Today, in the era of Alexa and Google Home, when everything is automated be it drinking water from an RO to sleeping on an extra comfy bed specially designed for you, everyone wants to have a life of ease where their efforts are reduced by machines and technology.
There are different approaches in the application of these technologies, let’s take an example of a Smartphone operated by you and your parents- you might use the smartphone as a medium of your communication, finding jobs on LinkedIn, going out on dates with the help of Tinder, maybe some of you are writing with the help of Grammarly on your phone and some are creating videos on youtube and Instagram.
But your parents may be finding it hard to use Whatsapp and saving a new contact on their smartphone, the reason is the “Generation gap”. Now the question arises, How could the generation gap stop someone or be an obstacle? Habits are the answer; our parents are habitual with keypad phones and we’re habitual with smartphones.
Let me tell you a story, A few days back when I was roaming in my father’s office, a client came and as after having a discussion he was leaving he asked me to save my father’s number on his NOKIA Keypad phone so he can contact him later, I nodded and took his phone, I tried my best but could not get it in 5 minutes, so my father took the phone from me and he did it in a single minute.
Why I was not able to pull it off and it was such an easy task? I knew it as I was using the smartphone for the last 5 years and I couldn’t even remember where were the letters in that keypad phone and my father on the other hand uses keypad phone so he did it with ease.
The generation gap is nothing but a different perspective of things, Maybe you’re a fan of Diljit or Karan Aujla but your father likes listening to Mohammad Rafi and Kishore Kumar. But when we talk about the generation gap, today it’s wider than ever and the reason is ‘technology’.
I am not the person who disguise the uses and benefits of technology but when we sit in our drawing room with our family and especially in India, We still notice that our parents and grandparents are having major difficulties in operating their Smartphones and they try it very hard (maybe more than we ever could).
I am talking about our parents, now let’s talk about how many of us know how to install new software on our laptops and computers. We all are technology-friendly only when we can understand it.
What we need to do is reduce this gap so we can connect more with our elders, we can guide them on how to use a smartphone and how to play their favourite music on youtube, and how to write a mail on a laptop.
This will help us and our next generation to learn that it’s a natural phenomenon and today you’re considering yourself smarter than your parents, tomorrow your children would think the same. Never demotivate anyone who’s older than you and he’s trying hard to learn something new, remember the days when you started riding the bicycle and your father patiently hold your seat until he was confident that you learned how to ride.
Learning should never stop and as an elder, you need to understand that, if you won’t try you cannot learn it, and if you think about the people you can never learn. People laugh at you because they follow sheep mentality and they haven’t seen anyone like you do anything that you’re trying, everything has a first of its kind. Sachin never thought 100 hundred would be impossible at his age, he tried and played his best at his age when most of the players would retire and he achieved the milestone no one ever could.
We as youth and as elders have to understand that one has the experience and the other one has determination, eagerness to win, both are equally important for the growth of the society.
Time flows like water, learn to swim with it.