The topic of seniors and tech is something I despair over quite frequently. My own dad is 75. He’s by no means a genius, but he isn’t a stupid man (though he

The topic of seniors and tech is something I despair over quite frequently. My own dad is 75. He’s by no means a genius, but he isn’t a stupid man (though he has seen significant cognitive decline in recent years). He worked in finance most of his career so he was working with computers fairly early on and throughout most of his career. We had a home PC by 1989, and he spent a lot of time in the 90s messing with DOS and Windows 95 and programming with C as a hobby. These days he has an iPhone and iPad that I got him because of accessibility and ease of use, a Windows PC, and a Roku (he used the Hulu local tv service instead of cable). On all of those devices he can only do the basics and is completely helpless if something unexpected happens. Just a few days ago he was watching a show on Prime Video, accidentally skipped to the next episode, and couldn’t figure out how to navigate back. On his iDevices he routinely gets confused trying trying to look at messages, i think because he’s used to seeing/answering them through notifications and doesn’t understand the layout of the messages app. He also has a lot of frustration with the iDevices due to arthritis in his hands. On his PC he’s been using Quicken to track his finances for probably two decades, and last year he ask me to help set up online download of his accounts to make the reconciliation easier. I thought it was a good idea at the time, but every month or two now I have to sit down with him and spend an hour unravelling a mess he created due to getting confused about Quicken’s process for matching downloaded transactions with those he manually entered in the register. I could go on and on with examples, but the question I ponder over is whether or not there’s a fundamental difference between his generation that didn’t grow up with technology and the younger generations that did. Will technology move on and change so that even those of us who a tech savvy today are hopelessly outclassed in 30-40 years? Or are have our brains been wired differently to make us more adaptable? I don’t have answers and I’m rambling at this point, but I feel like something has to give. For seniors today technology is mostly a convenience (they can choose to largely ignore it if they want to) but by the time we reach their age I don’t think that will be the case.