My office used to be a kitchen.
When our building was converted in the late nineties, two one-bedroom units on the nineteenth floor were combined to create the space where Bonnie and I have lived for the better part of fifteen years. What became my office was originally the utility heart of one of those units — small, tucked away, and entirely mine. A wall of mirrors makes it feel larger than it is, stretching toward the view of downtown Tulsa outside my window.
The walls are lined with more than fifty framed black-and-white photographs I’ve taken over the decades. Portraits of family and friends. Candid moments. Celebrations. Smiley faces from good times I might otherwise only half-remember. They are my audience, and they are completely silent — which is precisely the point.
Nobody uses this room but me. Nobody touches my computer, my devices, or anything on my desk but me. If something gets misplaced in here, I’m the only possible suspect. In a world that increasingly makes me feel like a visitor in someone else’s domain, this room is the one place where I am unambiguously in charge.
I’ve never called it a sanctuary before. But now that the word has come up, I can’t think of a better one.
The Questions That Come With the Territory
Last week I was working under a deadline, trying to email a document that required five scanned images. I had four. When I went to scan the fifth, my scanner — a loyal, reliable machine that has never given me serious trouble — decided without warning that it was no longer connected to my home network.
Everything stopped.
What followed was not panic, exactly, but something close to it — a rapid-fire internal interrogation that I suspect every man my age knows well, even if he’s never heard it described out loud:
What am I actually looking at here? How bad is this going to be? Do I need to call support? If I do, how long will I wait? Will someone actually answer? Will I have to sit through promotional recordings while I wait? Will they need a screen share? What if it’s a hardware problem — a new part, a repair center? And if I can’t get this working in the next twenty minutes, how do I get the scan I need for this email?
All of that, in about thirty seconds, while staring at an error message.
I looked up at the photographs on my wall. Fifty faces looking back at me, all from moments when things were good. I took a breath. And then I did the most obvious, least dramatic thing possible: I unplugged the scanner and plugged it back in.
Two minutes later, it worked.
The relief was disproportionate to the fix — and I think that’s worth examining, because the relief wasn’t really about the scanner.
All of that, in about thirty seconds, while staring at an error message.
What the Frustration Is Actually About
I wrote in an earlier piece about my father, Frank Leighty — a decorated Navy fighter pilot who froze in front of a blinking cursor because he couldn’t bear to look foolish in front of a witness. I don’t share his embarrassment exactly. My version of the same problem runs hotter. When technology defeats me, I don’t get shy. I get angry. The particular anger of a man who spent decades mastering complex, high-stakes work and now finds himself stymied by a printer.
It doesn’t even require another person in the room to trigger it. I’ve felt the same tightness — in the shoulders, across the chest — watching a YouTube tutorial where the presenter moves through steps at a pace I can’t match. You try to follow along. You fall behind. You rewind and fall behind again. And somewhere in there, a quiet, humbling thought surfaces: I’ve lost a step.
That thought is the real problem. Not the technology.
Gerontologists have a name for the psychological territory older men navigate in this stage of life: integrity versus despair. The idea is that late life eventually forces a reckoning — either you find a way to make sense of your accumulated experience and feel that it adds up to something, or you slip into a creeping sense of irrelevance. Technology, more than almost anything else in modern life, has a way of pressing directly on that wound. A device that won’t cooperate isn’t just an inconvenience. For a man whose entire identity was built on competence, it can feel like evidence.
Which is why the sanctuary matters as much as it does.
Why Older Men Learn Technology Better at Home
Research on how older adults actually learn technology consistently points toward one finding that senior centers and computer labs tend to ignore: adults age 50 and older now use tech products at the same rate as younger adults — yet the anxiety of group learning environments consistently prevents them from reaching that potential. Men learn significantly better in private, on their own devices, at their own pace, than in group settings on unfamiliar equipment.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a dignity issue. In a classroom, every confused expression is visible. Every question feels like a public admission. Every moment of falling behind is witnessed by someone who might be keeping up just fine. The anxiety of that exposure is often enough to make the learning impossible — not because the material is too hard, but because the performance anxiety gets in the way.
In the sanctuary, none of that applies. You can be furious at the scanner. You can talk to the screen. You can unplug something and plug it back in without anyone watching, and when it works, you can feel the relief without having to explain why it took twenty minutes.
The research on lifelong learning and brain health is equally clear: engaging with genuinely complex, unfamiliar tasks is one of the most effective known strategies for maintaining cognitive sharpness in older adults. The National Institute on Aging found that older adults who learned digital photography had more memory improvement than those who only socialized or did less cognitively demanding activities. Every time you work through a technology problem — really work through it, in private, without someone doing it for you — you are doing something more useful for your brain than any puzzle or crossword has ever been.
The sanctuary isn’t a retreat from the digital world. It is, in its own way, the training ground for it.
The sanctuary isn’t a retreat from the digital world. It is, in its own way, the training ground for it.
The View From the Nineteenth Floor
I am not a tech wizard. I don’t pretend to be. There are things my devices do that I don’t fully understand, and there are mornings when the gap between what technology expects of me and what I can deliver feels wider than I’d like to admit.
But I have a room where I can work through that gap on my own terms. I have fifty photographs on the wall that remind me, when the error messages start, of who I was before any of this technology existed and who I still am when it cooperates. And I have learned, slowly and not without frustration, that the most powerful move available to me is usually the simplest one: stop, breathe, and try the obvious thing before calling for help.
Most of the time, unplugging it and plugging it back in is enough.
If you don’t have a sanctuary yet — a room, a desk, a corner of the house that is entirely yours, where you can struggle in private and succeed in private — I’d suggest finding one. Not because technology is going to get easier, but because you are going to be more capable of handling it than you think, provided nobody is watching while you figure it out.
The view from the nineteenth floor is considerably better when you’re the one who reconnected the network.
