 |
|
|
|||||
If you thought gaming was a young persons activity, think again. Older adults now make up nearly one-third of all U.S. gamers, with 57 million Americans who are 50 or older playing regularly. Half of those in their sixties and seventies play some form of PC, mobile, or console video game every week. Even people in their eighties36%!are gaming, according to recent data from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). While it may be that older gamers simply have more free time, traditional pastimes like knitting and bridge are giving way to Twitch streams and first-person shooter games. The Guardian spoke to gamers like GrndpaGaming and TacticalGramma, who stream titles such as Call of Duty, the hunting simulator theHunter: Call of the Wild, and the air-combat game Metalstorm to hundreds of thousandsand, in some cases, millionsof followers on Twitch and YouTube. As long as you keep your brain active and functioning, youre not going to sit there and just deteriorate away, Will, 72, who games as GrndpaGaming, told The Guardian. Boomers and members of the so-called silent generation (the youngest of whom turn 80 in 2025) say their top reasons for gaming are to unwind, keep their minds sharp, and simply have fun. Some research suggests video games can offer cognitive benefits for older adults, though the effects often depend on the type of game. There are social perks, too, especially on multiplayer platforms where boomer gamers are getting a crash course in Gen Z slang. Ive learned some things I dont want to learn, Michelle Statham, who streams as TacticalGramma, told The Guardian. Gaming is becoming more popular across all age groups. According to ESAs research, nearly two-thirds of Americans, from kids as young as 5 to adults who are 90 and older, regularly play video gamestotaling around 205.1 million players. The gender split among players is fairly even, with 47% identifying as women and 52% as men. But among older generations, women are more avid gamers: 52% of boomer women reportedly play video games, compared to 46% of boomer men. When it comes to the gaming community, age really is just a number.
Category:
E-Commerce
Were taught to think of raises as the holy grail of career and financial success. Annual performance reviews. Awkward remuneration conversations. Hoping (and sometimes praying) that your hard work gets noticed. If this is your earning strategy, you’re already behind. Forget the raise. In todays workplace, shaped by AI and economic flux, the smart earners are rewriting the rules. We cant say that raises dont matter, but theyre no longer the most effective path to earning more. Here are the five savvy steps to get you closer to making more. 1. Ditch the illusion of linearity Stay longer, get promoted, earn more. In todays landscape, it doesnt always work that way. Pay progression isnt neatly tied to tenure, and loyalty alone no longer guarantees growth. So too, for following a traditional career path, the well-trodden graduate to partner/executive/C-suite path. In the modern job economy, status has become more performative than financial. Earning more doesnt follow a straight line, nor is it built on hierarchy. Its built on leverage. A linear mindset ignores lateral moves and misses cross-industry opportunities, often with a significant financial upside. With global skills shortage, never have employees with in-demand skills held such a financial strategic advantage. But be smart: this is not an endorsement for job-hopping. Tenure is still important when in conjunction with in-demand skills. This combination can make you exponentially more valuable, opening doors to equity options and lucrative bonus structures. 2. Flip your view of a raise A raise isnt the only way to take home more pay: consider additional retirement contributions, performance bonuses, opportunities for upskilling, flexible work arrangements, or additional leave entitlements. These benefits have lower immediate costs to your employer, but compound your long-term opportunity for financial gain. When no direct salary increases are on the table, employers are often relieved to meet you halfway. A collaborative, rather than adversarial, approach demonstrates strategic thinking, further reinforcing your position as a high–value employee. 3. Revalue your contribution Too many people expect that increases happen regularly and every year. They dont. And when they do ask for more, its based on the increasing cost of living. Overall, these tactics yield crumbs. Move beyond base-level expectations: you want the cake. Salary growth and negotiations follow transformation. Revisit what you have contributed in the last 12 months and quantify it into a measurable business impact. Is it cost savings, revenue generation, value creation, new efficiencies, or some kind of innovation? If you can, put a dollar amount on it. And from now on, commit to a monthly log of contribution and value creationand take it with you for next years salary discussions. Make a compelling business case based on data and the market, not opinion, helping you pitch confidently rather than passively. 4. Look for multiple income streams This is not a second job or building on your portfolio. This is a long game, being entrepreneurial with your skills within your existing professional framework. Develop expertise and relationships that generate opportunities beyond your existing role. This could be consulting or advisory work, keynote speaking engagements, expert commentary contributions, board positions, or industry committee roles. The key is leveraging your existing job to create premium–paying opportunities that further enhance rather than compete. This could work perfectly if you have negotiated upskilling, professional development and additional leave entitlements. These activities dont just create income; they build on your professional reputation, expand your network, placing you as an industry leader. Here is where it gets interesting: a higher profile strengthens your position in future salary negotiations, a virtuous cycle. 5. Position yourself as a product (because you are one) AI has automated many tasks, but it cant replace strategic visibility. Just as successful product marketing showcases attributes and unique selling points, so too must you ensure your professional contributions are recognized by the right stakeholders. Position yourself in high-profile projects and meetings. Ensure your ideas are heard and your work is clearly attributed to you, not lost in the we, us, or team. Collaborative input has its place; so do individual contributions, and not at the expense of the other. Just as products need care, attention, and servicing to keep them in top form, so do you. Ensure you are recharging, caring for your mind and body, and pursuing growth opportunities to enhance your professional worth. Rethinking your earning strategy means recognizing the more profound shifts in how we work and whats valued. Understanding these shifts allows you to approach your career and earning potential not as an ordered system, but as a platform: adaptable, strategic, and ready for whats next.
