I am sixty plus but my phone thinks otherwise

By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

At 60 plus, I do not feel old. I walk every morning. I crack the same jokes I have always cracked. I even know what a meme is, within limits. But my phone, that sleek and quietly superior rectangle I bought last month, appears to have formed a different opinion of me.

I bought a new smartphone not because I wanted one but because my old phone finally gave up. It had tolerated years of gentle neglect; forgotten passwords, ignored software updates and a charging cable that worked only when held at a precise angle I had discovered by accident and could never fully replicate. The new phone looked harmless enough. Smooth, shiny and apparently smarter than anyone I know. I thought, how hard can it be.

Those are my famous last words on this subject.

The setup process began with a request for my Apple ID. Then my Google login. Then a two-factor authentication code sent to an email account I had apparently created in 2011 and not opened since. Every screen introduced a new term: widgets, biometrics, sync, cloud. The cloud, I have since learned, is where my photographs now reside, floating somewhere in a digital sky to which I have no reliable access.

After 45 minutes of tapping, swiping and conducting a quiet conversation with the phone that it was not designed to hear, I called my son. He walked over. Tapped the screen three times. Said, done. No manual. No tutorial. No visible distress. He then showed me Face ID, which means the phone now looks at my face every morning and confirms, with what I can only interpret as mild resignation, that it is me again.

I have since become that person. The one who begins every sentence with, can you help me with this app. My son is now my unpaid, increasingly patient, occasionally sighing technical support. Each time I ask for help, he responds with the calm of a man who has answered this question before and fully expects to answer it again. You just swipe up and hold, he says.

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I swipe. I hold. I arrive at a screen showing the weather in a city I have never visited and an alert informing me that my storage is 98% full. I hand the phone back. He fixes it in two seconds and walks away. No explanation. No debrief. The quiet confidence of someone who finds none of this interesting.

I am not alone in this. My friend Ravi still uses a Nokia from 2009. It makes calls and does not have opinions, he says and I understand exactly what he means. He treats modern smartphones the way one might treat an uninvited guest who has taken over the living room and rearranged the furniture. Then there is Anjali, who bought a tablet and uses it exclusively to play Solitaire. The icons keep moving, she once told me. It is like they are trying to escape. She is not wrong.

Many of us suffer in silence. In meetings, when someone says just share it in the drive or toggle it in the settings, we nod with quiet authority and Google the words later, alone. We are not lost. We are operating in a second language that no one formally taught us and we are doing our best.

There is something genuinely humbling about being declared technologically obsolete while feeling otherwise perfectly functional. It is not that we cannot learn. It is that no one prepared us for the pace. One day we were mastering email. The next, someone asked us to log in to the refrigerator.

Technology keeps describing itself as intuitive. I would like to know for whom. The other day I tried to set a timer and added a dental appointment to my calendar instead. I now have a reminder next Thursday for a cleaning I did not schedule. The gadgets have a tone I find difficult to warm to. Are you sure you want to delete this? Yes. Item permanently deleted. Wait. Undo? Too late. The interaction has the quality of a bureaucratic counter where the person on the other side is perfectly polite and entirely unmoved.