system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Being old is not an excuse to not use technology

I work in law, and I am 29 years old.  Very often over my career I've heard that "older" people can't be expected to know how to use Microsoft Word, email, Google, or other websites or technology.  I find this to be a pretty poor excuse.  Frankly I think it is mostly laziness and entitlement that causes this demographic to avoid use of these technologies.

Let's say that an employee is 60 years old, and started working in an office setting at the age of 25.  That is **35 years** of experience in office settings and, to my mind, 35 years of experience with the exact technologies that these people complain about.

Google debuted in 1998, **24 years ago**.

Lotus Notes email software came out in 1989, **33 years ago**.

Microsoft Word was introduced in 1983, **39 years ago**.

These employees have literally had 2-3 decades to get used to this technology and yet they act as though they came up in an era when all you could do was write with a quill and ink by candlelight.

"But just because a technology *debuted* decades ago doesn't mean everyone immediately learned how to use it.  Adaptation takes time."  Correct, and it's been decades of time for that to happen.

"Even if someone knew how to use Word in the 80's or 90's, there's been a lot of updates to the technology since then."  In my experience as someone who started using Word at the age of 7 or 8, no update has been so huge that it completely changed how to use it.  It takes a few days to get used to and is doable by any reasonably intelligent person.

"People late in their careers don't want to bother with sending emails and writing documents, that's grunt work for newbies and assistants."  Sure, and for this reason I'm always happy to help.  I honestly find it much more respectable to be told, "I don't have time to write this email, you do it for me," then "I just don't know how to use email cause I'm too old."  EDIT: Getting a lot of arguments to the effect of this but saying that this sort of thing is my job as an assistant, not the senior's job.  My point here is that a) idk what age has to do with it, you can just tell me what you need done and I'll handle, but perhaps more importantly b) sometimes (not always but sometimes) the high-billing, no free time, VIP lawyer folks would save loads of time by knowing how to do certain things than spending the time to tell me what they need, check it over, ask questions, and then finally have it be done.  It is not more efficient to ask me \*every time\* you need to make text bold, for example.

"This is a strawman argument, everyone knows that older people love technology and use it all the time."  Ok.

EDIT: Your hypothetical white-collar exec who grew up in a coal mine and never saw a computer until the age of 50, who never learned to read, and who has relied on secretaries to feed him prime rib by hand ever since he started as a junior in the field yesterday, does not apply to this topic. 

EDIT #2: seeing a lot of the same answers which I address in the main post, so I’m going to stop replying at this point unless your comment is especially smart or especially dumb.

EDIT #3: at this point all the new comments are from people clearly not reading the post so I will only be responding to intelligent comments (not that this edit will be read).
gpt
Do you know what the Google, Microsoft Word or E-Mail of your particular generation will be?

Is it already there? 

There is a lot of stuff out there you might know about or you haven't bothered to try to understand yet. You might find parts of it dumb, useless, or you expect them to fade away quickly so you don't use it. Maybe Discord. Tiktok. NFTs. Or generative neural networks. Maybe these, yeah. They have huge potential and might be a thing people are going to use on a daily basis, and they might be able to do many things we can't even think of right now. 

Meanwhile the stuff you know continues to be used, by people who are like you. Why change? Why implementing a whole new thing when you are busy maintaining what is already there? You have *just finished* writing tutorials and documentation for the system you got 5 years ago, why change again now?

At some point something will leave you behind and you will have a hard time catching up. And a hard time to see the point in catching up, too. Or maybe you will, but others might not, and then we hear a new generation complain how the old people "fail to use X even though X started to exist in the 20ies already!"