The paradoxes of progress: An old iPhone user struggles to upgrade to the latest model

By Frank Bruni

Like many people I know, I decided about a month ago to get a new iPhone. President Trump’s tariff threats, tariff realities and tariff tempestuousness portended higher prices, and I was due anyway. My old iPhone’s bells and whistles were at this point whimpers and wheezes. Its battery was a joke. Off to the Verizon store I went. I’d made an appointment and was assured I’d be in and out in a jiff.

Some jiff. The sales rep’s explanation of pricing and plans lasted longer than many of my lectures. It was 10 times as hard to follow. I placed my order anyway, and when I returned three days later to swap my sputtering clunker for its shiny upgrade, a data-transfer process that was supposed to take 60 minutes crested three hours. Then there were days of text messages and emails with the sales rep to iron out all the kinks.

Ah, the paradoxes of progress. The ironies of efficiency. Multiplying conveniences come with metastasizing inconveniences. The very gizmos, gadgets, hacks and programs meant to simplify tasks also complicate them. You must download this. You must upload that. You must take a photo. You must digitize a blood oath. You must enable cookies. You must disable cookies. You must configure this setting and then that setting, and have you updated the app? Update the app! Because then you’ll be able to customize your experience even further, provided you have the time and patience to educate yourself on the infinite customizations.

And just when you fall in love with a new bit of technology, it betrays you. My Ring doorbell, for example. I relished how it permitted me a nanny-cam glimpse of whether a package had arrived, a service provider had shown up or my dog was staying put and behaving in the front yard. All this on my iPhone, wherever I was! My old iPhone, I mean, because my new one refused to accept my Ring password, even as my laptop validated its correctness. The app gave me inscrutable and contradictory reasons; several weeks elapsed before I summoned the fortitude and concentration to solve the riddle and set things right. Don’t get me started on my new app-controlled lightbulbs, whose setup consumed an entire afternoon.

Yes, I’m old, and younger sorts are more adept at the various facets of our wireless ways. Codgers and technology go together like peanut butter and sardines. But it’s also true that baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z alike muddle through a morass of inputs, outputs, passwords, password validations, password resets, QR codes, notifications and nudges that didn’t exist a quarter-century ago. Those cyberannoyances accompany innovations that undeniably streamline a range of experiences — summoning a ride, plotting a route, buying a movie or concert ticket, changing the thermostat, checking in for a flight — to a degree that I wouldn’t be foolish enough to wish away. But the innovations seldom live up fully to their promises of ease and expedition, and they introduce intricacies and imperfections all their own. The troubleshooting accretes; for every three minutes you gain, you give one back. And your head fills with a kind of noise that can sap your energy with a special and sinister potency.

Several times a week, I find myself ordering something on the internet that requires more decisions and discernment (red or gray or blue, six-pack or eight-pack, one-time or recurring delivery, wrap or bun) than the selection of a spouse. Or I scrutinize online counsel for solving a problem with one of my devices that bears no relation to the words and images that the device is actually showing me. I search in vain for different, better instructions, my cyber-roving leading me to a dead end that puts me in mind of calling a company help line for a conversation with a bona fide human being, except good luck reaching that apocryphal creature, because the voice mail maze is designed to prevent it. By the time I resign myself to the futility of my quest, I’ve lost another 15 minutes atop the 15-minute chunks I sacrificed to the hiccups and stutters of the many other conveniences that purport to diminish my stress.

Almost every day, I struggle to reconcile the format of a digital document someone has given me with the format in which I work. Or I send or receive an email involving my or a colleague’s need for help figuring out some fancy online interface that our workplace or profession has just implemented, ostensibly to optimize our performance.

Speaking of emails, there’s no staying on top of them, not when there are also text messages and WhatsApp missives, and I even know some people who are not Pete Hegseth using Signal. Corresponding is so much less tortured than in the quill-to-parchment days of yore, which has merely succeeded in making it a greater torture than ever.

I understand and envy people who unplug, tune out and drop off the grid — well, apart from the hygiene challenges and the loss of the best streaming services. It’s not blissful minimalism or high-minded asceticism to forgo hot water and classic “Sex and the City” episodes. It’s feral.

But then I do renewed battle with my wireless, app-controlled Sonos sound system — the volume controls work only when they’re in the mood to, and the speakers seem to belong to some union that mandates erratic five-minute breaks — and feral is tempting. The music of nature. All that fauna and flora. I hear they’re enjoyable and sometimes even identifiable without some glitchy app or a pained sequence of questions that Siri, ever fickle, keeps misinterpreting.
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Credit: The New York Times