People like to complain. Their favorite topics are politics, government and taxes. It’s so unimaginative. Politics is the same as it’s always been—people acting like people. Government is also the same—it’s how we manage our public sphere, and you can be sure there will be someone who won’t like the management. Income taxes, well, nobody likes them, but they have gone down for most people, and as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, they are the price we pay for civilization. So, if you’re this kind of complainer, get a life.

People are still feeling a pinch, though, and maybe they haven’t identified it. But I can. What is really taking a chunk out of today’s wallets is the cost of staying in touch with the world.

Remember the good old days? No pay TV, only an aerial. A phone, not a landline. Your computer?  About the only thing your first computer could do was read two disks – one that was “read only” with the software program on it, and one that was “write only,” onto which we’d type. That computer couldn’t communicate with anyone. Fifteen years ago, when I ran a newspaper, we were excited when we began to send news stories from our computers over the phone instead of paying a messenger to haul a disk to our graphic designer who laid out the newspaper and prepared it for the printer, who picked up her disk in a truck. Now everything goes by e-mail.

In 2012 we’re all online, searching the ether for information and connections of all kinds. Communication and the costs associated with it have taken over our lives. A Comcast bill?  It can be more than $200 per month with your landline, television and Internet.

Your cell phone quickly consumes cash. $70 a month for unlimited calls. An extra $20 for unlimited texting and so forth. $100 more per month if you want to download lots of data. We’re up to $390.

Your iPad connection could cost you about $80 per month, pushing you to $470.

Even your landline is more expensive. Of course you can call anywhere in the U.S. for a pretty reasonable fee, but the phones themselves are pricey. My mother and father had a phone number that eventually become Harrison 7-2602—on a party line. That black phone that Ma Bell rented to us lasted from before I was born until my parents moved 45 years later. Now the buttons on the phones our family got eight years ago for a few hundred dollars are dying, and the phones will soon need replacing.

Perhaps you have a car. Sirius radio, which has no advertising and pulls in stations of all types unless the signal is blocked by a tree or a building, will take about $20 a month from your pocket. And automobile wi-fi, which allows to you connect to the Internet in your car from your computer and also might include Google Earth on your car’s navigation system, will set you back about $29 per month on Cadillac, with a dollar more on others. So now we’re up to about $520.

Your CDs are out of date. Even though there appears to be a small comeback for turntables as a cool retro artifact, the real news is on iCloud, where accessing 20 million songs on any of your devices will cost only $25 annually.

That totals more than $6,000 a year. Not all folks have all this stuff. But I’d wager that most of us probably are spending a small fortune on these connections. And this tally doesn’t include any hotel, airline or airport fees you might have to pay to get online, or charges for the web sites that aren’t free, or such equipment as a back up disk or the extra electricity we’re paying for to run all these little buggers.
If you’re one of those paying thousands for connections that you didn’t even know existed five years ago, there is surely more to come and your expenses in this realm will reliably go up.

We’re just going to have to remember the good old days, when we actually could complain about taxes.