Now they say phone addiction is leading to all kinds of mental health problems among young people. Which is probably true. They spend multiple hours a day scrolling TikTok shorts; keeping up with friends on Insta (Instagram; full disclosure, I have an Instagram account); frenetically languishing in a madcap, hyperspeed world of video games, violent images, and social media unreality, leaving real persons and others behind in their walled off fortress bedrooms glued to their devices.

But what about us older folks who are just as addicted, but in a more benign way, perhaps? This is especially true for people like myself who are rapidly aging in a world which, as always, revolves around youth, idealism, and infinite futures. This despite the fact that the world is going to “hell in a hand basket;” the most vicious kinds of war, including genocide and forced, man-made starvation, are gripping Europe and the Middle East; and large parts of our Mother Earth will be uninhabitable because of the extreme heat wrapping itself around the planet in coming decades, choking the life out of our “advanced” civilization. Oh, I almost forgot. The country is veering off toward becoming an autocracy, but that couldn’t happen here. But as long as we have internet…

So it’s a good thing I’m old. My world has become quite circumscribed since Covid. I’ve always been, I hate to say it, a rather “old soul” since I was a teenager, ensconced in my room with a vast stamp collection that was my pride and joy. That’s the kind of relaxing world of discovery I immersed myself in back in those long-ago, pre-internet days. I did, however, spent a fair amount of time outside, and went bowling, played tennis and swam at the country club.

Everything about that older world started changing dramatically around 1995. I got my first computer in 1996 and connected to the newly hatched cyberspace-age-like galaxy of entertainment and knowledge via a 28.8 kbps modem that slowly crackled with weird static noises that ended quietly, after which you were IN. Connected. Online. As in “America Online.” It got so that the pure ecstatic anticipation of modem sound became the tech sound of my life, the siren song of the late 20th century. I couldn’t wait to hear it as I sat at my computer desk (an old-fashioned, padded card table with a heavy, clunky Mac Performa desktop, later to be a futuristic looking but equally heavy cobalt blue iMac (circa 2000), which I thought was the coolest thing I had ever owned. I was in my mid to late 40s and felt like a kid again, with the ultimate toy right in front of me at my beck and call, endless hours a day in the evenings and early mornings of my night-owlish existence.

Now it’s 2024. I’m 73 and my lifelong companion and window on the world is my latest iPhone (Model 15 pro max) on which I do just about everything: reading, writing (with a stylus) watching YouTube videos where I can learn just about anything, taking photos (my only camera), dictation, and all the other tasks and chores of daily life I once did offline. My books are lonely. That’s big problem. When my cell service was knocked out for about eight hours recently, I tried to stay calm and carry on. But my little world was turned upside down in an instant. But turn back the clock? No way! I’ve even misplaced a book I’ve been meaning to to read that is titled, “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.” Do I really want to know?

I have to laugh when I think about how unsettled and disoriented I was during that 8-hour internet cellular outage last month. I wrote and am re-posting the following essay from 25 years ago when the seismic shock of a major equipment failure turned my tech world upside own for the first time.

From my journal, November 30, 2000:

I walked into the room this past Sunday, in the early evening after supper, unaware and clueless as to what the coming moments would bring. I turned on the power button of the computer. I then heard a hissing and fizzing, a most alarming and disconcerting sound, like when you drop Alka Seltzer in water, and then a cascading series of popping noises, like little firecrackers going off, and then the telltale smell of something burning, like plastic maybe? Surely, surely it was not originating right in front of my nose.

Unmistakeable. I had that sinking feeling, for I knew that my seemingly invincible computer, my mother board-humming, monitor-glowing and keyboard-comforting, window on the world was self-destructing, giving up the ghost, surrendering to the relentless onslaught of my insatiable curiosity, my ever-present need to be online and connected to that vast and teeming world that exists in cyberspace.

Stunned. Disbelieving. Turned off the power. Stared at a blank screen. Silently raged against the failure of technology, when there’s nothing godlike about it. After all, — it’s just a computer, a machine, an extension of my mind and heart and soul, that’s all, and it was gone. Taken away. Zapped in a hail of electrical misfirings, exhausted finally, after 4 and 1/2 years of endless use, by the oh-so-human operator — me — the wizard behind the curtain who kept manipulating the controls to continuously amuse, inform, delight and frustrate himself in front of that magical box. Gone.

The past few days I’ve started my mornings in an altogether different frame of mind. An unconnected frame of mind. No computer. No Internet. A quiet bowl of cereal and blank stares at the wall, and then the TV, the blankest wall of all.

Now I’m back, but I was changed. I saw myself briefly as I once was. It was rather nice.

That was then, this is now. It’s not nice nor pleasant, nor anything else positive when your main connection to the world is gone, even if for only a few hours, as was the case a few weeks ago. Life can never be as it once was. Try as I might.