Technology is quickly becoming less and less about the underlying technologies and more about how the large corporations want you to use their product. I was briefly a volunteer website administrator for a small non-profit and despite having done freelance web development 15 years ago and knowing how to program HTML and several other web technologies, it was a struggle because they used Google on the backend and everything in Google was unintuitivly laid out and impossible to do without going through the Google interface. I often frustratingly joked that I was a Google administrator, not a web administrator.

Another example was some Linksys wireless mesh extenders I bought. The setup process involved using a privacy invasive app on your phone to connect with Bluetooth. It would try for 5 minutes and then just error with no error code. There is no manual setup process. There was no log file. When it didn’t work after 5 minutes of trying, it told you to call a phone number that was always busy and blocked the 5 minute connection process since it needs a phone to do both things. Eventually, after about 6 hours, it just randomly started working.

Combine that with people biologicaly becoming less able and willing to learn as they get older and it’s pretty likely that millennials will eventually get left behind even if they try to keep up to date.