Back in the day, my husband used to bitch about how people were glued to their phones at all times—even while walking somewhere. “How can they see where they’re going?” he’d ask. “What if they don’t see a car and it hits them?”

I’ll bet you can see where this is going. Now Dan is as much of a cellphone addict as the people he used to look down on.

He has a history of finding changes in technology unwelcome. He didn’t even want to get a regular cellphone in the first place. It was only after a protracted argument caused by one of us not notifying the other where they were and when they’d be home. I pointed out that this would not be a problem if we had phones we could carry around with us and not rely on a landline.

Finally, he began to see it my way and caved. I purchased inexpensive cellphones and gave him one. It was the kind with almost no features or difficult-to-access ones. (To be honest, it was the kind that parents are now encouraged to get for their kids. Like that would go over big and occasion bliss. No internet connection? No social media? They’d sooner just leave it in the box. But I digress.)

The low-ball cellphones we got worked okay, except for one tiny problem—Dan kept losing them. Not once or twice, mind you, but regularly. Once he even lost it in another state. (My dad would have said, “I’m going to tie it on a string around your neck so you won’t lose it.” His dad would have said, “If it was up your ass, you’d know where it was.” But I digress some more.) But even when he lost each flip-phone he insisted on replacing it with another just like it.

The problem only got worse when I bought a smartphone for myself. Dan refused to give up his rickety flip-phone. He did marvel at the many things I could do with the smartphone, like play Puss-in-Boots Fruit Ninja or get directions to the sushi place nearest to our hotel.

What changed his mind was advances in technology. When he heard that 5G was on the horizon and the flip-phone would flip its lid in fear, he consented to me selecting him a smartphone. A simple one. It should do as little as possible except make and accept phone calls. No Fruit Ninja for him.

Soon, however, he discovered that with it, he could get online. He had a computer and was used to the wonders he could find on the Web. (Web-wonders, as it were.) Mostly, he read the news, checked the weather, and watched YouTube videos of cute kitties, which, after all, was why Al Gore (or that guy with the series of tubes) invented the Internet.

Soon he was scrolling regularly. (It strikes me as ironic that scrolls were a very early form of communication, but now the word as well as the world has gone high-tech. But I digress yet again.)

Singer-songwriter Tom Paxton once wrote, “The news is all bad, but it’s good for a laugh.” Now that even the news isn’t good for a laugh, Dan has increased his intake of cat videos and stories about archaeology. And sworn off doomscrolling.