Taping TV shows has become a habit for me; I never watch anything live anymore. I use the word “taping,” but of course I use a DVR, and I should say I “record” TV shows. Compared to the bad old days (10 years ago), when I had to program my VCR to the time and the day I wanted to record a show, the DVR makes it so simple. Click on the program you want to record and, presto chango, you’re set. No mess, no fuss. And with the simple press of a button, the DVR jumps ahead 30 seconds so I no longer have to sit through commercials for medicines that will cure diseases I don’t have. Yet.

By skipping commercials, I can watch the evening news in 22 minutes – usually less because I also skip through the heartwarming stories at the end of each broadcast. I’m not against heartwarming stories, but that’s not why I’m watching the news. If I wanted to watch heartwarming, uplifting, human-interest stories, I would watch a show called “Heartwarming, Uplifting, Human-Interest Stories,” not one called “The Evening News.”

I used to think I would spend the time I saved watching commercials to clean the house or write the great American novel, but it turns out I really use it to watch more TV. I can zip through “So You Think You Can Dance” and “The Voice” in half the time it would take to watch them live.

When the DVR came along, I put my VCR in the broom closet, thinking that someday I’d hook it up again and watch all the hand-labeled videotapes I’d never gotten around to watching. It has never happened. It sits in there with the old CD player that iPods made obsolete and the boxes of printer cables and connectors that wi-fi made obsolete and the giant speakers that earbuds and desktop speakers made obsolete.

When I add up all the money spent on electronics that are too old to use but not old enough to sell as antiques, I want to weep. There are boxes of 156KB floppy disks in there and expensive computer backup devices that can hold 20MB of data, or about 10 times less than the tiny card in my digital camera. That camera will end up in the broom closet of broken dreams soon, along with several first-generation cell phones because they are so hopelessly old-fashioned and out of date. It would cost me money to sell them on eBay.