Douglas Adams once observed that, as we age, we start thinking differently about new technologies:

"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

I thought of that quote recently, when Google acquired Twitch for more than a billion dollars.

You may have missed the news. Probably because you, like pretty much everyone I’ve talked with over the age of 30, has never even heard of Twitch.

So, allow me to explain: Twitch is a site where you can watch other people play video games.

That’s right. It’s a website where you watch video of the player’s screen, sometimes with a picture-in-picture video of the person’s face, too, while they play a video game. You don’t play; you just watch them do it. And, somehow, Tweens are on the site watching for hours at a time. Enough so that Google deemed it a billion dollars of eyeballs worth.

To me, however, it seems patently absurd. A sure sign I’m now over the hill, and losing my sense of tech cool.

I had a similar feeling this week, when I ran into a young guy I had wanted to hire as a designer for one of our portfolio companies. I had emailed him previously, and hadn’t heard back. I had Facebook messaged him, too, thinking perhaps he didn’t use email much. Nothing.

Oh, he told me when we met. He didn’t really use Facebook or email. Mostly he just communicated with his friends via Snapchat, and two or three other apps I’d never even heard of.

Ever precocious, I’m a year ahead on Adams’ 35-year cutoff for becoming a technologically-confused old man. It seems I have nothing to look forward to now but decades and decades of all my appliances perpetually flashing 12:00.