"Deal with it": a broken friendship

I am of Generation X and in 2 years I will turn 50 and I am wondering whether that will make me a dinosaur on the verge of becoming extinct when I cannot keep up with the fast-flowing development in technology of our times.

It makes me wonder whether in order to survive in our high-tech societies and communities I have to keep pace with the developments in social media by learning all the terminology and jargon along with their cryptic acronyms when chit-chatting online as the prospects of meeting people face-to-face now seems to be a dying culture.

I am already familiar with some acronyms such as "TC" ("Take Care" and also a reference to the Maldivian football club "Truth and Care") but most other acronyms are unknown to me because I don't chat much in real time and prefer sending messages with fully formed sentences with proper punctuation and grammar - and I expect the same from my recipients.

Now it happened that one of my friends may have been frustrated having to write text at length while chatting online in real time and therefore often forced himself to resort to use acronyms. However, this made me irritated in turn when I had to Google a lot of acronyms he employed which created a lot of pauses, inconveniently slowing down continuation of our conversations.

He would say things like "ig" and I would be wondering at first whether he meant "Instagram" and then a few moments later it would hit me that within context he meant "I Guess".

Sometimes these "convos" (yes, that is the acronym for "conversations") would remind me of another friend who would write "brb" ("Be Right Back") and disappear for what seemed like an eternity to me, making me wish that he had instead written the other more appropriate to the circumstances acronym "TTYL" ("Talk To You Later").

So, the friction I had with my acronym convoluted friend I mentioned earlier reached a boiling point yesterday and resulted in a tragic conclusion.

I finally worked up the courage to tell him he can't expect me to allocate a great deal of what little precious time I had left in my life to "educate" myself to keep up with the pace of progress of the "Internet generation" and that I can't be expected to Google everything he said in mysterious acronyms just to continue our conversations.

He then bluntly told me to "deal with it" and rather unceremoniously pointed out that I was "behaving in a restrictive manner" which pissed me off and resulted in my outburst: "Go **** yourself."

He responded by saying "OMG" ("Oh My God") and "Can't accept them from you" and that I have to "carry those words with me".

I perceived this as amounting to him brushing off elderly people and refusing to lend his assistance to such people who need an empathetic help to keep abreast in an era of rapid development in technology.

I pointed out this on a small Viber group which contains him, me, and two other mutual friends. But rather than being apologetic about his way of dismissing senior citizens, he played the victim card instead and abruptly "left" the group.

I "deleted" the group then because I didn't want to be in a group that contained close friends of such a person who didn't give a rat's ass about the plight of old age people like me who cannot hope to keep pace with a technologically advancing world which hardly resembles itself from one moment to the next.