In a world permeated by technology, it’s hard not to become immersed in it. The patterns we create in our brains become habits, and the habits become our lives.  And in 2018, it’s hard to think of life without the great worldwide web. I don’t know about you, but whenever I think about the fact that the majority of my time is spent looking at a screen and pressing buttons, I freak out and have a mini-meltdown.

According to most, I’m considered a “millennial,”  – a term I have never been quite comfortable with as I have lived half of my life with technology, and the other half , without it.

I was born in 1981, back when the internet was still a pipe dream, and the only kind of media people knew about were the newspapers and reporters on TV.

As a teenager in the 1990’s, the only interaction I had with the internet was when I was in high school and hogged my parent’s phone line with AOL’s dial-up internet. I was never on the internet for very long, though as my mom or dad, twenty minutes after logging in, would yell out from the living room, “Honey, I have to use the phone – only five more minutes, okay?”

In 2002, I studied advertising, as a college student in New York City, and read about a new thing in the industry they were calling, “interactive television.” At the time I thought it was a nutty idea and privately doubted the possibility of it ever becoming a reality.  But with the rise of the internet and its seemingly endless possibilities, we now pretty much have interactive television  with streaming media channels like Netflix, Hulu, Roku, and Amazon Prime, among many more.

But despite all the technological advances of the digital age, none of it has lived up to my childhood fantasies. When I was little, I always imagined that my adult life would be like “The Jetsons.” Who doesn’t want a robot maid and flying cars? So as much as I like technology I’m also a little disappointed, as it never became as wondrous as my childhood fantasies. I have to remind myself, from time to time, that this sector of society is forever in motion, fueled by creative innovation.

And I, for one, secretly hope my Jetson’s dreams will one day be a reality, complete with a life on Mars and an apartment that orbits the sky. It’s possible, right?