Category:
E-Commerce
Ive been using Comet, Perplexitys AI-powered browser, for the past week. Using it to navigate the internet is very similar to any other browser experience, with one major enhancement: the Comet Assistant. Its a feature that can accomplish web-based tasks independent of you, and Im quickly becoming convinced its the future. I wrote an extensive review of Comet for The Media Copilot newsletter, but here Id like to explore the broader implicationsnot just stemming from Comet, but the whole idea of an AI-powered web browser, because soon well be swimming in them. OpenAI is reportedly about to release its own take on the idea, and certainly Chrome wont be far behind given Googles deep push into AI. Introducing a browsing assistant isn’t just a convenience. It has the potential to fundamentally redefine our relationship with the web. AI browsers like Comet represent the first wave in a sea change, shifting the internet from something we actively navigate to something we delegate tasks to, increasingly trusting AI to act on our behalf. That will present new challenges around privacy and ethics, but also create more opportunities, especially for the media. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} A new browser dawns Those old enough to remember web browsers when they didnt have cookies (which let websites remember you were logged in) or omniboxes (which hard-wired search into the experience) understand how significant those changes were. After using Comet, I would argue the addition of an AI companion transcends them all. For the first time youre surfing the web with a partner. The Comet Assistant is like having your own personal intern for what youre doing online, ready to take on any menial or low-priority tasks so you dont have to. For example, I order most of my groceries online every week. Rather than spinning up a list myself, I only need to open a tab, navigate the store site, and tell Comet to do it. I can command it to look at past orders and my standing shopping list as a guide, give it a rough idea of the meals I want to make, and itll fill up the cart on its own. Or I could tell it to find the nearest Apple Store with open Genius Bar appointments on Saturday morning, and book a repair for a broken iPhone screen. You get the idea. Once you start using Comet like this, it becomes kind of addictive as you search for its limits. Book a flight? Plan a vacation? Clean up my RSS reader (it really needs it)? To be clear, the execution often isnt perfect, so you still need to check its work before taking that final stepin fact, with most use cases, itll require this even if the command is quite clear (e.g. Buy it), which should give most people some relief to their apprehension of outsourcing things theyd previously done by hand. But I believe this outsourcing is inevitable. In practice, Comet functions as an agent, and while its abilities are still nascent, they’re already useful enough to benefit a large number of people. Browser assistants will likely be most peoples first experience with agents, and most will judge them for how effectively they perform tasks with minimal guidance. That will depend not just on the quality of the tool and the AI models powering it, but also how much it knows about the user. Privacy concerns are elevated with agents: think about the grocery example and now extrapolate that to medical or financial information. Can I trust my AI provider to safeguard that information from marketers, hackers, and other users of the same AI? Perplexity has the distinction of not training foundation models, so at least the concern about leaks into training data is moot. But the level of access a browser agent hasessentially looking over your shoulder at everything you do onlinecreates a very large target. Nonetheless, the potential for convenience is so great that I believe many people will use them anyway, and not see the leap to agents as much more than the access they already give major tech platform providers like Apple or Google. Providing informational fuel for agents This has big implications for the media. If you think about the things we do onlineshopping, banking, interacting with healthcare providersall of them are informed by context, often in the form of research that we do ourselves. Were already offloading some of that to AI, but the introduction of a personal browser agent means that can happen even closer to the task. So if I ask the AI to fill my shopping cart with low-fat ingredients for chicken enchiladas, its going to need to get that information from somewhere. This opens up a new landscape to information providers: the contextual searches needed to support agent activity. Whereas humans can only find, read, and process so much data to get the best information for what theyre doing, AI theoretically has no limits. In other words, the surface area of AI searches will expand massively, and so will the competition for it. The field of “AIEO,” the AI version of SEO, is about to get very hot. The spike in agent activity will also hopefully lead to better standards of how bots identify themselves. As I wrote about recently, AI companies have essentially given themselves permission to ignore bot restrictions on sites when those bots are behaving on behalf of users (as opposed to training or search indexing). Thats a major area of concern for content creators who want to control how AI ingests and adapts their content, and if bot activity suddenly becomes much bigger, so does the issue. Information workers, and journalists in particular, will be able to unlock a lot of potential with browser agents. Think about how many of the software platforms you use professionally are browser-based. In a typical newsroom, reporters and editors will use information and context across all kinds of systemsfrom a communications platform like Slack to project-management software like Asana to a CMS like WordPress. Automations can ease some of the tedium, but many newsrooms dont have enough resources for the technical upkeep. With a browser agent, workers can automate their own tasks on the fly. Certainly, the data privacy concerns are even higher in a professional environment, but so are the rewards. An AI informed by not just internet data and the context of your task, but with the goals and knowledge base of your workplaceAND with mastery over your browser-based softwareould effectively give everyone on the team their own assistant. And this isn’t some distant, hypothetical scenarioyou can do it right now. Comet is here, and though the Assistant sometimes stumbles through tasks like a newborn calf, it has the ability to perform research, operate software, and accomplish tasks on behalf of the user. That rewrites the rules of online interaction. While the amplified privacy concerns demand clearer boundaries and stricter accountability, AI browsers represent a step change in how we use the internet: Were no longer alone out there. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||