I so feel this. Last holidays I just decided I’m done.
“All my contacts are just gone!”
“I know I put the right password in”
“Why doesn’t my mail work?”
Lol everyone I know has iPhone, I just lie and say I dont know anything about that
There are so many thoroughly entrenched problems that can’t be resolved without the turnover of a generation or two, but those fixes need to be built, tested, and battle hardened now.
The reason I know things can change for the better is because boomers spent half a century debasing society to the state we see it in today.
What gets me is that it isn’t universally an age thing.
My grandmother isn’t perfect by any means, but she is able to manage email, whatsapp (surprised me with leaving voice messages through it recently when her arthritis made her not want to type), texting, facebook (including chat), amazon, browsing the internet, video calls, and ordering from non-amazon sites. She’s in her early fucking 90s.
She had something she wanted to do and decided to learn about it. She didn’t make it everyone else’s problem. She has people, including me, who she will lean on for support sometimes, but when she does she takes notes. She wants to know how to do these things and puts in the effort.
Meanwhile her daughter, my mother, has this attitude that “Everything is supposed to be easier with a computer, so if it’s not easy it’s the computer’s fault not mine.” If she can’t figure out how to do something in two clicks, or if the menu option isn’t exactly where it makes intuitive sense to her, my mother effectively throws her hands up and gives up. Combine that with this intense fear of somehow cratering the whole machine if she clicks the wrong thing and she’s fucking useless.
She literally couldn’t manage getting music off of CDs onto an iPod. You know, the horribly complex set of steps of: plug the iPod into your computer using the charging cable, iTunes will open automatically, put the disc in the drive, it will automatically ask you if you want to rip/import the disc into iTunes, click yes, wait for it to complete, click sync on the iPod in the iTunes menu, wait until it’s done, then click eject.
Something that’s only going to make this worse over time is the constant attempts to make all of this more simple. Android and iPhones have built in password managers, which can be great (especially linking a Mac laptop’s keychain with the person’s phone) but if something fucks up all hell breaks lose because it wasn’t something they ever had to think about.
I’ve worked with people who scroll anything by clicking the scroll bar and slowly moving it up or down to go where they want. Completely ignoring the scroll wheel on their mice…
I’ve also worked with people who don’t use their right click often enough to know that it shows options by context most of the time and that it won’t always be the same options.
Wild.
“Nothing’s working right since I downloaded my game.”
Okay dad, I’ll fix it. Again.
My dad.
I’m not technical!
Yes but… it is an electronic device. You need to plug it in, turn it on at the wall and press the power button. It’s been like this for decades now. How the hell have you managed to use a toaster or a TV at this stage?
Speaking of TVs, how can they not get the concept of having the right input. Fucking had to be on channel 3 for 30 years, now instead of 3 push input until you see it. How’s that so hard.
We have a guy at work; early 60s, doesn’t have an email address. He literally does not have an email address. The one he gave when he started with us is his wife’s. He has a phone, but he keeps it turned off in his bag. Not asleep, off.
When you ask him to do anything involving a computer he gives you all that “oh I don’t do computers” bullshit, and at this point all I can think about is how much household admin and labour he’s off loaded to his wife. How much of the irritating day-to-day shit we have to do by email, or by logging in to a website; all tasks that his wife has to carry out because he “doesn’t do computers”.
He’s not brain damaged, he just doesn’t see the value in learning.
I set him up with some online training he needed to do the other day. Nothing overly complicated, just watch an online slideshow, then click on a QR code to go to a form to answer questions. He clicked on the link, but because it was already open in another tab it didn’t open again. And instead of spending a few seconds investigating the issue, he just walked upstairs to my office to tell me it wasn’t working.
I can’t wrap my head around being so completely incurious about things. About not having the desire to work out why something isn’t working and attempting to fix it. It’s such an alien way of being to me.
My uncle is early gen X I think and didn’t have a laptop, smartphone, or home internet for years. He got his first smartphone in like 2019. He lives alone and I hardly see or talk to him, yet over the years since he got a phone he has always wanted to be the one to take family photos with it, show me what he’s learned or the research he’s done. He’s planned vacations and managed his retirement all on his own through his new laptop and phone now. It’s clearly not an age thing, just a willingness to learn, which he has always had an aptitude for.
‘I cant seem to get my head around this newfangled “computer” thingamajig’ bitch you lived your life in the kafkaesque abstractions of the financial system. You taught my ass the foundations of information theory. And you can’t manage to type in openoffice on god damn linux mint? (C. Early 2010s, might’ve been ubuntu)
‘NERD! you’ll never get laid knowing that shit and bossing people around. It’s 2008, not 1978, nobody needs to know this wierdo nerd shit. I bet you don’t even have a facebook account.’ (Was teaching him how to download and open a torrent file. On windows.)
‘Tell me how to use this’ ‘no like in one message. For all of unix. No i cannot check a wiki or read a book. It must be personal 1-1 communication.’ (Basic rundowns of how shit works and how to use basic functions) ‘Sorry, that was over 140 characters, feels like you’re bullying me. Also im not using that ux, im using gnome which you specifically said would be harder for my use case.’
The flavor is generational. My desire to fry them in a slop machine data center’s exhaust heat is not.
I love getting the questions (not necessarily from old people) like “how do I do X in Y app?”.
I watch them stare and click random things then give up.
I’ve never used Y app so google “how to do X in Y app”. Click first result “how to do X in Y app”
me: I googled it. here’s how to do X.
them: amazed at my tech skills
Amen
My mother still doesn’t understand that passwords are exact. She thinks remembering something “close enough” should work. In other news, she’s on her ~20th primary email address. My father can keep his passwords straight, but falls for every scam he comes across.
While it’s fun to mock the boomers, new gens aren’t particularly tech literate either. At my job, at one point, we recruited someone younger than me. I’m not particularly old but the industry is dominated by older people, ex-military, etc. Dude was on the tech side like me, but he had no awareness or ability to learn what certain buttons were or how to troubleshoot any issues. I learn things just by testing stuff out, but apparently no one else outside of specific demographics does the same.
20 years ago the helplessness was quaint, almost cute. Going to visit my grandparents when I was in middle school was almost like traveling back in time. No Internet, no videogame consoles. It was perfectly fine because they were in their 70’s and the Internet was still either a novelty or a convenience. They never bothered to learn because they thought they would be dead before they would need to.
Well, now they’re in their early 90’s. All their friends have been dead for at least a decade and my grandpa is almost completely blind. I would love to set him up with some lovely accessible devices to let him listen to music and audiobooks, maybe get him into podcasts. But it would be an incredible hurdle just to get him to agree to it. Not to mention all of their medical appointments where my mom has to help them with their online profiles. So many things you used to buy at the store you now have to go online for.
They managed to adapt just fine to telephones and television working out. At a certain point they just said “eh whatever, I’ll be dead before I need to learn this” and then went ahead and lived too long. I hope I never get like that, but at the same time I actively refuse to use new technologies that I’m opposed to. I don’t use AI, I don’t keep my credit cards on my phone, I don’t have a smart lock or thermostat in my home.
I think it’s because there was a time when technology actually required things like reading manuals or typing something specific. Like, VCRs and universal remotes and DOS weren’t super intuitive so they just decided it was someone else’s thing and turned their brains off for anything requiring electricity. Four decades later they’ve still left them off.
