Look, I’m not some thumbsy millennial who sleeps with his iPhone inches from his head. I’m a ’60s-born Gen Xer who sleeps with his iPhone inches from his head. Sorry to say, it’s not to take emergency calls — the ringer’s off; these days I mostly turn on the sound for Instagram. I just like to, you know, check my stuff: last thing before bed, first thing in the morning and upon every overnight flash of wakefulness. Are my European friends digging that post? Did the Dodgers win? What’s the opposite of “intransigent”? And of course, when I need to wake up ahead of my natural circadian surfacing (which is before my neighbor’s dogs but after those stupid birds), I use the phone alarm. But usually, out of habit, caution or loyalty, I also set my clock radio.

That’s right — my clock radio! It’s a clock and it’s a radio, and that’s it! Waking up to the radio is a flat-out superior experience to my phone’s alarm on many levels. It’s not that the phone alarms themselves are dreadful; my chosen chime, which has the groovy yacht-rock name “Slow Rise,” is a pleasant enough melody. I might prefer the fluttering keyboards from Ween’s “The Mollusk,” but eventually, any chime becomes just a chime, which presents two issues. First, you might build a tolerance and fail to notice you’re being summoned to rise, whether slowly or otherwise. More crucial, waking up to a standardized sound is a boring way to live.

It’s almost too obvious to point out, but the radio, by contrast, is different at every moment, forever. So on any given morning, a clock radio may give you any variety of human voices, or Beethoven’s Sixth, or “Baba O’Riley.” Sometimes you wake up to a marvelous serendipity, like a plane song on the morning of a flight. How many people have woken up to “I Got You Babe” and just cracked up? (If I ran an oldies station, we would play that song at the same time every morning.) But the radio won’t jolt you — if you want a mellow break with slumber, you set your radio to a public news or classical station; if you dig guitar solos, you set it to classic rock. We take radio’s blend of predictability and surprise as a given, though such formatting was invented by programmers in the ’60s because they recognized that this formula gives us cognitive, even visceral pleasure.