Don’t even tell me if there’s a new social media platform. I won’t know what it does or what makes it special, and I’m pretty sure it will involve some specific brain pleasure-center rewiring that will make it impossible to connect with old-fashioned happiness. Not only that, but I figure if I jump on board and give it the old college whirl, it will already be obsolete. I’d feel like a pre-spurned lover. And who needs that?

I don’t enjoy Twitter. I haven’t looked at Instagram, or Tik Tok, or WhatsApp, or Tumblr, although I’ve heard some of them can give you a disease if you swipe the wrong way, which is also true of toilet paper. 
If it’s not a new way to interact with strangers, it’s a new way to communicate, and if I get one more of those I won’t have any idea how to get hold of anybody. Does my friend answer the phone? Which one? Answer texts? Answer emails? Answer Facebook Messenger? Everyone has a preferred communication portal, and you have to remember which one works for each individual.
So the other day I was looking at my email (which I always answer, BTW, unless I forget, which could happen, because my personal software is glitchy), and there was something in there that purported to be from a phone number, not a name. And when I opened it, it went straight to a conversation icon in my dock that I’d never seen before. It says “Messages” but I don’t remember ordering up such a thing. I clicked on it. Inside were four messages, all from phone numbers. I don’t know whose. (Remembering people’s phone numbers is an old and currently irrelevant skill. You can’t even show that off anymore. You try to impress someone by rattling off your childhood friends’ phone numbers and people squint at you like they’re wondering if you can pull off a Rain Man thing in Las Vegas.)
Two of the four phone numbers I was able to figure out from the context of the message. The one about estimating a fence is from the fence guy. I don’t know why his message is hanging out in the dock on my laptop. He has my phone number. Seems coy to me. It’s like if someone wants to get hold of you by skulking in the shrubbery going Psst. The other three messages have apparently been hanging out in limbo in my dock for a while now.
So I looked up this Messages thing. I still don’t know why it exists. Says you can text someone at any time with it. Couldn’t you before? And why isn’t it on my phone?
 
I’m missing out. But at least, thanks to my considered avoidance of these things, I have no Fear Of Missing Out. You want to get hold of me for certain, see if you can get your message projected on the wall across from my toilet.