Halloween cocktail epiphany

And a toast to long friendships

It is a “good year” for holidays, we say here in Zurich. Meaning that the public ones fall on Thursday and Friday, which makes for a long weekend. Easier time off.

Halloween last week happily also fell on a Friday. Originally a Celtic festival, the fun day of candy and costumes in the States remains less recognized in Switzerland. Was thereby the perfect moment for a longtime friend and I – each with American roots – to catch-up. Share the spirit of the evening.

Speaking of spirits. We decided on a cocktail bar, even when I’m more the wine girl. In fact, we met at perhaps the most iconic cocktail bar in Zurich: Kronenhalle. A tough choice between two other cool options for that kind of thing, might I mention: The Widder Bar and The Old Crow.

Having not seen each other for quite some time, my friend (we shall call her Cat) and I caught up on all things professional and personal while sipping a “She So Insane.” In the quickly lapsing years after COVID, we’d both moved homes, Cat now had a teenager, my job had changed while her previously changing roles had well-landed.

I joke often that you really don’t want me to steer bar or dinner conversation, given my recent professional immersion. We inevitably end up talking about getting old. 🙂

So I tried to just lightly explain to Cat what else I learned needs to change. How current options were fundamentally designed decades ago. That we won’t view them any more positively as something we want when we are older than older people do now. She – appropriate for a cocktail evening – lightly responded. “Oh well, by the time we are old the technology will have changed.”

And right there in that moment it hit me. Cocktail inspired illumination! The technology will change and we will change. The design options for our second-centuries, as it looks so far, not so much.

We usually don’t even see these products unless we had a much older person in our lives who needed them – acquired often through medical supply channels.

With the most friendly, warm un-Halloween-ghost-like tone of voice I could muster, I tried to get my epiphany out there, “We must demand better design as consumers now if we want better products in our homes to be ready in the next 10 or 20 years, when we ourselves are older!”

I’m a barrel of laughs over a cocktail, eh?

Cat took it in stride.

We moved on. How were our friends and acquaintances doing? Our mothers – happily, each still independent, admirably stubborn. What’s it like to raise a teenager. Latest best dating apps. Our dreams, concerns and practical priorities.

Was really great to catch-up in that way which is always great when you share experiences that don’t need to be spoken. Cultural roots with holiday traditions, plus years of friendship. A toast to both new and past moments. To seeing how each has evolved. That satisfying feeling of an exchange with someone who knows you a little – where you can express differing views and be understood.

Made possible by the passage of time. For that deepening spirit of shared experience, you actually must grow older.

It was from this exchange that I could also see more clearly our design blind spot about age. That we rightly prefer to bring ourselves together as we are humanly right now rather than focus on the unseen future. (Including the glaring gap of products we may wish to have when we get there.) I get it.

I wonder if one day Cat and I will sit in the same bar, or one of the others, and remember this conversation. Our lives now again different, still evolving.

No hurry to get there, yet wouldn’t it be beautiful?

Maybe by then, we will have also influenced some innovative design into the products. 🙂

We finished off All-Hallows-Eve sipping a perfectly named classic. “Fairy Tale.” Magical, courageously mixed, and evoking the spirit of heroes.