I disagree. I don’t think it’s age specifically, but rather your date of birth if that makes sense. It’s not that once you reach a certain age you are incapable of understanding something new. Millennials are good with technology because we grew up in a time where the internet was blooming and it made sense to adopt it into our lives. A lot of what we learned with regards to how the world works was through technology. Boomers already had a life that worked fine before the internet and had good reason to reject it. Now that technology is at the heart of everything they are decades behind millennials in their learning curve.

Obviously there are boomers who are tech wizards (and many whom we owe for how technology has shaped us for good or for bad) and there are millennials who suck at it. But to deny that there is no trend is ignorant.

I will admit to that. I have to call someone for anything more complicated than smacking it with a hammer or re tightening a screw.

Although at least I know if I wanted to, I could learn. Some older people will ask you for help doing the exact same thing, even without a difference in context or method, over and over again, like they’re incapable of learning. And I get that certain concepts are harder to grock as a whole, but they had to repeatedly ask how to save anything, when back then it was always just clicking a save icon, real simple.

Now if they were saving a new file I can understand the confusion over having to name the file and understanding where it’s placed. That’s a separate skill to learn. And even then they’ll learn how to make it do what they want, but then be totally clueless when doing anything different. Like they might understand that working on a different document, that might be in a totally different location, I can understand confusion at first as they get used to the difference and how to fully grasp that concept.

But after telling them how to find these locations, how to make the files, and how to read a file path and how to navigate them, you expect them to use that knowledge to fend for themselves while doing that specific task, at least. But they’re not learning how to place that file or move through the file system. They’re learning they need to go up a folder level to get to that file, or when they get to this folder the thing they want is the 3rd row down that starts with S.

They blindly learn the exact clicks they need to get what they want, but not understand why they need to do it that way.

Sorry that turned into a bit of a rant, but my point is, I can be taught how to do a household task, and the physical reasons why it works that way. They can be taught, but they seem to have a really hard time actually learning.

But there’s a motivation difference. The boomers want to know how to get a thing done. We want to learn how to do the thing that gets the job done. So they want to get a certain task done, they will just memorize click A, click B, type in C, and D gets done. Where we will learn why A does what it does and how it affects the rest of the process, and the same about B, eventually learning enough so that if there is an update that changes it up a little, we can still get it done.

Meanwhile if so much as a button changes color, they lose it, and have to ask for help.

Meanwhile since physics isn’t changing, there won’t be an update. Hammering a nail won’t change. The hammer may get a better design, but you’ll still smash it into the nail to get something to hold together.

But we learn that and factor it in early, and we know going forward that some things can always change a little. They’re used to things that can’t change. So our learning process got that much better, and the same will be true in the future.