Park City is known for innovation, wealth and progress. But there is a quieter reality playing out just beneath the surface, one that many families here recognize immediately once they start caring for an aging parent.
We are building a society that older Americans cannot easily live in.
Almost every basic task now requires digital fluency. Health-care portals. Online-only insurance forms. Banking apps. Prescription refills. Employment paperwork. Government services. Password resets with two-step verification. Uploading documents. Clicking links sent by email or text. All of it assumes comfort with technology that many older adults simply do not have.
We call this progress. For millions of seniors, it feels like exclusion.
I am living this first hand with my mother, who is 74 and experiencing cognitive decline. She still values her independence fiercely. She lives alone. She insists she is managing. But nearly every interaction with the modern world now requires skills she never needed for most of her life and cannot reliably use today.
Try asking someone with memory loss to navigate a health-care portal. Try helping them reset a password that requires symbols, capital letters and a verification code sent to a phone they cannot locate.
Try explaining why their bank no longer sends paper statements or why insurance documents now arrive only by email. Try distinguishing a legitimate alert from a scam designed specifically to exploit older adults.
These systems are not neutral. They reward those who already understand them and quietly punish those who do not.
This problem is not limited to health care. Employment has moved almost entirely online as well. Even basic jobs now require navigating third-party hiring platforms, identity verification software, and remote onboarding systems.
If something goes wrong, there is often no local person to speak with. Just an automated message telling you to check your portal.
If this is frustrating for younger workers, it is often insurmountable for older ones.
We hear constant talk about labor shortages, yet we continue to build systems that screen out experienced, reliable older workers before a human ever reviews their application. The irony is that many of these jobs do not require advanced technical skills at all. They require showing up on time, following instructions, and doing the work. But the digital gatekeeping happens first, and many never make it through.
Here in Summit County, where the population skews older in certain areas and seasonal work is common, this matters. We rely on older residents as volunteers, workers, caregivers, and community anchors. When systems quietly push them out, the entire community feels the loss.
Families step in where they can. Adult children manage accounts, reset passwords, upload documents, and spend hours on hold trying to fix problems their parents did not create.
But not everyone has someone who can do that for them. Many seniors are isolated. Many are afraid to admit they are struggling. They pretend they understand because the alternative feels like losing control of their lives.
Technology was supposed to make aging easier. In many cases, it has made it harder and more dangerous.
This is not an argument against technology. It is an argument for designing systems that recognize how people actually age. Cognitive decline, vision problems, arthritis, anxiety, and limited income all affect how older adults interact with the digital world. Pretending otherwise is not progress. It is neglect.
There are solutions. Health-care providers can offer simple non-digital options. Banks can maintain paper statements and in-person services without penalties. Employers can provide local human contact for hiring and verification. Government agencies can staff phone lines with real people instead of chatbots.
Most of all, we can stop blaming older Americans for not keeping up with systems that were never designed with them in mind.
A community that prides itself on inclusion should not require seniors to disappear behind passwords and portals. Aging should not mean becoming invisible.
If Park City wants to remain a place that values people at every stage of life, we need to make sure progress does not leave our elders locked out.
Because right now, too many of them are being quietly pushed aside, not by policy or intent, but by design.
Jay R. Werther is a Park City resident.