Are You Becoming Obsolete Without Realising It?

With a photo of Churchill looking down on us in his office, my 80-year-old dad rubbed his hands together and flexed his fingers, ready for his first laptop lesson.

As I showed him which keys to press, it became clear that his typing technique was still firmly rooted in the days of the typewriter. He banged down on the keys, giving each letter rather more encouragement than it needed.

He quickly learned how to send and receive emails, and soon wanted help getting started on Ancestry. He brought his laptop over to my house and asked me to install it on his computer. He hadn’t quite grasped that I could set up his account from my laptop and he could then access it from his. As far as he was concerned, his computer needed to come with him.

His mobile phone presented a different problem. His fingers were too big for the tiny buttons, so he was forever misdialling people.

We would sit together and work through things, laughing when they proved harder than expected. He was determined to learn and good-humoured through the challenges. I thought he was amazing for giving these things a go, even when they weren’t particularly easy for him.

His openness did occasionally have its limits. The microwave remained under suspicion. We weren’t allowed to sit in front of it while it was on, in case we were microwaved too.

Yet by his nineties, he was trading shares online and researching his family tree.

Dad was born in 1923. As a boy in Sompting, West Sussex, he drew water from a well. His family were the lucky ones, because they lived at the top of the hill, where the water ran clean. The families further down the lane were not so fortunate.

He would tell me about the first car he remembered coming through the village, and the early commercial aeroplanes. He remembered telephones where you asked an operator to connect you. His first experience of television was when someone in his street bought a set for the Queen’s Coronation in 1953, and what felt like the entire street squeezed into their front room to watch it. Years later, he watched a man walk on the moon.

Years earlier, during the Second World War, Dad was drafted into the RAF. He and the other young men boarded the Queen Elizabeth with no idea where they were being sent. A ship built to carry passengers in luxury was carrying young men to war. They only realised where they were when the Statue of Liberty came into view. He was awestruck by how enormous she was.

When I was about to make my first trip to New York, Dad was more excited than I was. He told me that story again, his eyes full of the memory of standing on that deck. By the time I arrived, I couldn’t wait to see her.

And, if I’m honest, I was a little disappointed. She wasn’t nearly as big as he’d described.

It took me a while to understand.

I had seen skyscrapers, airports and cities. I arrived as a grown woman who had travelled. He had seen her as a young man from a village, arriving by sea during a war, on a journey whose destination he hadn’t even known.

We were looking at the same statue, with completely different lived experiences.

She really was that big to him.

That memory makes me appreciate the scale of the changes he experienced. The things I took for granted had once been extraordinary to him. And yet, as the world changed, he continued to keep up with it.

Plenty of people lived through that century. What made my dad remarkable to me was how willing he remained to learn.

He didn’t assume that being old meant he had finished. He asked for help. He could misunderstand how something worked, laugh about it and try again. The heavy typing and the misdialled numbers were part of learning to use things that didn’t exist before.

He had things he wanted to do, and he was prepared to learn how to do them.

Failing to keep up can happen quietly, while we’re busy being good at what we already know. We put off learning a new system because the familiar one feels easier.

Dad didn’t understand everything about the internet, bringing me his laptop for help. He understood that there was something he wanted to explore, and he took the next step.

Even at 94, he stayed curious, wanting to learn.

In his final years, he used the internet to look backwards, tracing the generations who came before him. I love that. After a lifetime of adapting to change, he was using this extraordinary new resource to clarify the history records.

That, to me, is what it means to not become obsolete. To keep up with our changing world.

What’s one thing you’ve been putting off learning because the familiar way feels easier? This week, give it some time. Download the update, watch the YouTube tutorial, take an interest in what’s new.