I am reminded, on occasion, of my advancing age.

It's never pleasant, the flash of awareness that comes with learning, for example, that my children didn't know that the first telephone had no touch screen.

Those reminders are coming more and more frequently these days, as I get annoyed at the way someone's driving or ordering at a restaurant, as I talk back at the commercials we're forced to watch if we won't pony up an extra $20 a month for Hulu 2 and A&E&Extra and Prime Video Pluperfect. (By the way, weren't those a fantastic few years after TiVo but before streaming shows forced you to sit through the same ad over and over again every 10 seconds? Wasn't the glorious absence of advertising a fulfilled promise of progress, like flying cars and high-speed trains?)

I'm a fan of science, vaccines and Western medicine in general, but these drug ads have started giving me pause. If there are enough people with eczema to take the thousands of new drugs that are being advertised for it, the government should investigate. I grumble when a drug ad tells you that a side effect of a hot-flash medication is hot flashes, and also when they tell you not to "take Latuda if you're allergic to Latuda." I'm sure there's a legal reason why they do all that, but it's enough to make a lady wish she had one of the pills that, in commercials, turn life from black and white into color.

I also tend to get grumpy and suspicious of new technology, which proves that I'm no longer the youthful, footloose and childfree woman I once was.

There's a new feature at Whole Foods where it offers you the chance to pay with your palm print. As if that makes life easier for anyone other than Amazon and the police investigating your murder.

I once went into one of those fancy-pants Amazon convenience stores near my work to get lunch. After I picked out a couple of things, I looked for the checkout area. Couldn't find it. I approached an employee.

"How do I pay?" I asked, in the bizarre position of trying to find a way to hand over more of my money to Amazon.

"It already knows," the woman answered.

Call me a luddite all you want, but that's the stuff of an episode of "Black Mirror."

My brother, who's younger than I am, keeps telling me that this new technology is wonderful and that soon we'll all have Elon Musk brain implants, playing video games just by thinking about them and making shopping lists without taking out a pencil. Maybe it's the extra three years I have on my brother, but I'm not intrigued. I try pretty hard to forget the thoughts rattling around in my brain. I sure as heck don't want a digital record of them.

I've also decided to avoid new social media sites. People can talk about TikTok and Snapchat all they want, but I'm too old to get on that bus. I don't have the extra brainpower, yes, but I also feel like social media is turning us into a bunch of dancing monkeys, performing for one another's amusement at the enrichment of tech companies.

Social media sites, particularly video apps, have changed us. Everyone doesn't only want to be famous now. Everyone wants to be famous for being funny. Billions of people all simultaneously make billions of jokey videos about what would happen if toddlers had lawyers and how Italian moms act at soccer games. The main thing I think when I'm watching these videos is how mediocre the humor is. But they can't all be sidesplitters. I mean, how many truly funny people are there in the world? Not enough to create a million funny TikTok videos a day, that's for sure.

Being funny is like being cool. Not everyone can be cool; that's just physics. Coolness is a bell curve, with Lenny Kravitz on one end and Mike Pence on the other. Most of us sit somewhere in the great, goofy middle.

But on social media, everyone is furiously pretending. They pretend that they're funny, they're cool, they look great in bikinis and cook elaborate meals and visit exotic locales. All the pretending is getting to us, I worry.

Long before social media, Mike Nichols once said that "the great American danger we're all in [is] that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it."

I know, I know, no one knows who Mike Nichols is anymore, but the sentiment's true anyway.

Take it from me, a grumpy middle-aged lady: Technology is for the birds. Or for teenagers, at least.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: Ales Nesetril at Unsplash