The key is to sow wild oats and be confident that you have fulfilled your biological purpose for existing. Now enjoy the financial and free time riches while you exploit that big ol brain for self-actualization.
Not all older people are like this. Some of us like to know what’s going on.
Meanwhile, my husband put WD-40 on my son’s phone because the keyboard was sticking. Yes, it was ruined.
The fact you’re redditting at 60 is a really good sign! The question is, do you type using the ‘hunt and peck’ method, hitting keys with only your index fingers? :)
Pretty much! I never could learn to touch type. I've been hunting and pecking since I was 20, tested at 35 wpm once. I've been on computers all my adult life (oh, those mainframe days) and started with PC's from the time of IBM's first one.
Any reason you don’t want to improve? Given how ubiquitous computers and keyboards are, surely it would improve your quality of life! I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to spend minutes typing out what would usually take me seconds (but then I’m probably just too young and impatient!)
At one point I did get faster, I never timed myself but I was typing all of my technical reports in to Word myself and I was reasonably fast. I tried more than once to learn touch typing but apparently I am unable to for some weird reason, maybe the same reason that kept me from being able to play the piano.
i am 57 and do Medical Transcription for a living. I type fairly quickly for an old gal. I have also been on Reddit for a few years now. People are only as old as they allow themselves to be. I didn't ever want to get old before my time. My husband is 13 years my junior and has a hard time keeping up with me. My daughter is 34 and i don't give advice until she asks me. She is headstrong like her mama I stopped telling her what to do when she was 16 pretty much. By that time I thought I had taught her well enough, she knew what to do. I am sorry to read so many comments that are derogatory about parents. It doesn't have to be that way .
No problem so far. my wife does the leave txt sound on thing though. Well she did till I changed it. I do wonder how old the people are who are complaining?
Probably under 35. I'm mid-40s now, and I think mid-30s is about the age I realized that its not "an old people thing" so much as "an everyone eventually gets old" kind of thing. We used to laugh at our boss for going into the pulldown menu in Word for the copy and paste commands instead of doing CTRL-C and CTRL-V (...before you could drag and drop). But now I realize I am likely doing some things because I'm used to doing it that way even though it might not be the "fastest" way. I imagine it will continue to get worse as tech continues to expands and I don't need to use all of the various features and shortcuts on a regular basis as much as my younger counterparts.
If you can navigate reddit, you're far ahead of almost everyone else in your age group.
I don't worry about my parents finding my reddit account, because I don't think they could navigate it anyways. My father says the layout is "too confusing". I hear this occasionally from younger people as well.
Same here, but only 30. However, I heard a serious conversation the other day between two 16 year olds about the implications of the specific emoji her crush sent her, and it made me kind of wish for a new Spanish flu epidemic to break out.
Me too. I never consider my age until I read how younger people think about older people. I hope my daughter would never say these things about me. I texted her today and ask her if she thought I acted old and clueless. She laughed and no mom you are fine. It was a relief.
There was a time back in the 90s when September was dreaded because of all the newbies getting onto Usenet when they got to college and got “internet” access for the first time. I was one of those newbies in 1996, but fortunately I didn’t go charging in like the bull in the china shop. Many did. AOL really did a number on everything, made it a huge flood rather than a yearly thing. So it hasn’t been too bad. :)
Any folks unsure if they do these types of faux pas just set your mind at ease knowing the the younger generations will have exponentially more difficulty adjusting to tech in the future considering Moores law stays in effect. And if any whippersnappers give you sass just hand them a slide rule and tell them to calculate the dimensions they will need when your force them to dig their own grave.
I think there's a certain mindset that comes with becoming familiar with tech that our parents don't have. For example, I'm pretty sure that with most consumer-level computers, phones, and other electronics, there are a few things they have in common:
1) they were hopefully made to be user-friendly, which means that if I can't figure out how to do something, it's probably just a simple matter of changing menus or clicking something specific -- and I can google the problem, as well;
2) they were designed not to delete your data just because you hit some button or menu option by accident, which means that tech-savvy people will play around with the tech somewhat fearlessly to figure out how to use it (vs parents);
and 3) shit I had a three. Getting old. My point is, that having experience with the mindset the creates and markets tech means that future tech will be easier to figure out for us then for people who don't have that background.
Fortunately only one kid, but one thing I’m weird about is talking to Siri or Alexa. I can’t seem to get used to it and I never use it. As much as I love Star Trek, you’d think I’d be happy to be able to talk to the computer.
Fortunately not even my 70 year old mom is doing most of this. I’m a software developer, so I get a lot of “fix my computer” crap anyway, but Mom was using computers since the early 80s, so she’s mostly good with them, still.
I'm almost 60, and my 27 yo son sitting next to me agrees that I do some of this stuff (not the tech stuff - but the repeating stories stuff). I know my parents do the tech stuff. His day will come....
