To ourselves, to everybody.

Technology is not making life better. It was, probably, on balance, for a long time (for the global north, at least), but we passed a threshold somewhere around 2 to 3 years ago.

Here are three anecdotal, personal, unscientific, unrepresentative examples. (I don’t have to prove stuff every day, right? I’m sure someone will study all this eventually.)

I wanted to do at least one thing today. The first thing I set out to do, upon getting up around 4:45 AM was to find and hire an editor who would convert an article I had written some time ago from the Sage Harvard style to the Chicago style. 10 hours and three freelancer portals later, I’ve got nothing to show for it. Just to get one of the portals to send me a 6-digit code so I could make an account took four hours. I thought maybe I was using the wrong browser, so I tried other ones. I thought it wanted a non-personal e-mail address, so I provided my work e-mail address.

Nope.

No clue what was going on, and I’m really sad because this platform seemed to have just the right people. Another platform, on which I searched for another couple of hours had two people who seemed to come close, but I wasn’t sure.

My frustration with this was getting so high that I wanted to listen some music to calm down.

My Sony WH-1000s had started making a screeching noise, with no rhyme or reason as to the timing, so I had ordered some earbuds about a week ago. Since then, it’s been hell trying to read the tiny instruction manual (even with my glasses on) and trying to make sense of how to put the darn things on. With help from other people, after a few days I got to the point I could put the left one in such that it would stay. The right one pops out within minutes no matter which combination of “wing” and tip I try (or who puts it in for me).

What’s worse, the music sounds like a mosquito. I knew the bass response couldn’t have been intended to be this bad, so I tried going against the recommendations: I put the earbuds deeper into my ears.

The music finally sounded normal. And after less than five minutes, they both popped out. (One fell in the dog’s water bowl.)

My previous pair were JBLs. One of those had popped out while I was walking the dog on a sunny and beautiful spring day. At that moment, I happened to be standing in place. (I was waiting for the dog to finish inspecting part of a small neighborhood garden.) The left earbud plopped out, bounced off my chest, slid down between my torso and my jacket, and … vanished. I looked all over that tiny garden and the sidewalk. I looked for a long time.

That’s why I went back to the Sony headphones, but one day a couple of weeks ago, they screeched (it’s very loud) at just wrong time, so I ended that audio relationship right there and then.

I won’t even get into the day’s third big frustration; this much should do. What I feel the need to point out is that in 1984, say, or 1990, one could buy a $20 pair of headphones and they would work right out of the box. (Did I mention I spent 35 minutes pairing the earbuds today?) It’s now 2025 and I can’t listen to music without turning my day into a nightmare. How is technology a convenience, exactly?