The Things Gen X Still Finds Surprisingly Difficult About Modern Life

Gen X has spent a lifetime adapting to change. We grew up with landlines, cassette tapes, paper maps, encyclopaedias and televisions that had to be switched on manually. We then watched computers arrive in the home, followed by the internet, mobile phones, social media, streaming services and a world where almost everything can be done from a device in your pocket.

You would think we would be completely comfortable with modern life by now. And, to be fair, we are pretty good at it. We can use online banking, book train tickets, order food, navigate using our phones and work out how to connect the television to the Wi-Fi. Most of the time.

But there are still some things about modern life that leave many Gen Xers quietly wondering whether things were actually easier before.

Remembering which password you used

Passwords were once relatively simple. You might have had one for your computer, perhaps another for your email and maybe one for an online shopping account.

Now everything seems to need a password, and every website has slightly different rules. It must contain a capital letter, a number, a symbol, something representing an ancient civilisation and possibly the name of your first pet. Then, just when you have finally remembered it, the website tells you that you need to change it because you have used it before.

The result is an increasingly complicated collection of passwords, password managers, authentication apps and verification codes. And there is always one account you desperately need to access that you haven’t used for three years and absolutely cannot remember the password for.

The mystery of QR codes

Gen X grew up in a world where a menu was something you picked up from the table.

Now you occasionally sit down in a restaurant, look around for the menu and discover a small square of black and white pixels staring back at you. You point your phone at it, wait for the camera to recognise it, click something, accept something else and eventually arrive at a website that wants to know whether you will accept cookies before showing you the food.

There is nothing particularly complicated about a QR code, but there is something strangely satisfying about remembering when you could simply be handed a piece of paper.

And yes, we know that paper menus are not exactly cutting-edge technology. But at least you never had to worry about whether your phone battery had enough charge to order the chips.

The endless stream of notifications

Gen X remembers when being contacted meant the phone actually rang.

You answered it, spoke to someone and put the receiver down. That was the end of the conversation. There wasn’t a little red number waiting to remind you that somebody had sent you a message, somebody else had liked something, an app had a suggestion and your supermarket wanted to tell you about a special offer.

Modern life has turned our phones into tiny attention-seeking machines. There is always something waiting to be checked.

The strange thing is that Gen X grew up perfectly well without any of this. We were quite happy being unreachable for several hours. If somebody wanted to know where we were, they generally had to have a pretty good idea of where we were likely to be.

Finding the off switch

Modern appliances have become wonderfully clever, but sometimes they are cleverer than we need them to be.

A washing machine can have enough programmes to make you question whether washing clothes has become a specialist profession. The television has several remotes. The heating can be controlled from your phone. The coffee machine has settings that appear to require a university degree.

And then there is the simple question of how to turn something off.

Gen X grew up with switches. You pressed one and the thing went off. There was no need to open a menu, select an option, confirm your decision and then wonder whether the little light is supposed to stay on anyway.

Customer service without the customer service

There was a time when having a problem with a company meant finding a telephone number and speaking to somebody.

Today, you may be directed towards a website, a chatbot, an automated phone system, a frequently asked questions page and several links that eventually lead you back to the page you started on.

You can spend twenty minutes trying to explain a problem to a computer that insists it doesn’t understand the problem. Eventually, you find yourself saying, “I just want to speak to a human being.”

That sentence probably sums up a surprising amount of modern life.

The disappearing art of knowing where you are

Gen X grew up reading road signs, looking at maps and remembering landmarks.

You knew that you had gone too far because you recognised the pub you had passed ten minutes earlier. You knew which road to take because you had driven it before. If you got lost, you either stopped somewhere and asked for directions or carried on confidently while pretending you knew exactly where you were going.

Now we have sat navs that calmly tell us where to go. It is incredibly useful, but it has also removed some of the need to develop a mental picture of where things actually are.

There is something slightly alarming about realising that you have travelled somewhere several times but couldn’t tell someone which direction it is in without asking your phone.

Booking absolutely anything

Modern life promises convenience, and often delivers it. But sometimes the process of booking something online feels like an endurance test.

You select the date. Choose the time. Create an account. Confirm your email. Verify your phone number. Accept the terms. Decide whether you want insurance. Decline three optional extras. Confirm again. Enter payment details. Receive a code. Enter the code. Then discover that your chosen time has disappeared.

Gen X remembers when you could occasionally walk into a shop, make a booking or buy a ticket by simply talking to somebody.

It wasn’t always faster, but it was usually easier to understand.

Knowing what the television is doing

Television used to be wonderfully straightforward.

You turned it on, chose BBC One, BBC Two, ITV or Channel 4 and watched whatever happened to be on. If you didn’t like it, you changed channels.

Now there are terrestrial channels, streaming services, catch-up services, apps, subscriptions and menus within menus. Finding something to watch can take longer than watching the programme itself.

And there is a particularly modern form of frustration when you finally find something you want to watch, only to discover that it is available on a streaming service you cancelled six months ago.

The fear of accidentally subscribing

Modern life is full of buttons that seem harmless until you press them.

Free trials are particularly dangerous territory. You sign up because something is free, fully intending to cancel later. Three months afterwards, you notice a payment leaving your bank account for a service you have completely forgotten about.

Gen X was raised in a world where buying something generally involved handing over money at the time. The idea that you can agree to pay for something indefinitely by clicking a button on your phone still feels slightly suspicious.

Perhaps that is why we still look at bank statements with the concentration of detectives.

When technology doesn’t behave

One of the things Gen X understands better than almost any generation is that technology can suddenly stop working for no obvious reason.

We grew up with televisions that needed adjusting, cassette players that ate tapes and computers that occasionally froze for reasons nobody understood. We learned to switch things off, switch them back on and hope for the best.

The difference now is that there are far more things to go wrong.

The internet disappears. The smart speaker stops listening. The television decides it cannot find the Wi-Fi. The printer refuses to print despite having plenty of ink. Your phone insists that an update is required at exactly the moment you need to use it.

After a lifetime of technological progress, the universal solution remains surprisingly familiar: turn it off and turn it back on again.

And then there is the phone

Perhaps the biggest irony is that Gen X has become extremely dependent on the very technology we once managed perfectly well without.

The phone is now our diary, camera, sat nav, newspaper, bank, music player, television, address book, alarm clock, torch, ticket wallet and communication device. Lose it and suddenly a surprisingly large part of modern life becomes difficult.

Yet many Gen Xers can still remember when the mobile phone was something carried by a businessman in a large coat, and nobody expected you to answer immediately.

We have adapted. We have learned. We have moved with the times. But that doesn’t mean we have stopped occasionally looking at a piece of technology and thinking, “Why have they made this so complicated?”

Maybe Gen X isn’t bad at modern life after all

The truth is that most Gen Xers are perfectly capable of navigating modern life. We have had to be. We have experienced an extraordinary period of technological change, moving from analogue childhoods into a digital adulthood.

Perhaps the difficulty isn’t really technology itself. It is the sheer number of things that now demand our attention, our passwords, our data, our subscriptions and our willingness to click “accept”.

We grew up in a world where many things were simpler because there were fewer choices. You waited for the television programme, looked something up in a book, phoned somebody at home, used a map and went to the shop.

Modern life is undeniably convenient, but convenience can sometimes come with its own complications.

Maybe that is why Gen X occasionally longs for something wonderfully old-fashioned: a button that actually does what it says, a person answering the phone and a device that doesn’t need an update before it will let you make a cup of tea.

We have embraced modern life. We just reserve the right to complain about it while doing so.

What part of modern life do you still find surprisingly difficult, even though you’ve been doing it for years?