work in the customer service industry and seeing how many older people refuse to adapt makes me heartbroken. They get extremely frustrated because I think they feel left behind or forgotten. I'm always there to help them but sometimes it just isn't enough and they don't even bother. I understand that sometimes things are better from the past or that your flip phone 'works just fine' but there comes a point where you will be left behind because of stubbornness and failure to adapt.
Alternative point of view: why should they adapt? A lot of new tech consists of artificial barriers that offer no real advantage for a significant cognitive cost.
My 80-year old uncle wanted to get a larger TV. Turns out you can no longer buy a new one without something calling Google TV. Is he really a stubborn failure for refusing to learn a completely new and pointless (since all he needs it for is to watch sportsball) set of skills?
I'm not even 40 and I too often feel overwhelmed by things like these. Modern tech environment is such a minefield of traps and scams I can't blame anyone older, cognitively impaired, mentally unwell, or just less intelligent for giving up.
To have a constructive conversation about this, I'd introduce a concept of cognitive cost: that is, that making decisions has a distinct, if not precisely measurable cost. For example, if I closely tracked the changing prices of several brands of butter available to me in a local store, I might save several dollars a month. Yet the effort needed to make all these calculations every time I do shopping is worth more to me than the $7 or so that I could gain. Same with my uncle - he wants a larger TV, but he doesn't want to "pay" the "fee" of learning to navigate Google crapware; "fee" that he could otherwise "spend" on e.g. reading more books.
So my first argument would be: many of these older people are, in fact, performing a perfectly rational calculation: whatever they could gain by "adapting" just isn't worth that much effort to them.
My second argument would be about catastrophic risk. Recall the concept of insurance: you accept a certain, small cost in exchange for protection from potential of a very large one. My car probably won't get stolen, and I'd rather keep the money instead of paying an insurance premium, but if I do pay, I can be sure I won't incur a large financial loss if my vehicle does in fact get taken. Maybe my uncle wouldn't accidentally send all his money to Nigerian scammers, but only way to be sure is to not use the internet at all - and he has easily made this decision a long time ago.
So, to sum up the second argument: adapting to new technology carries large, almost incomprehensible risk for older people. You may consider whatever disadvantage they incur as a result of not doing so as an "insurance premium" paid against the risk of a financial or a psychological/social (like being publicly humiliated due to accidentally posting something intended for search engine/private message) catastrophe.