A Confession, and 47 Open Browser Tabs
Last Tuesday, my friend Lynne sent me a link to a website about brain health exercises. Reasonable. Except it was the sixth link she'd sent that week, each one to a different online platform promising to improve my memory, my fitness, my cooking, my sleep, my relationship with my grandchildren, and — this is a direct quote from one of them — my "cognitive vitality quotient." Whatever that is.
Lynne is 71 and has recently discovered that the internet contains more than email and the Weather Channel. She's at that dangerous stage where everything online seems like a miracle, the way I felt about QVC in 1996. She called me Thursday to say she'd signed up for four different learning platforms in one afternoon and could no longer remember the passwords to any of them. Wrote them all in a notebook. Lost the notebook. Found it in the refrigerator next to the half-and-half.
So this article isn't a list of ten websites with peppy descriptions. You can find those anywhere. What follows is what actually worked — the online tools and platforms I've genuinely used, the ones my book club friends swear by, and the ones Frank accidentally subscribed to at 11 PM on a Tuesday because he thought "Start Free Trial" meant free forever. (It does not. We now pay $14.99 a month for a meditation app he's opened twice.)
If you're looking for phone apps specifically, Nino wrote an excellent guide to the best free apps for seniors that covers that territory. What I'm talking about here are the websites and online platforms you use on a laptop, a tablet, or whatever screen is closest when curiosity strikes.
Staying Connected Without Losing Your Dignity
Zoom remains the standard. I know everyone has complicated feelings about it after 2020, but my book club has met on Zoom every other Wednesday since the pandemic, and at this point Zoom has seen me in my bathrobe, with wet hair, eating almonds with the microphone unmuted, and once — memorably — with Frank wandering behind me in his underwear asking where the Advil was. The free plan gives you 40-minute meetings, which is 38 minutes more than most conversations need. The paid plan is $13.33 a month if you want longer sessions, but honestly, we just restart the call.
Skype, which the original version of this article recommended, has become a ghost town. Microsoft gutted it, rebuilt it, gutted it again. My friend Trudy tried to use it last March to call her sister in Vancouver and spent twenty minutes on an update screen before giving up and just phoning her like it was 1997.
What replaced it? For family calls, FaceTime if everyone owns Apple products. For mixed groups, Google Meet works in any browser — no app required, no account required for the person joining. You send a link. They click it. Revolutionary concept.
Learning Things You Don't Need to Know (The Best Kind)
Coursera is still extraordinary. Free courses from Yale, Stanford, the University of Michigan. I took "The Science of Well-Being" last winter, which is essentially a Yale professor telling you that buying things won't make you happy, delivered over six weeks with homework. Learned some genuine psychology about gratitude and savoring. Also learned that I will do homework at age 72 but not at age 18, which tells you everything about maturity and nothing about intelligence. The course forums are surprisingly active, too — people posting reflections, sharing how they applied the exercises, occasionally arguing about whether money really can't buy happiness. (It can buy a patio heater, which comes close.)
Khan Academy remains completely free — no premium tier, no hidden costs, just a nonprofit doing what it says. Frank used it to brush up on personal finance concepts before we met with our financial planner. He watched eleven videos in one weekend and then explained compound interest to me as though I hadn't been the one managing our money since 1982. What makes Khan Academy work is how it builds on itself — you can start with the basics and follow a path at your own pace without anyone making you feel like you should already know this. The progress tracking is motivating without being pushy, which is more than I can say for most things designed to help me.
The newer discovery: Skillshare, which costs $13.99 a month but offers a free trial. Watercolor painting. Photography composition. Creative writing. My neighbor Anita took three watercolor courses and now paints desert landscapes on our patio on Saturdays — and by "our patio" I mean my patio, which she has quietly annexed with her easel, her mason jars of brush water, and a drop cloth she never picks up. It sounds lovely until you realize you've lost the good table. The teaching style is practical rather than academic — short video lessons, 15 to 25 minutes each, project-based. Not for everyone. But if you want to learn something with your hands rather than just your brain (ask me how I know), it fills a gap Coursera doesn't.
TED Talks deserve a mention because they're free, they're short (under 18 minutes), and they've gotten me through more waiting rooms than any magazine ever has. Bren\u00e9 Brown on vulnerability. Johann Hari on depression. A primatologist explaining why monkeys steal things, which I watched three times because it reminded me of Oliver, my two-year-old grandson, who once pocketed a stranger's car keys at a restaurant with the stealth of a trained operative. Actually, scratch that — he wasn't stealthy at all. The stranger watched the whole thing happen and was too charmed to intervene.
Keeping Your Brain From Going Soft
AARP Staying Sharp is free with an AARP membership ($16 a year, or $12 if you sign up for five years). Brain games, memory exercises, articles on nutrition and sleep. Took their Brain Health Assessment, which asked me questions about my diet, exercise, social connections, and stress levels, then delivered a personalized report informing me I should sleep more. Frank could have told me that for free.
But the platform I didn't expect to love? The New York Times Games subscription. $6.99 a month for Wordle, Spelling Bee, the Crossword, Connections, and Strands. Bev from book club started our Wordle streak in January 2025. We text our results every morning using the colored squares — green, yellow, gray — and the unspoken competition has become the most aggressive thing in my social life. Dale got his first Wordle in two guesses last month and texted the group "Just saying" with no further explanation. Insufferable! Worth every penny.
