At Some Point They Redesigned Everything and Forgot to Tell Us

 

I opened my banking app yesterday morning and stared at it for thirty seconds.

Everything had moved. The buttons I’d been pressing by muscle memory for two years had vanished. Replaced by something called a “streamlined experience” which meant I now had to hunt through three menus to do what used to take one tap. There was no announcement. No warning. Just the assumption that I’d adapt.

And I did, eventually. Because what choice do I have?

But here’s what’s quietly infuriating: nobody asked. Nobody even told us it was happening. One day the thing worked one way, the next day it worked another, and we’re all just supposed to nod along like this is normal. Like perpetual disruption is the cost of living in the modern world.

It’s not just apps. It’s everything.

My local Tesco moved the bread. Again. Third time in eighteen months. I stood there like a lost tourist in my own town, scanning the aisles for something I’d bought every week for a decade. When I finally found it — tucked between the organic quinoa and some sort of artisan crispbread nobody asked for — I felt simultaneously relieved and ridiculous.

The woman restocking shelves saw my face. “They’ve moved it all around again, love.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Head office.”

Head office. As if that explains anything. As if there’s a room somewhere full of people whose entire job is to make sure we never feel settled.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the constant redesigning isn’t about improvement at all. Maybe it’s just to remind us that we’re not in charge anymore. That our preferences are data to be noted and then ignored.

I miss things staying put.

I know how that sounds. I know it makes me sound like the sort of person who writes letters to the council about potholes and remembers when you could leave your door unlocked. But I don’t care. There was something reassuring about the predictability of objects and systems. You learned where things were. You developed a rhythm. Life had enough genuine chaos without your breakfast cereal playing hide and seek.

Retirement was supposed to simplify things. Fewer obligations. More control. And in some ways it has. I don’t answer to anyone anymore. I can spend three hours reading the paper if I want. I can drink Yorkshire Tea at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday and nobody questions it.

But the trade-off is this: everything else became a moving target.

The world didn’t stop redesigning itself just because I stepped off the hamster wheel. If anything, it accelerated. Every website I visit has a new layout. Every service I use has been “upgraded.” My energy supplier sent me an email last month cheerfully announcing they’d “improved their customer portal” which turned out to mean they’d buried the actual useful information under six layers of animated graphics and chatbots that can’t answer basic questions.

I rang them. Waited twenty-three minutes. Got through to someone who sounded about nineteen.

“I just want to see my bill,” I said.

“Oh, you can do that on the app now!”

“I don’t want the app. I want the bill.”

Pause.

“The app’s really easy to use, though.”

We’re having different conversations, him and me. He thinks I’m struggling with technology. I’m not. I’m struggling with the fact that nobody thinks it’s worth asking whether I wanted any of this in the first place.

The paid subscribers get the full rant about what this says about autonomy and ageing in a culture that treats adaptation as a moral obligation. Let’s just say it gets darker.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: when did we agree that everything had to keep changing? When did “new” become the only measure of “better”?

I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure anyone does.

All I know is I’m sixty-seven years old, I’ve navigated shipping routes across three oceans, and yesterday I couldn’t find the button to transfer twenty quid to my granddaughter because someone in Silicon Valley decided rounded corners were over.

Progress, they call it.

Feels more like being rearranged without consent.

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If this is your kind of thing, there’s more where it came from. I write about retirement, ageing, and the quiet absurdities of later life a few times a week. Some of it is free. The better stuff is for paid subscribers.

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