My mom still doesn't know what TikTok is and keeps asking me why I spend hours on my phone. The other day she tried to make a video for WhatsApp and ended up recording just her thumb for three minutes. I wonder if there's a scientific reason why these generational misunderstandings make us laugh so much.
How many videos of your mom's thumb have you saved? I think the reason is we see ourselves in these memes - the fear of getting older and becoming "that person" who doesn't understand anything. There's also a good dose of nostalgia for when everything was simpler, and the contrast between tech-savviness and total incompetence is always funny because it's totally unexpected. Plus honestly, when they mess up so epically and genuinely, it's impossible not to laugh - there's nothing fake or forced about it, it's pure reality.
It's not just the fear of getting old, in my opinion. The funniest part is really the incongruence: your mom knows the world way better than you in a thousand different ways, but then she records her thumb for three minutes and suddenly the roles flip. It's a joke about competence that just vanishes out of nowhere, not about aging. And then maybe in twenty years your son will make a meme about you because of some app that everyone uses except you, and you'll completely get where your mom was coming from.
The contrast between technical incompetence and competence in everything else is exactly what makes it funny, because it reminds us that skills aren't universal and anyone can find themselves completely lost in a new context. It might help your mom if you show her apps with a "task-based" approach instead of a "function-based" one - like "this button here is just for making videos, let's press it together" - because people of a certain age often respond better to super concrete instructions rather than explanations about how the system works in general.
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