The Curse of Staying Relevant: A Cautionary Tale

The moment you get gray hair, society expects you to lose your mind—or at least forget your iCloud password. There’s a familiar script for getting older: stare at a smartphone like it might explode, complain that the radio is just “loud noise,” and settle into a cozy fog of nostalgia.

I, in my infinite wisdom, refused to follow the script.

Over a long, career, I’ve spent real, non-refundable hours learning to use modern technology without calling a grand-nephew for help. I listen to new music. I follow the trends. I have accounts on digital platforms whose names sound like digestive problems.

And what do I get for all that effort? Complete alienation from every generation.

Being older and up to date leaves you stuck between two cultural battlefields:

Exhibit A: My Peers, the Living Fossils

My generation has developed a serious case of “paradigm lock.” They’ve climbed into cultural coffins and pulled the lids shut.

Take music. Imagine being twenty-two, looking at the charts, and thinking: “That’s it. Music has peaked. For the next forty or fifty years, I’ll listen only to the songs playing when I was awkwardly making out in the back of a VW Beetle.”

It’s a strange kind of mental freeze, but plenty of people do it. To my peers, my refusal to live on an endless diet of 1980s music looks like a betrayal of the tribe.

Exhibit B: The Youthful Gatekeepers

Then I step into the wilds of the internet, where young people don’t applaud me for keeping up. They look at me like an uncontacted Amazonian tribe might look at a tourist with a GoPro: confused, wary, and unsure what to do next.

For Gen Z and whatever alphabet soup comes after them, knowledge has an age limit. If I mention a current trend or understand some internet slang, I’m not a cool ally. I’m an anomaly. A glitch in the matrix. Their faces say, “Grandpa, why are you colonising our algorithm? Go back to Facebook.”

The Verdict

So here I am: I feel too modern for the retirement community, and far too old to make my own TikTok. It’s a funny little trap. I spent a lifetime trying not to become obsolete, only to discover that people think being obsolete is what makes someone my age socially acceptable.

But I’m not changing my playlist. If I have to choose between being the social weirdo who knows what “Sigma” means and the guy crying into his steering wheel because they don’t play Phil Collins on the radio anymore, I’ll take weirdness every time.