Can You Hear Me Now

Note: The underlying article can be found at https://ajprokop.com/2026/07/20/the-boomers-guide-to-surviving-technology/

Pip: There is a certain irony in a blog called Can You Hear Me Now being primarily about whether anyone can keep up with the thing they are hearing.

Mara: Andrew Prokop is asking exactly that question today — how retired men navigate a world that keeps rewriting its own instructions, and where the line is between staying curious and hitting your limit.

Pip: Let’s start with the retirement circle and the technology reckoning they did not entirely ask for.

The Boomer’s Guide to Surviving Technology

Mara: The frame here is a men’s retirement group, average age around seventy, sitting with a question their careers never quite prepared them to answer: how do you stay relevant when the ground keeps moving?

Pip: And the Alan Watts epigraph does a lot of heavy lifting before the first paragraph even starts — “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

Mara: That line becomes the spine of the whole piece. The discussion surfaces five distinct emotional responses to modern technology: nostalgia, acceptance, fear, balance, and curiosity. Most of the men felt at least two or three; the author claims all five.

Pip: The personal anchor is a story about his father — a Navy radio operator turned Motorola engineer who spent decades on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, then hit a wall when embedded microprocessors arrived and ones and zeros replaced transistors and capacitors.

Mara: The father’s breaking point lands with real weight. He asked his son to teach him assembly language, couldn’t make the conceptual leap, and mid-session “threw up his hands in frustration and said, ‘That’s it. I am retiring.’” Nearly fifty years at the top of his field, then done.

Pip: That moment reframes the whole discussion — it is not about being bad at technology, it is about reaching saturation. The question the author is now asking himself is when his own version of that session arrives.

Mara: The five themes the group surfaces are genuinely distinct. Nostalgia is about emotional attachment to analog devices tied to formative memories, not a wish to return. Curiosity covers the members who use ChatGPT and payment apps daily, alongside the ones who want only email and calls — and the technology-averse gentleman who still owns two smart speakers.

Pip: Which is the detail that earns its keep. Lines in the sand, apparently, are permeable.

Mara: Fear gets the most concrete treatment. Cybercrime is described as a multi-billion dollar business, and AI is making scams harder to detect. The author’s response is direct: “The only way to know you are being deceived is to know what deception looks like.”

Pip: Balance and acceptance close the loop — no one in the room believed a pre-internet world was coming back, and the goal shifts from mastery to staying curious long enough to stay in the game.

Mara: The closing image returns to the dance metaphor: keep learning, keep asking questions, “even if I occasionally step on my own feet.” The saturation point is real; the aim is just to keep it waiting.

Pip: Curiosity as a survival strategy — that is the actual argument underneath all of it.

Mara: And the saturation point as something you can maybe outrun, but probably not forever. Worth sitting with before the next update drops.