I’m so old, I remember a time when your house phone didn’t have a rotary dial. You just picked up the receiver, and the operator would say,

“Number, please.”

“Hudson 1234, please.” And she would connect you.

All the phones were heavy, black behemoths that you were darned lucky to have. When I was a teenager, the only way to reach someone was to call their house phone. You know…the one on the wall in the kitchen with the 15’ curly cord so you could sit on the basement steps and talk privately. There were no answering machines. If there wasn’t an answer, you knew they were busy, and you’d try later. You carried a dime in each of your “penny loafers” in case you needed to call your mom to come get you.

The Jetsons promised us jet packs and flying cars. They got the video phone right. I remember when I bought my daughter her first desktop computer so she could write her reports on it. Her dad said it was ridiculous to do that. No one was going to use a computer at home, for heaven’s sake! Then came Compuserve and AOL. The familiar beeee-ba-beeeeeeeep-boooo…..buhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Then a portable phone that was bigger than a breadbox that you carried around. Hubby #2 was a physician and needed to be available 24/7 when he was on call. He wore a beeper, and when it went off, he had to call in to the answering service or the hospital or another doctor…all while we were walking the baby in the park. Never…in our wildest dreams would we ever think of taking a picture of ourselves! How utterly ridiculous! Or send naked photos to someone. (That’s what the Polaroid camera was invented for!)

When I went into the computer place to buy that first computer, the sales guy said, “Now, take this thing home and play with it. Don’t be afraid of breaking anything. If anything happens to it, you just bring it back in and I’ll fix it.” That was it. I went to town on that thing, and I’ve never looked back. When I co-authored a book for the National Institutes of Health, I actually used the first LAPTOP to type the manuscript! Those of us “of a certain age” remember when our days didn’t revolve around something that tethered us like a chain. We didn’t doomscroll our way through life. We just experienced it.

I went through a terrible clinical depression in the late ‘80s. I spent my days on the computer when my second child went off to school. I was disconnected from humanity….disconnected from my family and the world. And that was LONG before you could carry a computer with the kind of power that used to take a whole building to hold. Now, the world is in our pockets, and we’re raising entire generations on smoke and mirrors. I’ve been around long enough to know that most genies can’t be put back in the bottle, and AI will change everything all over again.

When I proudly took my first laptop with me to visit my family in West Virginia, I would say my grandma was mesmerized. But it was more like, “What IS this sorcery?” My father’s reaction was more poignant.

“The internet will be the death of this country.”

You may have been spot on, Dad. But there’s this thing called Snapchat that can take pictures of you, take away all your wrinkles. and give you the skin you never had in real life. I play with it occasionally.

Remember…Mr. Peabody and Sherman said we’d have a time machine, too. Didn’t they?

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So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self[a] is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 2 Corinthians 4:16 ESV

***Gratitude Journal*** Today, I am grateful for the magic of the internet and the budding yearn to cut back on its use.