The genre is a reliable crowd-pleaser: the list of things baby boomers still do that supposedly prove they are hopelessly out of touch. The double space after a full stop. The phone call where a text would do. The earnest overshare on Facebook. It is easy, familiar fun, and it rests on two assumptions that do not survive much scrutiny. Taking those apart turns out to be more interesting than the list, and a good deal fairer.
The trouble with “generations”
The first assumption is that “boomers” are a coherent group of people who share a set of traits. On this, the science is unusually blunt. In 2020, the United States National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened experts to assess whether generational categories are a meaningful basis for managing a workforce, and the answer they reached was, in effect, no. The differences within any generation are far larger than the average differences between generations, and much of what looks like a generation gap is really the ordinary effect of being a different age, or of having lived through a different moment, rather than a fixed personality stamped on everyone born inside a twenty-year window.
Two researchers in the field, Cort Rudolph and Hannes Zacher, went further still and published what they framed as an obituary for generational differences, arguing that the idea persists largely because it is simple, satisfying, and highly profitable for the consultants who sell seminars explaining it. That is worth sitting with. A great deal of confident talk about what boomers, or millennials, or Gen Z are “like” is a stereotype wearing the costume of sociology. It feels like knowledge and behaves like prejudice.
The technology trope is a decade out of date
The second assumption, and the beating heart of the genre, is that older people simply cannot manage technology. This one has the virtue of being testable, and it is losing. Pew Research, which has tracked the question for years, finds that older adults’ adoption of the very tools they are mocked over has climbed steeply. By 2021 a clear majority of Americans aged 65 and over owned a smartphone, three-quarters used the internet, and their presence on social media had grown roughly fourfold since 2010. The gap between the oldest and youngest adults is real but has narrowed sharply over two decades.
Baby boomers, who now run from roughly their early sixties to their late seventies, sit largely within that rising curve. The image at the centre of the joke, the baffled pensioner jabbing helplessly at a screen, describes 2010 far better than it describes now. The mockery has simply failed to update its own software. It is, in the most literal sense, the out-of-date party in the exchange.
The deeper point: an old illusion with a new target
Strip away the specifics and a familiar move remains: declaring the older group hopelessly behind. It is worth naming plainly that this is ageism, a prejudice with one unusual feature. Unlike most, it is one that nearly everyone both dispenses and, if they are lucky enough to live long enough, eventually receives, because the young who find their elders out of touch are merely the not-yet-old. The conviction that the previous generation has lost the plot is not a fresh discovery each cohort makes. It is a recurring illusion, roughly as old as the idea of generations itself. The young of the actual 1960s struck their own parents as just as incomprehensible as any boomer strikes a twenty-year-old today. That does not make the feeling less vivid. It makes it far less trustworthy as evidence about anyone.
None of this requires pretending every habit is identical across ages. People do carry the formatting conventions, the slang, and the default tools of the era in which they came of age, so a double space or a fondness for the telephone is a genuine cohort marker. But these are stylistic fossils, mostly harmless and often perfectly sensible, not proof that a person is completely out of touch. And the correction runs in every direction. The same lazy machinery produces the caricature of millennials as entitled and Gen Z as unable to concentrate. The weak link is the category, whichever generation happens to be in the crosshairs.
What the evidence does and does not settle
A few honest limits belong here. The Pew figures are American and drawn from surveys, and it remains true that older adults, on average, take up the very newest tools somewhat later, so there is a real difference at the leading edge, if a modest and shrinking one. The critique of generational thinking concerns the usefulness of the categories, not a claim that age never matters at all, and the term “boomer” is itself loosely and inconsistently defined. These are corrections to a caricature, not a denial that people change with time and circumstance.
Within those limits, the honest conclusion is not a defence of one generation so much as a caution about the frame. The things that supposedly prove a cohort is out of touch mostly prove that the category is a blunt instrument and that the joke is older than any of its targets. If anything here is reliably out of touch, it is the assumption that the decade of a person’s birth tells you very much about who they actually are.