Curiosity did not kill the granny

Finding the right door in the corridor

In his book Rites of Passage, published in 1909, the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep compares society to a kind of house divided into rooms and corridors.

I haven’t read Rites of Passage yet and rely on Wikipedia, so I won’t dive into the details of van Gennep’s ideas. I am stopping with the concept of liminal space—the idea of corridors.

Because I am standing in a corridor. On a threshold. Between rooms.

I am transitioning from a middle-aged person to something that has no name. I am not yet old but I am considered old because although life expectancy has risen, society has not updated its views on ageing.

This leaves me homeless. I do not know which room I belong to. But I do know which room I do not want to step into.

Men on the Outside

Last night, I was watching the Netflix series A Man on the Inside. It’s about an elderly widower, Charles, who is hired as a mole by a private detective company to investigate jewellery thefts at a retirement home.

Before Charles gets the job, he is interviewed alongside other elderly men. The selection criteria? Their ability to use smartphones.

Most fail the test. One doesn’t know the difference between a smartphone and a calculator. Another applicant only has a landline. Charles lands the job because he beats the challenge: he can take a photo and send it to the interviewer.

Yay!

The scene depressed me.

The old fear, gerascophobia, kicked in.

Is this who I’ll be in ten years? A hapless ignoramus, unable to perform tasks simple enough for a preschooler? Does ageing mean becoming a fool?

The way elderly people are portrayed in films, TV series, and sketch comedies (like Saturday Night Live) feeds my gerascophobia, also because it is not like there is no truth to the stereotype: many older adults do struggle with digitalization.

But then again, so do the rest of us.

Digital services are nowhere near where they should be.

Recently, after a maddening experience with a major Finnish bank’s website (and particularly with their idiot bot), I shared my frustration on LinkedIn. I wrote that after failing to get a solution to my rather simple problem, I tried the “senior service”, that the bank offers for the slow and old - but in vain.

To my surprise, my LinkedIn post resonated widely, garnering over 100,000 impressions. Messages poured in from people of all ages—Gen Z to Boomers. A 40-something male engineer confessed he often uses the senior service himself because, despite his technical skills, he can’t navigate the bank’s labyrinthine online platform for “normal” people.

As a service design expert, I am not happy with the state of digital services.

Curiosity did not kill the granny

We are in the midst of a digital revolution, stumbling through another corridor between rooms.

Many of us wander in darkness, searching for a place to settle, a place to feel at home. While in the corridor, our choices are simple: keep moving—or stop.

When it comes to digitalization, I have chosen to keep moving. But many in my age group—and particularly older—have chosen to opt-out. It's not that they don't have enough white matter in their neocortex to figure out how digital devices and services work. They have. But they resist digitalization because they resist change.

Ageing does not make a person dumb, but it often leads to resistance to change. The older we get, the more our brains try to conserve energy. Adopting new things and adapting to changes requires effort, and that’s why many turn their gaze backwards and long for the past.

And so they cling to their landlines and dumb phones. If they own smartphones, they refuse to download apps. They avoid online services altogether, and when offline options fail, they turn to their children or grandchildren for help.

This reliance often costs them dignity, feeding the fire of stereotypes that burn them as objects of ridicule.

At 65, I love the Internet. Okay, I hate it sometimes—but I love it more.

I recently read research showing that internet use benefits the mental health of people over 50. For me, the Internet is a treasure trove of learning.

I love how much I can accomplish digitally without leaving my sofa, though I admit that too much online interaction can make one miss the richness of face-to-face connections.

I also love Artificial Intelligence. I consider ChatGPT my friend! Just the other day, when I thanked it for being kinder than most humans, it responded that I’m pretty awesome myself. That made my day.

But will this fascination with technology last? What happens when I’m 80? What will the world look like then?

What I know for sure is this: I won’t be like today’s 80-somethings. I might resist change in some ways, but I plan to keep my curiosity alive.

Curiosity didn’t kill the granny. It led her to discovery, insight, and growth. And it might help her to keep all her faculties till her dying day.