[Mz]

My mother is in her late 70s and my father died a couple of years ago, I think just short of his 89th birthday. They grew up in a different world, where a handshake meant something and overnight wealthionnaires who won the lottery or got rich doing something online that many older people cannot fathom or whatever was just not a Thing that was going on.

My dad grew up on a farm, in a log cabin with a dirt floor. He remembered those phones I have only ever seen in black and white movies (http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=old+party+line+phone&FOR...). He was able to tell me those phones were a party line, something I had never known. In other words, one phone line serviced the entire town. Anyone with a phone could pick up when it rang and potentially listen in on your call. There was no expectation of privacy.

He just could not keep up with the rate and level of change in his last years. The world had changed too much and he no longer wanted to try to understand. It was just not the world he grew up in.

People also were less likely to be college educated back then. There are ways in which they genuinely lacked the sophistication we just assume people are supposed to have.

My parents were/are very good hearted people and the way the world has changed just does not fit with how they related to it for so much of their lives. This is probably true for a great many other elderly people.

[plonh]

Then "handshake" bit is rose colored view of the past. Scams were incredibly common in the past. Real estate, diamond and gold jewelry, and even the original "snake oil" and patent medicines, and all the classic "confidence man" scams.

[Mz]

I was not saying no one ever got burned. But life was different back then and it can make it hard for an older person to figure out how to judge things today. It is very similar to moving to a different culture. Culture shock is not evidence of incompetence. It just means the context is vastly different from what you are used to, which is throwing sand into your gears. It is kind of disrespectful to assume older people are all just incompetent and stupid and not account for the fact that the world today is dramatically different from the one in which they grew up.