OK Boomer

It’s commonly believed that wisdom is associated with old age. The older you are, the more experienced you are. With this experience, members of older generations can pass down valuable knowledge and life experience to the members of the younger generation, so that they can learn how to successfully live their lives. But, is there anything that older people learn from the younger generation –the generation that I am a part of? Well, the world that we live in is constantly changing, and this naturally creates generation gaps. As a result, each generation should have its own qualities, characteristics, and philosophies that are specific to them. This must mean that there are things that older people can learn from our generation, and one major difference between the old and younger generations is the use of technology and its capabilities.

My parents aren’t as fast as I wish they would be when it comes to the use of technology. It can take forever for them to complete simple tasks on a computer, or even to just to scroll through their phone to select an app (Alright, it might not be that long, but it can sometimes feel like ages). For any member of my generation, they could complete these same rudimentary tasks with their eyes closed. When asked to connect old age and technology, there is one immediate image that comes to mind for many of us. We visualize an elderly person needing to be taught how to use the features of the Windows 10 operating system on their computer. It’s a fact of life that as we age, it tends to be harder to grasp new concepts than when we were younger. The world we live in is rapidly changing due to the current swift growth of technology. Ideas can be transported across the globe in seconds, and information can be accessed and readily available to anyone in seconds. Technology constantly reshapes our environment and it is inevitable that the rate at which the capabilities of technology will increase faster and faster. Older generations must adapt to these new developments that didn’t exist when they were younger. Our generation was brought up in a world where this is natural. And now for my attempt at a metaphor. We are all swimmers in this stream of technology, and we all, with varying degrees, must put effort into counteracting its downstream flow. The “effort” that must be applied by everyone is affected by their age: the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to the use of new technology. When it comes to understanding how to use technology, older people can benefit from the knowledge that younger generations have.

Once older people become “technologically literate”, they can still benefit from younger generations by learning the applications of this technology. For example, older people can adopt the practice of almost all teens today: the use of social media. Social media allows you to participate in communities and/or networks that at one time you could not have possibly had access to. It brings the world closer to you. Adopting this practice, for example, can act as a solution to an enormous problem among seniors –loneliness. The recent (and by recent, I mean around the last decade) boom in technology has given us endless ways to keep in contact with our friends, family, or to meet people we have never met before, and this can massively help the elderly overcome social isolation, if the problem may arise. Technology acts as a gateway to a new world, and older people’s unfamiliarity with it makes it something they can learn from our generation to change that.