We heard about the ‘2016 is 2026’ trend;

In 2016, a quiet but telling shift was already underway. Long before “longevity” became a buzzword and before ageing was reframed as an economic and social imperative, early signals were emerging about how older Australians were engaging with media, technology and one another.

That year marked the launch of Charlie’s Oldies Media Aware (OMA) Study — a research project examining how older members of the community were adopting online and social technologies, plus how those tools could be used to reduce isolation and strengthen connection.

The findings challenged a lazy assumption still common in mainstream discourse at the time: that older people were passive consumers, disconnected from digital life.

Instead, the study revealed growing curiosity, capability and a massive appetite.

Older Australians were online, learning, communicating and seeking relevance, not retreating from it. The issue was not willingness; it was that systems, platforms and media narratives were being built without thought to include them.

Three months later, the conversation shifted again.

Life Flip, published mid-2016, explored a more confronting idea: what life actually looks like beyond the conventional “retirement age”. Not decline. Not withdrawal. But contribution, value and agency in later life, particularly past 60, an age still framed in many policy and media settings as an endpoint, rather than a transition.

The premise was simple but disruptive: longevity changes everything. If people are living longer, healthier lives, then the social script around ageing needs rewriting. Later life is not a footnote; it is a chapter.

That perspective was reinforced in an offhand remark that landed with surprising force. During a conversation with a Vision Australia Radio newsreader — who’s 90 years old — she casually referred to someone else with the phrase, “Oh, she’s only 70.”

The comment matters because it exposes something rarely acknowledged: perspective doesn’t flatten with age. It scales.

A 90-year-old sees 70 the way a 30-year-old sees 26 — younger, earlier, not yet “there”.

Age, it turns out, is always relative.

What does change is visibility. When people can’t see themselves in the future, as in, in media, leadership, culture or storytelling – they instinctively label it as “old”. Not because it is, but because it feels unfamiliar.

This is where media impact becomes impossible to ignore.

Audiences increasingly expect to see real people, from their own era, reflected in news feeds, feature stories and everyday reporting. Not caricatures. Not nostalgia pieces. Lived experience, current contribution, contemporary relevance.

For major news outlets, this isn’t a soft cultural issue; it’s a structural one. Fail to reflect an ageing, digitally literate population and you don’t just lose resonance — you lose relevance. The risk is not offending older audiences; it’s disappearing from them altogether.

GreyMatter sits squarely in this space. Born from early research, sharpened by lived observation, and sustained by the simple truth that ageing is not a niche issue. It’s the mainstream, arriving faster than many institutions expected.

2016 wasn’t just a year. It was a signal. And a decade on, the facts have only become harder to ignore.

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