As an enterprise tech journalist, I’m frequently reminded of the supposed ‘generation gap’ that exists between the regular adults and the kids who live online these days.

I pause at this point to explain the distinction I’ve made between enterprise tech and consumer tech journalists, simply because I doubt my colleagues writing about the latest, hottest gadgets are told as often that there exists this entire race of supercomputing humans born after 1995.

A generation of people so adept, so inherently threatening to the enterprise IT foundation they’re coming to, that they rattle the bones of any IT director planning for long-term sustainability.

…or so the story is told.

The people I speak to take the two supposed ’sides’ and draw a rough, crayon line right down the centre, separating the ‘e-generation’ from people like my parents, who think predictive text is the cleverest thing to hit us this side of technology.

Thing is, I never thought I was one of the latter.

Not till I started this whole Rubik’s cube thing, realising half the instructional videos I was watching and replaying were made by…by…children. Children who haven’t passed a major exam yet in their lives, who can solve a cube faster than I can scramble one.

And then there’s this guy’s video, where he explains how to made a Rubik’s cube go faster.

Only he’s on the phone for the first part of it. And he’s talking to the camera, and to his girlfriend at the same time. And there’s music in the background. (In other videos he’s posted, it’s heavy metal.)

The amazing thing—to me, at least—is only one person out of 123 comments (at last count) asked why he couldn’t have just gotten off the phone for that moment before making the video. It was absolutely jarring.

Everyone else watching had enough capacity to take it in and weed out what they didn’t need.

You know how when old people are in the car, they make you shut off the radio? That’s because they don’t have enough capacity to think through the extra sensory input.

And it hit me: that’s what’s happening to me.

All these younger models are coming with more RAM, and worse, parts of mine are failing and my brain’s capacity is shrinking.

If I never felt old before, I do now.

Funny thing is, when I was explaining this realisation to a colleague today (who’s also into Rubik’s cubes), he immediately knew which video I was talking about. He couldn’t think through the distractions, either.

Guess it’s happening to all of us.

People who need a swift kick in the you-know-where immediately.

• The lady in the lift who couldn’t decide where to get off, progressively hitting every button to the ground floor, before leaving on the second floor she hit, resulting in the lift stopping on every floor till it got to mine, long after she left.
• The two men who stood in front of a large dessert menu outside a cafe, almost completely obscuring the items from others’ view, while mentally tasting each of the 30 listed desserts to decide on which to eventually order.
• The lady who couldn’t get into the full lift, who continually pressed the lift call button from the outside before the carriage could move off, repeatedly opening the doors to a claustrophobic squeeze of people who’d just like to get to their destination, thankyouverymuch.
• The man who suddenly poked his car out of a sidelane well into main traffic, stopping my car (on the main road) dead in its tracks. Who then proceeded to glare at me and wave me on, impatiently.