Everyone thinks boomers hate technology (and younger people, and maybe everything in general) but what they actually hate is feeling incompetent

My father-in-law is 68 years old.

He spent his career as an engineer, designing systems that keep buildings standing. Last week, I watched him stare at his iPhone for ten minutes, trying to figure out how to attach a photo to a text message.

When I offered to help, he snapped: "I'm not an idiot. I can figure it out." His hands were shaking.

That moment cracked something open for me about what's really happening when we talk about boomers and technology.

We've built this narrative that older generations hate tech, resist change, and refuse to adapt. But after watching Dan—and my own parents—I've realized we're getting the story wrong.

The real issue isn't the technology itself

Here's what nobody talks about: boomers grew up in a world where competence was visible and measurable. You could see a well-built cabinet, a balanced checkbook, a car engine you'd just fixed. Skills had clear steps, definable endpoints, and you could develop mastery through repetition.

Then suddenly, the rules changed.

Technology doesn't work like that. Interfaces change without warning. Updates break things that used to work. What was intuitive yesterday becomes obsolete tomorrow.

He told me later: "I spent forty years knowing exactly what I was doing. I could read blueprints, calculate load-bearing capacity in my head. Now I can't make my phone stop buzzing and I feel like an idiot."

That's not about hating technology. That's about the shame of suddenly feeling incompetent in a world that measures worth by how quickly you adapt to constant change.

The learning environment is hostile

Think about how boomers are expected to learn new technology.

There's rarely a manual. Instructions assume knowledge you don't have. Error messages are cryptic. And if you ask for help, you often get impatience or condescension.

My mother described trying to learn Zoom during the pandemic: "The tutorial video went too fast. When I paused it to write notes, I couldn't remember which button I'd pressed to pause. So I couldn't unpause it. I sat there feeling like the dumbest person alive."

She's not dumb. She's a retired accountant who managed complex financial systems for decades.

But she learned those systems in an environment where asking questions was normal, where training was thorough, where competence was built methodically. Digital technology assumes you'll just "figure it out" through trial and error.

For people who built their identity on expertise and reliability, that approach feels like being thrown into deep water when you never learned to swim.

The stakes feel impossibly high

Here's something younger people often miss: for boomers, technology isn't just about convenience. It's increasingly about survival in modern life.

Banking is online. Medical records are digital. Staying in touch with grandchildren requires apps. Job applications, government services, even parking meters—everything has moved to screens.

My father-in-law put it bluntly after that photo incident: "I feel like if I can't master this stuff, I'll be left behind. Irrelevant. Invisible."

Research shows that digital exclusion directly correlates with social isolation in older adults. When every family photo gets shared in a group chat you can't access, when plans get made in WhatsApp groups you don't know how to use, when everyone assumes you've seen the email sitting in your spam folder—you become peripheral to your own life.

So when a boomer gets frustrated with technology, they're not just annoyed with a device. They're wrestling with existential fears about their place in a world that's moving on without them.

The language around tech is inherently patronizing

Pay attention to how we talk about older people and technology.

We use terms like "digitally illiterate," which equates not knowing Instagram with not knowing how to read. We create "senior-friendly" apps with bigger buttons and simpler interfaces—which feels a lot like children's menus at restaurants. We praise boomers for "trying" to learn new things, as if basic competence deserves applause.

I watched my husband do this with Dan after the photo finally sent: "Good job, Dad! You got it!"

The look on his face. He didn't say anything, but I could see it—the humiliation of being praised like a child for something his son does a hundred times a day without thinking.

That dynamic—where younger people become the "experts" and older people become the "students"—inverts a lifetime of established competence. It's not the learning that's humiliating. It's the entire framework that treats technological knowledge as more valuable than the decades of other knowledge boomers possess.

What's really happening here

After watching my parents and in-laws navigate this, I've realized something. Boomers don't hate technology.

They hate feeling stupid. They hate being treated like children. They hate the assumption that their difficulty with devices means they're difficult people.

I've been reflecting on this lately, especially after reading Rudá Iandê's book Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life.

Rudá, who founded The Vessel, writes: "Frustration is the inevitable byproduct of our psychological complexity, the price we pay for the richness and depth of our inner worlds."

His insights helped me understand that boomer frustration isn't a character flaw—it's a human response to a system that demands constant adaptation while offering little support for the emotional cost.

We—millennials, Gen Z, whoever grew up with this—don't think about it because we've never known anything different.

But imagine if overnight, all the rules changed. If the skills you'd spent decades honing suddenly became obsolete, and you had to start over in a system designed by people half your age, using logic that feels fundamentally alien.

You'd probably seem pretty resistant to change too.

Final thoughts

The next time you see a boomer struggling with technology, try remembering this: they're not actually struggling with the device.

They're struggling with the feeling of incompetence in a world that never taught them this particular competence was coming. They're dealing with interfaces designed by people who never considered them in the design process. They're navigating a society that increasingly treats technological fluency as a prerequisite for basic dignity and inclusion.

And they're doing it while carrying the weight of a lifetime of expertise that suddenly feels worthless because it doesn't include knowing how to use TikTok.

That's not about hating technology. That's about grieving the loss of a world where your accumulated knowledge still mattered.