The Optimist's Dilemma

How I Learned to Stop Dreaming and Block Unknown Numbers

I got one of those texts from an unknown caller that just said “Hi!” yesterday. I immediately reported it as junk and deleted it, of course, because I know it is at best an attempt to verify an active number for someone’s mailing list (no, I do not need Best Rx Without Prescription, thanks) and most likely a phishing expedition to set me up for a pig butchering scam. Billions of dollars are stolen each year from people who started friendly conversations with the strangers who “accidentally” texted their number. The exact amount is unknown because many victims are embarrassed to report it, and I can relate. Because there is still an optimistic spark in me, a fantasy-addict piece of my brain that for a split second looks at the text and thinks “Hey, my old lover who ghosted me has a new number and he’s reaching out! I knew he missed me….”

A teenager lives in my head who instantly attaches a rom-com wish-fulfillment scenario to every missed call and every handwritten envelope. I know I should strangle her to death and put her out of my misery. But I’m also fond of the sweet, naive girl.

That sweet, naive girl

I am a digital immigrant, not a digital native, and in some ways the new age has put paid to this kind of all-in-your-head romance. I mean, you do know who’s calling. It says so right on the screen. And you don’t get to fantasize that you missed that special someone’s call because you were on the phone with someone else; you see that on your screen, too. (If you have better eyesight and faster reflexes than I do, you can even pick one up and put the other on hold.) There’s no more thrill leafing through the mail, because just maybe a crush from the past has been looking for you and wrote to your old address and it got forwarded. For one thing, no one snail mails any more and, two, if someone is in fact looking for you… they already found you.

Once upon a time, I could daydream about a high school boyfriend appearing out of nowhere to sweep me off my feet. Thanks to Facebook, they’ve all appeared already… and they rarely turned out as well in real life as they did in imagination. I remember one tall skinny drink of water with a dandelion puff of auburn curls who somehow grew up to look like Wilfred Brimley’s stunt double.

Of course, the new age offers its own digital catnip for the love addict mind, and there’s an entire underground economy built to exploit it. I’ve noticed lately that romance scammers with great (stolen) pics have figured out a way to put a phony Verified badge on their Hinge profiles. Now, I know that too good to be true isn’t true. You know that too good to be true isn’t true. But that badge gives teenage-addict-brain some ammunition, and next thing you know she’s thinking “maybe this time is different”… which is why scammers went to the trouble of hacking it. They know their target.

I don’t like being a mark. Some of the unhappiest memories of my life have been times when men played me — and men have played me, because sweet naive teenage-addict-brain is very, very gullible. “I love the ones who leave me, and I leave the ones who love me.” I heard someone say that the other day and, oh boy, is that true for me. I would do anything to keep the guy with one foot out the door from taking the next step. Even if it was injurious to me, or people I cared about, or, according to the court documents, the State of California.

What is a nice Jewish girl, a meek bookworm who went to Bronx High School of Science, doing in the penitentiary? Winning the love of a wannabe motorcycle outlaw with dimples, of course.

So I am very careful in our brave new digital world. I am what the military would call a hardened target. My phone screens unknown callers. I send unexpected texts to junk. I regret this sometimes, because I am an optimist by nature and kinda miss the days of getting excited about a handwritten envelope in the mail. But as the great director Billy Wilder, an Austrian Jew who fled Berlin before the war, said: “The optimists died in the gas chambers. The pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.”