I remember my grandparents making this exact same complaint: All of the new technologies during their younger years were amazing and improved the world. All of the technologies that came along in their later years were only complicating life after they had settled into comfortable routines.

In my hobbies and other real world activities I cross paths with people in their 20s a lot. It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future, contrasted with all the cynicism you get when you spend time in places with a lot of jaded adults who wish the world would stop changing.

I think it’s natural to wish that technology would pause right at the point in your life and career where you’ve got it all figured out and lose your appetite for new things. It feels good to be on top of it all and feel like your knowledge, routines, and career skills are never going to go out of style. It feels uncomfortable when the world continues to change after you’ve settled into something familiar and routine.

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coldbrewed 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The difference is that their TV wasn't spying them but our TVs definitely are (aka ACR).

	▲	Aurornis 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They all had stories of friends, family members, and siblings who died at young ages from conditions that are treatable with modern technology. My grandfathers both benefited greatly from new technology of their times like hearing aids and various cardiac interventions. I don’t like a TV reporting analytics either, but if we’re looking at technological advancements as a whole that seems like small potatoes.
	▲	ThrowawayTestr 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		My TV isn't connected to the Internet

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orionsbelt 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

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qsera 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Does not check out. One of the things I was highly excited about was RF communication. It still is. Another thing was LASERs and it still is.

Computers also was one of them. But modern media boxes are not exciting. Microcontrollers though, are still exciting.

	▲	JKCalhoun 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, TV was around long before I was born. It sucks, always has.

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21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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mrdependable 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Were they wrong?

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nerevarthelame 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When I was a kid in the 90s, my grandparents never wanted to get cable television, despite watching a lot of local broadcasts. Their children (and grandchildren) thought they would truly enjoy it: more live sports, history documentaries, and so on. They thought it would be low quality trash.

As a birthday gift, my mother tried to give them a lifetime cable subscription so they could see what they were missing. When the technician from the cable company showed up at their door, my grandmother stared at him through a slit in the blinds and refused to let him in or otherwise acknowledge him. I pitied them, and we joked behind their backs about how stuck in their ways they were. (Writing this as an adult, I can't imagine why my mom would insist on trying to give them a gift that they had overtly rejected.)

Years later, my grandparents gave in to cable. We were right: they did enjoy watching more Big 12 football. But they also enjoyed watching endless hours of Fox News. They became increasingly isolated, paranoid, and overtly racist. I won't blame 100% of this change on Fox News, but their transition toward hate absolutely poisoned their relationships with most of the family. I don't think that's exactly what my grandmother expected when she refused the cable man on her birthday, but she was still right.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their cutoff point for where technology stopped being good and exciting was prior to when this author thought technology was fun and exciting.

It’s a personal feeling. Once you get comfortable with the way the world is, you start wishing it would stop changing.

	▲	mrdependable 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Perhaps people that are older have seen that sometimes new technology is not all benefit. You are trading something. Once you are old enough, and have seen it happen enough times, you start considering all the good and exciting things that have been traded away over the years.
	▲	sickophancy 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It goes beyond that: what we call technology is inherently "abstraction of service", (ultimately all of which is related to boiling water for some reason???) and at a certain point too many layers of abstraction is more complicated than helpful in terms of reducing the amount of time spent interacting with the "work reduction layer". Your grandparents complaint is essentially that "github is good, but writing tests, and using CI/CD is too abstract and complicated". Which is fair, especially if you aren't talking about something for intelligent people in specific. Compare ordering milk with a milkman vs. the modern way. Previously the loop was 1. call milkman 2. get milk & pay for next milk now it can be a number of various paths (all of which are correct, confusingly!) to get milk delivered to one's door. Too much abstraction is no longer serving as a means of replacing work at this point, and managing the abstraction becomes a form of work. That's the real complaint. Happy 2 hear ur thoughts about this 1.

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glitchc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Short answer is yes. Most grandparents resisted computers, internet, cellphones or online banking until the network effect left them with little choice but to participate. You also see them glom onto popular platforms (Faceboook, WhatsApp) and not experiment much with alternatives (Discord, Snapchat). Driven by the same effect, they're only there because that's where their families and friends are.

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AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It may be based on your mental categories.

Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).

What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.

Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.

By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.

Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.

What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.

TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.