The rain was steady the morning I called Dorothy. March 2020 — the first week of lockdown, before any of us understood what we were in for. She was eighty-one, lived alone in a small house off Haywood Road in West Asheville, and her name came from a church directory I'd been working through all week. I expected a short call. Five minutes, maybe ten. Instead, we talked for nearly an hour. She told me about her grandchildren in Oregon, about the cardinals that visited her feeder every morning, and about the Facebook page her granddaughter had helped her set up the previous Christmas. "I wasn't sure about it," she said. "But now it's the only way I see their faces."
That conversation stayed with me. It still does.
The Quiet Revolution We Almost Missed
Something has been happening in the past decade that didn't make many headlines. Seniors got online. Not all at once, and not without difficulty — but steadily, persistently, in numbers that would have seemed unthinkable twenty years ago.
The Pew Research Center reported in 2024 that 75% of adults 65 and older use the internet daily. In 2000, that number was 14%. Let that land for a moment. We went from one in seven to three in four in a single generation.
Social media followed a similar curve. AARP's 2023 Tech Trends survey found that 70% of adults over 50 are on social media — with Facebook leading the way. Half of all adults 65 and older have a Facebook account. YouTube is close behind at 49%. These aren't early adopters or tech enthusiasts. These are retired teachers and widowed grandfathers and women who spent their careers far from any keyboard.
I think about my own mother sometimes when I read those numbers. She never owned a computer. She would have been baffled by the idea of posting a photograph where strangers could see it. And yet — I believe she would have loved seeing Zora's butterfly drawings pop up on a screen. The technology isn't the point. The connection is. It always was.
Why We're Showing Up
What surprised me most about those COVID phone calls was this. The seniors who seemed to be doing best — not great, but steadiest — were the ones who had found some way to reach beyond their four walls. A FaceTime call with a daughter in Charlotte. A YouTube sermon from their church. A Facebook group for people who remembered what Asheville looked like before the tourists came.
I'd been running my Seasons of Grace program for twenty years by then, and I thought I understood loneliness. I didn't. Not fully. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory called it an epidemic — chronic isolation carrying health risks equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. AARP found that one in three adults over 45 report feeling lonely. One in three.
But loneliness isn't really the whole story. The men in my Tuesday wellness circle — the one that started with two reluctant attendees and grew to nine regulars who called it "Tuesday coffee" — they didn't join social media because they were lonely. Not exactly. One of them, a retired carpenter named Earl, started watching woodworking videos on YouTube because he missed having projects. He'd send me links sometimes. "Have you seen this joinery technique?" he'd ask, as if I'd know the first thing about dovetail joints. I didn't. But I'd watch anyway, because his excitement reminded me of something I'd almost forgotten — how good it feels to discover something new, at any age.
We don't talk about that enough. Social media isn't just a lifeline for the isolated. It's a window for the curious. Seniors are sharing recipes in Facebook groups, following grandchildren's soccer games on Instagram, watching documentaries on YouTube at two in the morning because sleep didn't come and the mind was hungry. We are not passive consumers of this technology. We're showing up because we still have things to learn and say and share.
The Platforms That Fit Our Lives
Not every platform fits every person. Facebook remains the front door for most seniors — familiar, relatively simple, built around the people you already know. The groups are where it gets interesting. Gardening clubs, genealogy circles, caregiving support, local buy-sell-swap. My neighbor in Asheville found a replacement part for her 1967 Singer sewing machine through a Facebook group. Took her twenty minutes.
YouTube is the quiet powerhouse. Tutorials for everything — how to use your new iPhone, gentle yoga routines, how to make your grandmother's cornbread without a recipe card that's been lost since 1998. Some of my Seasons of Grace participants watch more YouTube than television now.
Instagram works for the visual folks — garden photos, grandchildren, sunsets. WhatsApp and FaceTime carry the family group chats that have become the modern kitchen table. And NextDoor connects you to your actual neighbors, which is sometimes exactly what you need.
The trick, I've found, is to start with one. Just one.
What the Screen Can't Protect Us From
I'd be lying if I said it was all good news. It isn't.
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that adults over 60 lost $3.4 billion to online fraud in 2023. That number is staggering. Phishing emails, fake text messages, romance scams, Medicare fraud schemes — the predators have followed us online, and they are patient and clever. I've sat with families in my practice who lost retirement savings to scams that started with a single Facebook message.
There's also the quieter problem of too much screen. Doomscrolling through news at midnight. Comparing your life to someone else's curated highlights. Sharing personal details — your birthday, your address, your daily routine — without realizing who might be watching.
Actually, that's not quite right. The problem isn't the screen itself. The problem is forgetting that the same rules apply online as off. Lock your doors. Don't hand your wallet to a stranger. And if something feels wrong, it probably is.
Starting Where You Are
A retired nurse in my Seasons of Grace program once told me that keeping a gratitude journal was "the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard." Six months later, she'd filled forty pages. "I still think it's ridiculous," she said. "But it works."
Social media is a bit like that. You don't have to love the idea. You just have to try.
If you're starting from scratch, here's what I'd offer — not as instructions, but as invitations. Ask a grandchild or a friend to sit with you while you set up a Facebook account. It takes fifteen minutes and a cup of tea. Join one group that matches something you already care about — a gardening club, a book group, a church community. Set a time limit. Thirty minutes a day is plenty. AARP offers free digital literacy courses at aarp.org that walk you through the basics without making you feel small.
And if it doesn't stick, that's fine too. The goal isn't to become a person who lives online. The goal is to have one more way to reach the people who matter to you — and to let them reach back.
The dogwoods outside my window are just beginning to bud. It's mid-March in the mountains, which means winter hasn't fully let go but something green is pushing through anyway. I think about Dorothy sometimes — the woman from that first week of phone calls. We're still in touch. She posts pictures of her cardinals on Facebook every morning. I always leave a comment.
The screen is just a window. What matters — what has always mattered — is who's on the other side.
The bravest thing I have seen people do is say "I need help" out loud. We never were.
