This turns out not to be soothing. According to the A.P.A. study, nearly half of millennials worry about the negative effects of social media on their physical and mental health. Often for good reason. A 2017 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 66 percent of Americans have witnessed online harassment and 41 percent have experienced it themselves.

When I watch kids giggling at their phones rather than at one another or families in the local diner silently sitting together in front of their respective devices, I can’t help thinking of Pixar’s post-apocalyptic “WALL-E,” a nightmare vision in which earthlings, stripped of their musculature and humanity, recline blobbily in automated loungers, affixed to portable screens whose animated features are all they know of human interaction.

And so, I resist. I downgrade, I discard, I decline to upgrade. More than a decade ago, I got rid of cable TV, then network TV. I cut out personal phone calls (unless the person is a continent away), then anything other than businesslike emails. If I want to catch up with a good friend or a family member, I wait until we actually see each other.

When the pop-up window on my computer asks if I’d like to install the latest version of this or that, unless it’s for security reasons, my response is, “No, thank you.” Nor do I want that “amazing” new app. My mother — yes, my mother — knew about Lyft before I did. I’ve never tried whatever Spotify is, preferring the radio and ye olde compact discs. I’m sure I’d still be using a CD Walkman if I’d ever gotten one to begin with.

Never got a Nook, a Kindle, an iPad, don’t want them. Until quite recently, I thought Alexa was a joke, a wild, hypothetical Orwellian item that might one day be foisted upon the world, not something that anyone might actually desire, pay for and willingly allow into her home.

Forced to buy a laptop in order to work on the train, I had to consider the latest models, so swift, so dynamic, they might leap into your backpack lest you accidentally forget to tuck one in yourself. In the end, I let my husband pick out the sleekest, most enlightened version for himself, while I took his four-year-old model, one his own mother had rejected as a relic from another geological age.

Do I slip up? Do I email unnecessarily? Have I found myself frantically texting something inconsequential from a beautiful outdoor setting surrounded by impatient children and adults making the same judgy how-could-you-be-doing-that face I so often make myself? I have. But I feel bad about it.