The crossword alone justifies the cost. I do it on my iPad at the kitchen table while the coffee brews, and something about filling in those squares at 7 AM makes me feel like the day has structure, which is a thing you don't realize you've lost until retirement takes it away.
For thirty-four years, the school bell told me where to be and when. Now nothing does. Routine isn't glamorous, but it turns out it was holding more together than I gave it credit for.
Health and Fitness From Your Living Room
SilverSneakers has evolved from a gym membership program into something much broader. If your Medicare Advantage plan includes it (and roughly 70 percent of plans do — check at silversneakers.com/tools/eligibility), you get access to their online video library: chair yoga, resistance training, balance classes. Free. No extra charge. My friend Charlene does a 20-minute balance class every morning in her den and credits it with not falling when she tripped on her garden hose in November.
For tracking what you eat, MyFitnessPal's website works fine on a computer — you don't need the phone app. The free version lets you log meals and track calories against a daily goal. After my doctor suggested I watch my sodium, I logged a week of meals and discovered I was consuming roughly double the recommended amount, mostly from canned soup. Disappointing. True.
And I'll say this quickly because it's not technically a tool: YouTube. Free. Infinite. Type "gentle yoga for seniors" or "seated stretching routine" and you'll find thousands of guided videos, many from certified instructors, all free, all available at 6 AM in your pajamas. Nobody is watching. Nobody is judging. My morning routine is a 15-minute stretching video from a channel called "Yoga With Adriene" — 13 million subscribers, so clearly I'm not the only one doing downward dog in my living room before breakfast.
Entertainment That Doesn't Cost $47 a Month
The health and fitness platforms are practical, but let's be honest — not everything we do online needs to improve us. Sometimes you just want to be entertained. And the streaming services have multiplied like rabbits. At one point last year, we were paying for Netflix ($15.49), Hulu ($17.99), Amazon Prime ($14.99), and Max ($16.99). Sixty-six dollars a month! And Frank was watching exactly one show. A documentary about bridges. On Amazon. Because of course he was.
We cut back to two. Kept Netflix and Amazon Prime. But that's apps and subscriptions, not what I'm here to talk about.
Goodreads is free and it solved a problem I didn't know I had: choosing what to read next. You rate books, it suggests more. You can join groups — my book club coordinates entirely through our Goodreads group now, and if you've been meaning to get on Facebook, Goodreads connects to it nicely for finding friends who read. The annual Reading Challenge motivates you to track how many books you finish. Set a goal of 40 this year. Currently at 11 as of March. Math suggests I need to pick up the pace.
Spotify's free tier plays music with ads. The premium version ($11.99 a month, or $14.99 for a duo plan) removes them and lets you download for offline listening. What I actually use it for: podcasts. Free, ad-supported, infinite variety. True crime for the patio. History podcasts while cooking. A podcast called "You're Wrong About" that re-examines historical events everyone misremembers, which is basically what I did as an English teacher for 34 years except nobody paid me $11.99 a month for it.
Staying Safe Online (Because the Scammers Are Relentless)
A brief detour, but necessary. Every time I recommend a new website to someone, they ask some version of "How do I know it's not a scam?" Fair question. The answer: assume everything is a scam until proven otherwise. Healthy paranoia.
Three things. One: never click a link in a text message from someone you don't know. If you're unsure whether a text is legitimate, we have a full guide on identifying text scams that's worth bookmarking. Two: if a website asks for your Social Security number and it isn't the IRS or Social Security Administration, close the tab. Three: use a password manager. I use the one built into Safari — it generates passwords, stores them, fills them in automatically. No more notebook in the refrigerator. Sorry, Lynne.
For a deeper look at how AI is changing what's possible online — including tools that can actually help rather than confuse — there's a practical guide to AI tools for seniors on this site that explains it without the jargon.
What Actually Matters Is What You'll Actually Use
Here's the thing. I listed a dozen platforms in this article. You will use maybe three. Correct and fine and exactly how it should work.
Lynne signed up for four platforms in one afternoon and remembers none of her passwords. Don't be Lynne. Pick one thing that addresses a real need — loneliness, boredom, a doctor who wants you to track your sodium — and get comfortable with it before adding another. The internet is not going anywhere. It will wait for you.
My friend Fran, who is 75, uses exactly two online tools: Zoom for her grandchildren and the New York Times Crossword. That's it. Two. She is not behind. She is not missing out. She is doing the crossword in her kitchen every morning and seeing her granddaughter's face every Sunday, and if that isn't technology working the way it should, I don't know what is.
The original version of this article, which I apparently wrote five years ago, ended by encouraging seniors to "dive into these resources" and "explore and grow." No. Don't dive. Wade in. Get your ankles wet. See if the water's fine. If it is, go a little deeper. If it's not, there's always the crossword.
We've also put together a list of essential websites worth bookmarking if you want a short starting point.
Lynne texted me this morning with another link. I opened it. Progress.
Frank just walked in asking why his email looks different. Dark mode. Again. Some things, it turns out, are timeless.
