The woman at the senior centre on Elm Street had her grandson’s laptop open on the folding table, and she was crying at a spreadsheet. Not about money. About memory. She had typed the same name into a cell four times because each time she finished, she could not remember whether she had already done it. I sat down next to her with my tea. The laptop fan was running hard, and the little machine felt warm through the table. I asked when she’d started keeping her lists on it. March, she said. When the paper notebook felt like giving up.
I hear some version of this every week now. Someone over sixty decides their mind is slipping, and the first thing they reach for is a device to catch what falls. A tablet for reminders. A laptop for the family records. And lately they come back to me upset twice over — once about the forgetting, and once about what the machine cost, because the prices have gone strange.
The laptop on the folding table
Here is what I know from reading the trade news my husband leaves on the kitchen table. A global shortage of computer memory started in 2025 — the chips called DRAM and NAND flash — and it has pushed prices up across the whole semiconductor market. The analysts at Kearney’s PERLab said in 2026 they expect it to last at least until 2030. The man who runs Micron, Sanjay Mehrotra, said in June of 2026 he thought supply would ease by 2028. Samsung’s Jaejune Kim said through 2028; SK Hynix’s Kwak Noh-Jung said 2030. When the people who make the stuff cannot agree within two years of each other, I stop waiting for a cheap laptop to save anyone’s memory.
And here is the part that matters more to me: the shortage exists because the world’s appetite for memory chips exploded — generative AI services, data centres, the works. McKinsey projected back in 2024 that demand for AI-ready data centre capacity would grow about 33% a year through 2030. Machines are buying up memory while the woman at my table worries about losing hers. There is a joke in there somewhere. My husband says it’s not a good one.
The paper calendar by the phone
So I did what I always do. I asked for the brown bag first — every bottle, every box — because the medicine cabinet is the simplest place to start and the last place anyone looks. Then I asked about her hearing, because hearing is memory; a word you never quite catch is a word you cannot remember. Then I asked what she writes down.
What is written down is remembered. Not because paper is magic — because the act of writing is a second pass through the mind. My note on memory loss at sixty says the same thing in more words. And ordinary forgetting has a shape — the name that comes back at eleven at night, the keys in the fridge. The other kind has a different shape, and a doctor like Dr. Okafor is the one to sort that, not a spreadsheet.
I keep my own way of remembering names in a notebook that cost less than the tea I was drinking.
I priced it out last month for a talk I gave, from ads and memory. I am not saying the machines are useless. I am saying I have watched a twelve-dollar notebook outperform a seven-hundred-dollar laptop for a frightened seventy-year-old, because she could find Tuesday in it.
Before you change anything — before you swap the paper for a screen, or get a device to prop up a memory you haven’t had checked — go watch the full video on what’s usually behind these slips and what actually helps. Sit through it with a cup of coffee and a pen.
Two families I work with went opposite directions this spring. One bought the tablet, loaded it with reminders, and spent three months learning the machine instead of sleeping — the sleep aid in their brown bag turned out to matter more than any app. The other family spent nothing: they got the blood-pressure cuff out of the hall drawer and used it daily, fixed the aunt’s hearing appointment, and put a paper calendar by the phone. Three months later it was the second household that was calmer. Calmer, and sleeping.
One worked example, real numbers. March 3rd of this year, a man at the centre started writing his three daily things in a notebook at 8 each morning — appointments, one name he’d used, one thing he’d walked into a room for. Six weeks, one change. By mid-April his wife said the panicky questions had dropped from most days to maybe twice a week.
It goes wrong too. Last fall I told a woman to try the calendar method and said nothing about the rest of her routine. She changed four things at once — calendar, new pill organiser, stopped a tablet on her own, started walking at night — and when she felt worse in two weeks, nobody could tell which change did it. That cost her a frightening month and a stern talk from Dr. Okafor. Try a single tweak, then wait about a month and a half to see if it actually made a difference. I say it so often my husband finishes the sentence for me. “Six weeks,” he says, and hands me the pen.
The myth: a failing memory after sixty means the worst, and the fix is a better machine. What actually happens, from a long stretch at a hospital pharmacy counter and a few years of brown-bag reviews on one neighborhood street: the commonest finds are a nightly allergy tablet, a sleep aid, uncorrected hearing, blood pressure nobody has checked at home, and a person who stopped writing things down because writing felt like admitting something. Ordinary forgetting has a shape. So does the other kind. The shapes are different, and they are worth learning.
Why memory slips after sixtyThe video explains the cause, and a way to steady your memory.
Before you get a single thing to manage this, sit through the video — watch the full video now — and then bring me your brown bag.
What I still don’t know, and think about when I fill my organiser on Sunday mornings: if the machines are buying up all the memory in the world until 2030, what exactly are we planning to remember with ours?