Being ignorant is not always bliss. Believe me, I know, because I’m ignorant about so much that is a part of today’s world.

Honesty compels me to confess that my ignorance is increasing. I know less and less.

Take popular music. Contemporary music. Whatever they call it. About this I’m abysmally uninformed. Ignorant.

For instance, there is a very popular, so it seems, young woman who is perhaps the most listened to singer/performer in the world she inhabits. Her name is Taylor Swift. If you were to offer me a cool million to name one song she has ever recorded I couldn’t do it.

In fact, I’m so ignorant that I don’t have a clue how her fans actually listen to her sing. Those little gizmos the young are addicted to must purvey her songs. It’s all beyond me.

Then there’s prescription medicines that are advertised so often on TV. I can watch the entire commercial, and when it’s over I usually have no idea what the medicine is for. Do patients actually tell their doctor that they want thus-and-such medications? Beats me.

The world, universe, cosmos of computers becomes increasingly foreign to me. You may know, or think you know, how to navigate just a tiny piece of this arcane world one day, but chances are something about it is going to change. Like tomorrow. It’s safe to say there has never been anything in history that has evolved with such rapidity as has the world of computers.

Of course, advances in technology, inexorably so, are driving just about everything today. We all know this. Even some of the very tech-savvy people struggle to keep up. For the rest of us, it’s all very stressful, and added stress is not something most folks want.

For those of us in our “mature” years, additional stress is not a wanted companion. Many of us want to simplify our lives. The onrushing tides of change won’t allow it. That’s not how we envisioned the “golden years.”

Well. So much for the lamentations of one Old Timer.

And so it goes.

APROPOS — “ Nothing is permanent but change.”

— Heraclitus (Circa 500 B.C.)