Older People Like Video

Somewhere around 2016, every editor in the world decided text was dead. Video was the future. Adobe Premiere was the new literacy. If you couldn’t cut in Final Cut you might as well start looking for another job, because everyone said the kids were done with reading—YouTube was the only language they understood anymore.

Except a Pew study from Washington showed the opposite. People over 50 wanted video. Everyone else still preferred text. Still preferred scrolling through a story instead of sitting through some YouTuber’s intro.

The reason’s obvious enough. Video takes time, attention, real mental weight. Text you can skim. You can read it at 3 AM when you’re half-asleep. It’s faster, which matters when you’re drowning in information trying not to fall behind.

Meanwhile older people got to sit back and let the news wash over them—whatever was trending, whatever was urgent—while young people were grinding through feeds, trying to stay current on enough topics to not sound completely lost in conversation.

Maybe it was never about what people actually wanted. Maybe the industry had already sunk money into video infrastructure and needed to convince itself the future was coming. Turns out people don’t need the future to decide what they prefer.