A few weeks ago, my troll boyfriend found a Tamagotchi in a GameStop, and he decided on the spur of the moment to get it for me.
I was a kid when the Tamagotchi craze hit, and I was always envious of my friends and cousins who got to hand-rear their little digital babies. (My parents wouldn’t let me have one.) Part of me always wondered what I missed in my childhood. And now I know. Oh, I know.
I missed nothing.
A Tamagotchi is a beep encased in a plastic shell. It exists to haunt you with ghostly notifications that signify nothing. Press button, my Tamagotchi screams at me from morning to night. Press button or I will die. The Tamagotchi, I have realized, is everything that is wrong with our smartphone era.
Is this what went wrong...