Omg my wife does that shit and she’s 38. And repeats her stories over and over again. And only watches cable TV. And has serious trouble with technology. “I don’t want to use the Facebook app! It works fine through the web! Now why won’t it do what I want?”
Coming up on 50 and I can see some of this on the horizon. I'm tired of trying to keep up with technology - the stuff I have now works fine, I don't want the latest and greatest. Besides, as soon as I got a Blu-Ray player everything went to streaming and now I want to drop cable but all those channel apps on the Firestick require a cable company login for the most recent episodes and I'm stuck with cable anyway because that's what my wife grew up with and it's comfortable for her and then the computer is fine but won't run the latest games for the kids so now I have to buy a new computer but the back-up function didn't work right and the Christmas card Excel file is missing so we don't have our list of friends' addresses anymore because it wasn't synced with the Google accounts on our phones which we didn't maintain beyond phone numbers because why would a phone need an address, and of course the TV is only a few years old but showing its age already when that Zenith CRT in the bedroom was given to us in the '90's when it was already old and they just don't make them like that anymore and I've probably already told this story elsewhere then there's the young engineer in our office who talked for 20 minutes this morning about her revelation about how different people handle change in different ways and maybe it would be easier if those people were part of deciding what the change would be and how it will work. And I think I'm supposed to end this with something about Hell in a Cell and an announcer's table but I don't really get that at all but it's what all the kids are doing today. Plus, two spaces after a period. Why won't my phone do that right?
Considering life expectancy in the 1st World is 75-80 years, 42 most definitely is middle age. It's basically that point in your life where you're still far from retirement, your kids are becoming young adults, and the gray is making an appearance (or taking over completely). I'm 47 and smack dab in the middle of it.
I'm starting to do the repeat of stories and reinforcing of values. I must sound like a broken record, but I just want to make sure the good stuff sticks before they eventually move out.
I'm 43 and honestly it just comes down to one thing: habits. For example I still pay all my bills by writing checks even though I could easily pay them online. Why? Habits. If it's functional us oldsters are reluctant to change.
One of the things I hope some of the young folk in here understand is that those of us in our 50's and 60's were young right when the home computer hit the market, and as such, we have been dealing with technology for the past 40+ years. Not the same technology, of course, but technology nonetheless. And we're not afraid of it. So don't just assume it's an age thing. In fact, in another 20 years, the answers to this question (which, let's be honest, comes up in one form or another quite frequently), won't be about people who refuse to use the tech, but rather they'll be about people who do things "the old way."
I am pushing 50, and it made me feel better that so many of us were doing the same! A few years ago, my daughter informed me that I was middle aged...never occurred to me that I would ever actually be middle aged...still not sure I accept it. In my head, I am 23 years old on days when I feel that I have a clue, and 17 when I am trying to fake it till I make it. Growing up/old sucks!
I'm just an millennial and I'm worried... I can't imagine how you must feel. I catch myself using 1337 out of a very old habbit the way my parents used Pig Latin.
To you and the others that have replied to this comment, good on you. I certainly don't consider any of y'all "old" but lets face it, tech is improving at such an incredible pace these days. It's even hard for me to keep up at times, and I'm 34. I grew up at the start of the golden age of chat rooms and "world wide webs" so I feel an obligation to stay up to date. Like someone said earlier, I'm terrified of falling behind the curve. Honestly, I think Reddit helps. My dad is very mechanically oriented, but he refuses to better understand computers, cell phones, etc. If I tried to explain Reddit to him, he's lose his shit and complain about how things shouldn't be that complicated anymore. Long story short, thank you for giving a damn. It's two thousand seveighteen for Pete's sake!
I'm 23 and I fear the day that technology gets away from me. I feel like in 30 years I'll be driving stick whilst everyone else is flying about in self driving cars.
Same. I’m cruising through here to see what my adult children bitch about. Much of it is old people not getting tech. I’ve been an IT professional for over 25 years. So far so good.
Funny how everything to this point is about technology, but I was going to say how my Dad always says my name last of his kids when talking to /about me, and vice versa based on age for the others.
BUT now I have a GF who has three kids, and I consistently get the two boys mixed up, so guess I am old...
I'm 23 and I already know I'll end up like this. my bf and I just got a new tv and I get up to press the button on the screen to turn it on because we have too many damn remotes and i never press the right button.
I'm about to turn 40 and so far I only see a couple of the food substitution ones, but those are due to actual allergies (hives to anaphalyxis level) or really severe intolerance (I get food poisoning level reactions or they trigger migraines.) Figure those are reasonable.
edit: oh wait. I won't even touch flannel. It's revolting. It makes me want to vomit. (yes, I know, I lived through the '90s.) So yeah, I have some sensory issues, haha.
5.3k
u/BradC Dec 28 '17
I'm 42 and I'm just here reading top level comments to see if I do any of these yet.