One Reason Old People Don't Update Their Stuff

Walk into an old person’s home and chances that it feels old: old furniture, old decor, old everything.  I used to think that it was because once you get old you don’t care about keeping up with things, or maybe you don’t have money to keep updating stuff, or maybe you don't want to spend money again on something you already updated when you were younger.

Now I realize there is another reason old people don’t update their stuff: they don’t realize how fast time is passing.  I ran into this exact experience with my home WIFI network of all things.

I spent a lot of time putting in a mesh WIFI network into my home in 2018.  I got it working, then pretty much forgot about it.  When I turned on my home devices, they got internet.  If I got a new  gadget, I hooked it up to the network and it worked.

Now 2018 doesn’t seem too long ago (to me), but it is SIX years ago, over 2,000 days.  When I was a kid six years took forever, and I got not one, but two college degrees in six years, which also seemed to last forever when I was a young adult.

And in tech, six years is definitely a huge amount of time, and during that time WIFI got updated, faster, could go further, and so on.   Time had passed me by, and I didn’t even know it since to me in my 50s, six years now seems like six months.

I would have still been oblivious about my ancient WIFI system but I ran across an online bandwidth tester, tried it out and saw it was much lower than the big number that my cable company justifies for their ever increasing monthly rate.  So I spent a whopping $200 at Amazon for a new system and took all of ten minutes to upgrade my home network.  My home network is now five times faster than it was, with a noticeable improvement in buffering and latency.

Now this was cheap and easy to do, so it was not about money or technical ability.  It just never occurred to me how much time had passed since I installed it.  If you had asked me when I put in my WIFI system I would have said it felt like a year or two ago.

So I was getting old inside my house and not even knowing it, which I now realize happens to a lot of old people.  They are just fine with what is going on inside their house, they just don’t realize how fast time is passing outside of it.