australia the place it is today, not all of it as we would like it to be I know,  but the result should be that we are respected and taken account of in any decisions the government makes, decisions which might affect us.

I enjoy reading the articles on the website, even the ones I may not necessarily agree with, and I hope it will continue to grow both in size and in popularity. It’s something we older members of the community needed for a very long time, even if we haven’t been aware of the fact, something to help in keeping those tired brain cells working and a change from incessant computer games which can be SO boring! May we see Starts At Sixty on our computer screens for many years to come!

Ed note: Brian wrote this of his own volition! Thanks so much, Brian.

What do you think – do you like reading Starts at 60 articles?