My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
They already are. I have a teenager. She is technologically illiterate as are most of her friends. Oh, she has an iPhone, iPad, laptop, etc. But when it comes to doing anything more than using her favorite apps on it, it’s like she’s completely lost.
We lose some of our capacity to learn as we age but I think we also kind of get to a place where our plate is pretty much full and you just let a lot of things go that aren’t important to you. I feel that way about certain things sometimes. Hell, I work with technology for a living but there’s so much that changes so fast. There’s a lot of stuff that sounds interesting but I’m not going to spend a bunch of time learning about it because I don’t have time and don’t care. Unless it has an impact on me getting paid of course.
Yes, absolutely. I’m a Xennial so I’m old. My world is tech because it fascinated me when I was young (and lucky enough to have access because it wasn’t a guarantee in those days) and I made a living from not being afraid of tech. I dealt with boot disks, dip switches, losing your Internet connection because someone in the house picked up the phone. My 9 year old thinks something is broken if a program asks them to update.
We built this world of it just works to make sure boomers didn’t have a panic attack everytime they used a computer and the unintended consequence is our children panic and have no interest in understanding the the underlying process of the systems they work with, because it just works.
I try to get my kid to care but they don’t, they just want Minecraft to work NOW.
All that being said I also have lost interest in a lot of what’s new. I know TikTok and Whatsapp exist but I have never used them. AI feels big enough that I’ve messed around with it but I never think oh let me ask ChatGPT… I’m sure in 10 years my kids or an employee are going to laugh at me as I read documentation and forums to figure something out and they will say Bro why not just ask ChatGPT. They just want everything to work and give them the answer now and I think it’s going to blow up in all of our faces.
I’m sorry, but are you referring to a teenager as a millennial? Because millennials are in their 30s by now.
No. The point is that technical skills, or lack thereof, aren’t tied to a particular generation.
Edit: also, I’m a Millennial.