I am late 30s. Grew up without cell phones, computers etc. Didnt hear about the internet before it was available at the nearby library.

However..

I study computer science. I love tech, gadgets etc.

My theory is though, at some point, my interest drops and i just stick with what i know. Just like i stopped caring about tv, popculture, fashion etc etc

You get other things to do, and less time for the fun stuff.

I refuse to use tik tok - so, maybe?

My daughter has this issue with others in her class - she grew up with me and the computers and games I got for her, and she was ahead of her classmates in IT from the start. Some others had never used a mouse before - at age 11.

I think the biggest variable in ability to learn is the willingness to learn. I think we will still annoy the youngin's of tomorrow a little bit, human nature is to avoid some change, but I dont think millennials will be as bad as boomers because of lead exposure.

You can already see millennials shying away from newer things Gen Z is into. Like TikTok. I think it's an inevitability.

Absolutely, and I'm looking forward to it. I'll be the fossil holding up the entire self-checkout lane because the retinal scan can't see past my cataracts, and not one of these kids can stop me!

Not a chance. Millennials had to be good at tech when they were coming up. Everybody after got iOS.

I'll add my two cents as a Gen Z that realized he was way more tech illiterate than initially thought.

In my undergrad, I was tasked with running molecular simulation jobs on an HPC that I could only access through a terminal. The complete paradigm shift I experienced going from just a Windows user to Linux was shocking. Didn't realize how little I knew about file system hierarchies, connecting devices, and seemingly unheard of concepts like mounting and partitioning drives. I didn't know that Bash existed, what a shell even was, or literally anything with networks. Imagine going from using Word and thinking the terminal is terrifying to writing python scripts in Vim without really knowing how to program either.

Linux plus a de-Googled phone is where I've been at. After nuking Windows 11 from my laptop, I even saw that it got a decent amount faster. Using software that won't have its UI drastically changed every year is nice.

It seems like most people at my highschool are familiar with their basic favorite apps and can get a not great grasp on new applications and programs. But other than that it seems like a lot of people seem hopeless because they might now how to use their favorite apps well, but the second anything errors out of bugs out or they install a new app that isn't so user friendly their brain just powers down. They don't even try to Google it.

This is one thing that kinda concerns me is they people stay in their little apple ecosystem and use the most basic apps they don't really get that experience of actually googling s error code or a specific bug. Even people who use their phones half the day still don't know shit about anything because they don't leave their bubble.

But I know it's not everyone's thing to try to step out of the bubble and learn how to troubleshoot and fix stuff. But there is so much cool stuff out there that they just refuse to learn because they didn't immediately understand the app. It's like they are scratching the ice with how much they can do with their devices and they don't even try to go deeper.

The vast majority will be, yes. We may have grown up with technology being janky but it has been years since that has been the case. People are comfortable with the current tech. Even me as a techie will often reach for the thing that I know how to use rather than going through the process of learning something new. I largely just want shit to work.

As a milenial, we were taught how to sewrch for solutions and trying to figure stuff out.

Chances are millenials will deal with tech far better thqn gen z. We might stumble when shit is so dumbed down its not even intuitive, but hey, we can actually search for solutions and use more than two brain cells.

They'll be worse, as qe abstract computer code more and more, less people actually have any idea how they work.

I mean I'm Gen Z and still don't understand what an NFT is so probably lol

It could happen. Is typing class still a thing in school? cause younger generations suck ass at touch-only typing from what I can tell, which is the opposite you would expect