Luddite: I Wish I Had Embraced Technology

Aaron Traister cultivated a technology-is-evil image growing up and shunned one advance after another, from video games to beepers to iPods to Facebook. (His was a Betamax family.) Now, at age 33, Traister writes in Salon that he feels woefully behind the rest of the world. He realizes that all the tech toys he eschewed as part of his Luddite philosophy "weren't the vain consumerist crap I pretended they were." Instead, "they were the foundation of a language that almost everyone in my generation has learned to speak." Everyone except Traister.

"I’m like the club guy who wakes up one morning in his mid 30s with a cocaine nose, an overdue rent notice slipped under his door, and a clump of hair on his pillow and realizes he may have missed something bigger than a good party," he writes. "Actually, I’m worse than that guy, because he probably knows how to use an iPhone." Or an iPod: Traister gave up after a month on the one he got for his last birthday. Click for the full column, which ends with Traister contemplating that it's time, once and for all, to join the tech club. (More Luddite stories.)