The oma-vlogs

In the last decades the society I live in has apparently changed a lot. My generation is often accused of individuality. Rightly so? I don’t know. But the fact remains that many older people in my country live in solitude and loneliness.

And I am aware of this, sometimes… But when one of my grandmothers broke her leg recently and had to stay in a recovery facility for many weeks, it became painfully obvious to me that loneliness is hard. She has a loving husband who helps her, the rest of the family tries to visit as often as they can, but we can only do so much and I, especially, live quite far away.

And it got me thinking. About loneliness. About time to kill. About spending hours stuck in a bed. About what it was like when I broke my arm a few years ago. It dawned to me that of course I have the privilege of being young. I have an active social life filled with young people who can travel easily. But apart from that, I also spend my days rather differently than my elders. My life is a lot more independent from physical abilities. A huge chunk of my life is… online.

And although my grandmother has adapted astonishingly well to the new age -she is quite active online- I do still think that there are resources that are untapped by her. So I decided to introduce her to my favourite kind of entertainment. This would hopefully provide some distraction from her boredom, but it would also create a new way of including her in my daily routine. The oma-vlogs were born.