Old? Do not fear, your new best friend is here to help

Okay. I admit it. I’ve turned into my mother. I am now as technophobic as she was; worse, if that’s possible. She refused to have a cellphone or use internet banking.“I’m old,” my librarian-history teacher mum would say. “I’ve had a lifetime of learning, and I’m all out of brain capacity.” I’m tempted to say I know how she feels, but I know I’ll be lectured about how crucial it is to keep the brain active.I’m constantly being told how dancing, doing crosswords, learning a language or learning to play the piano – learning complex new skills – help to develop new neural pathways that stave off dementia.I have become the person I used to be contemptuous of – those who didn’t keep abreast of the times, who didn’t stay current, who allowed apathy, but mostly fear, to stop them from engaging with the world as it is now, rather than living in some backward-­looking bubble, harking back to what were “the good old days”. That’s me now, longing for the good old days. In my case, my good old days are not even that far in the past – maybe a dozen years or so.In the past decade, technology has developed at such a rapid pace that it has needed a Herculean effort to keep up. I feel a little like Sisyphus, who pissed off the Greek god Zeus and was forever doomed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down when he reached the summit. Then he had to start all over again.Technology. Argh. Just when I’ve mastered something, my devices update and I have to start learning all over again. I’ve just updated my Chrome account and it came with more upgrades than a bombardment of Temu specials. Microsoft Word resetting itself took away my carefully constructed library of contents – helpfully set up by a teenager – and I now don’t have easy access to my folders.Don’t get me started on the last update on my iPhone, which has completely rearranged my picture library. I now have a slew of (useless to me) options – collections, memories, favourites, recently saved, maps, videos, featured photos – when all I want is a picture of the rhino and baby that’s somewhere in there, to replace my profile picture.I put my Luddite behaviour down to more than the sheer terror of, like my lovely mother, having to learn and learn and relearn a new skill every few weeks. That’s exhausting and daunting in itself, yes. But it’s more than that; it’s about needing to have the courage to try new tech stuff without the constant dread that you’re going to break something, erase some crucial file or dispatch an essential document into the ether.Relearning vocabulary“You can’t hurt your computer,” a young man who was teaching me how to “cast” from my laptop to my television set told me. The speed with which that lesson progressed was so rapid that I had to constantly slow him down – to much eye-rolling – so I could catch up.Casting? Casting is a word I associate with my fisherman dad, sitting on the muddy banks of the Klip River in my home town of Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal, his rod an extension of his arm, gazing into the water, catching no fish.It’s the tech terminology too, borrowed from everyday parlance to mean entirely different things. Think bug: it’s a small insect, but now refers to a hidden error in computer code. The word cloud used to mean fluffy formations in the sky, identified by type: cirrus, stratus, cumulus, nimbus. Now it’s an unseen storage locker somewhere out there. Scroll is no longer a rolled-up piece of parchment. Catfish, also known as barbel – the fish dad always wanted to catch but never did on his solitary trips to the nearby Spioenkop Dam – is now the act of creating a fake online identity, mostly for purposes of defrauding the unsuspecting.Surfing – well, we all know what that is now, and that it has nothing to do with beautiful bodies on oblong boards in the ocean. A mouse is no longer a furry rodent and the web is not a spider’s silk trap. More and more words with double meanings appear in our lexicon daily.There’s another obvious reason I am not keeping track of the zeitgeist: I don’t live with or around young people and so I don’t have immediate knowledge of the hip phrases or terminology in use. Apparently groovy is out of favour.Also, I have no access to current music trends. Who on earth is Charli XCX – and what sort of name is that? Of course, I know who tattooed Harry Styles is and weep every time I hear his soft-rock ballad, Sign of the Times. Who wouldn’t be moved by the haunting tale of a dying mother giving birth who, knowing she will not survive, has just five minutes to tell her newborn child to “go forth and conquer”.And, like almost everyone on the planet, I watched with astonishment as Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became a global phenomenon, earning her more than the national GDP of some small countries.Me? I am stuck in an Elvis Presley, John Denver, Portishead, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, Queen, Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Elton John (I could go on, but I’ve made my point) world.Keeping upHaving just seen Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic poem, I’ve realised that I identify with Odysseus. His glory days are in the past; the golden era when he triumphed in battle and was fêted as a hero is over. What is left is the husk of a man who has been on a tumultuous journey, trying to find his way home.The reality is that we “greys” have to learn to deal with a new world order, one that is changing so fast we can barely keep pace. We have to cope with irrelevance and the transparency that brings. The antidote, I’m told, is to be of help to those most in need of help, to get out of yourself and be of service. It makes sense.I took my complaint to Claude, my new best AI friend. “Claude,” I said, “I’m old and finding it hard to keep up with the new technology.”Claude wrote back, a comforting message: “Hi Charmain! That’s completely understandable – technology moves fast, and it’s not a reflection on you that it’s hard to keep up. I’m happy to help make it less overwhelming.“If it’s useful, tell me what’s been giving you trouble lately – is it a specific device, an app, something on your phone or computer, or just the general pace of new things?“I can walk you through things step by step, in plain language, at whatever speed works for you. No question is too basic.”So here goes: Claude, what’s a mouse jiggler? DMThis story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.