I seem to be running into a problem in which every time I try to update it says I do not have permission to do that and I do not know how to fix it. Does anyone know?

You might have to give some more information:
What exact Plasma version, which distribution?
What do you try to update and how exactly do you try to do so?

not sure how do I check, I'm petty sure it's KDE plasma 16. something, i know it quit out of date

Kinfocenter should show useful info.

if it is terribly out of date, whatever release of the distro you are running is no longer supported and has reached end-of-life.

As an example, if by '16' you mean Kubuntu 16.04, the kubuntu bits stopped being supported in 2019, and the Ubuntu core OS became EOL this past week. The software repos for it were removed from the standard software repositories and archived. I am sure similar things happen on other distros, so you will need to contact help form whatever distro you are using for further info.