Yes. We are.

We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn't user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.

Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.

Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.

Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.

Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.

Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I'm fairly certain that's related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.

It’s funny because we always thought that the next generation’s technical knowledge would utterly eclipse ours, but instead they only know how to edit a short video to seem to loop infinitely.

I literally just watched a video of a dude telling a story about how when he was 13 in 2012, his Xbox 360 controller stopped working and he thought the whole console broke when he just had to replace the controller batteries. 🤣

iOS is literally designed for toddlers to be able to use it. "iPad kids" aren't especially gifted, "iPad adults" are especially stupid.

But on the bright side, those same groups think they "know computers" because they can press large, brightly colored buttons - so they walk around with unearned confidence in their abilities and impatience/lack of appreciation for the people that actually have to fix things.

It's also why a large swatch of these same fucking idiot, drains on humanity loudly challenge the validity of voting tech infrastructure without any factual basis to their argument - they just "feel" like they get it.

Kids don't even understand file structures because modern OSs obfuscate that stuff.

I fix my parents’ computers. I fix the computers of the super old people in the neighborhood. I fix my kid’s computer. I fix my friends’ computers.

I don’t think it’s generational.

When your car breaks down, do you fix it? At what point do you take it to a mechanic?

At what point do you call an electrician or plumber? Who biopsies their own cysts?

It’s all the same shit. We live in a society of specialists because there’s simply too much potential knowledge for everyone to be able to do everything.

And if we start arguing about what things people “ought to be able to do themselves”, we turn into a bunch of old farts lamenting about the good old days.