When we're young, most of us can learn to spin plates and keep them spinning easily. Some are great plate spinners. Some are not, as reflected in... well, every single thing in life from exams to football to inventing covid-19 vaccines. When we're old though, the sticks holding the plates are fragile, the plates are cracked from being dropped so many times over your lifetime, and there are a lot more fragile plates to keep track of. Some have to fall and are gone for good, and you become scared of adding more for fear of losing what you have going already.
There are older folk who excel at life right up to the end. There are folk who die at 20 because something in their physiology self-destructs. Most of us are in the middle somewhere. My father, 83 now and slipping towards dementia, never got beyond basic TV operation. My mother, now entering the terminal phase of dementia at 81, did learn to turn on the PC I set her up with in the early 2000s, and even sent me an email once. But compared to just picking up the phone and speaking to me it seemed pointless to her (maybe she was right, given how messed up social media is making the world), and as TVs got more complicated I had to buy her the same TV I had to make support easier. Eyesight fades, tiny buttons get more confusing, combinations of presses to get certain operations become a maze. Tech life is a moving target, and chasing it can be hard at the best of times.
Anyway, there are getting on for a
million older people living with dementia, at all stages, in this country now. And dementia starts way before it's noticeable, putting you in that million. Bits of brain clog up or die randomly, complicating the brain's workings a tiny bit at a time as we get into middle age and beyond. And one day, as we find better ways of tackling cancer, even more of us will get the opportunity to wake up one morning and not remember how to use a light switch, let alone conjure up a password for your online bank.
So next time you're reaching for the "they don't want to learn" response, just take a moment to consider that while this will be true for some, it will definitely not be true for all. And one day it may not be true for you. So take a deep, tech support breath, and try to find the joy in being needed. It's what humans do for each other and it's what built civilisation.
Well, that got heavy. Never was a party animal on New Year's Eve though.
Fortunately, few people read beyond the first sentence of most posts, so I'll just wish the handful who made it this far a Happy New family tech support Year. Just don't ask me what year it is, ok. They're starting to go by faster than I can count.
Now, why did I come into this thread? I'll just go back to the other one and see if it jogs my memory...
