There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of retirement, when you realise that you have accumulated more digital accounts than you ever had responsibilities at sea. And at sea, I had quite a few.
I commanded ships. I held certificates, licences, emergency plans, crew lists, and a small mountain of paperwork that would, in theory, tell someone what to do if things went badly wrong. The maritime world is morbid in a practical way — it plans for disaster with the same cheerful thoroughness that it plans for everything else. Someone always knows where the muster list is.
The digital world is not like that.
The digital world operates on one assumption only: that you are present, engaged, and available to click something. It does not plan for your absence. It does not account for the possibility that you might, one day, simply stop. Technology understands engagement the way the sea understands a good passage — it expects it to continue. It has no framework whatsoever for what happens when it doesn't.
I've been thinking about this more than is probably healthy for a man of my age, and I've reached the conclusion that retired people — those of us who've had a quiet moment to actually sit and reflect, between the coffee and the afternoon walk — need to take digital life administration rather more seriously than we currently do.
Because here's the thing nobody warns you about when you pick up your pension letter and wave cheerfully at the office for the last time: your digital life does not retire with you. It carries on. Your subscriptions renew. Your email autoresponder stays silent when it should be saying something. Your voice data — those little recordings you made asking a smart speaker to play Radio 4 or remind you about the dentist — those don't evaporate. They sit somewhere, on a server in a country you'll never visit, waiting to be used in ways that would make your hair stand on end. Which, at my age, would at least be a novelty.
There is now a genuine, non-science-fiction possibility that a version of your voice could be reconstructed from accumulated recordings. That your digital patterns — your browsing, your purchases, your opinions cheerfully typed into comment sections you've long since forgotten — could be used to build something that resembles you rather more closely than is comfortable. An AI impersonation. Not malicious necessarily. But not you either.
And when you eventually depart — in the nautical sense, shall we say — your accounts don't close themselves. Social media profiles linger like ships left without a crew. Email addresses receive messages from people who don't yet know. Subscriptions charge someone. Algorithms, with their cheerful indifference, continue to suggest content to a person who is no longer there to receive it.
The sensible, practical, not-at-all-morbid response to all of this is to treat your digital estate the way a good captain treats his ship before handing over command: a proper handover, everything documented, nothing left running that shouldn't be.
There are services now that handle digital legacy planning. There are steps you can take with Google, with Apple, with your email provider, to designate what happens after you've gone. It is not especially complicated. It is, however, very easy to put off — which is precisely why most people do.
I'm not suggesting you spend your retirement in existential dread. Lord knows there's enough of that available without going looking for it. I'm suggesting an afternoon. A cup of something warm. A notebook. A list of every account you own, every subscription you hold, and a quiet plan for what becomes of them.
The sea taught me that the most dangerous thing on any vessel isn't the storm. It's the thing nobody planned for.
Plan for it.
If this struck a chord, there's more where it came from — longer reflections, practical thinking, and the occasional grumble — over at theoldgreythinker.substack.com or, if you'd like something to keep, visit greythinker.gumroad.com. Come and have a read.
If the writing helped, some readers buy me a Pot of Yorkshire Tea. I’m English and run my days on tea. It’s one of the ways I keep this work independent. I appreciate every kindness — truly.