In T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” there is a sarcastic line: “Let me disclose the gifts reserved for old age.” The “gifts” Eliot mentions include “the cold friction of expiring sense” and “the rending pain of re-enactment / Of all that you have done, and been.” Eliot died before the advent of modern computer technology, so he did not experience another “gift” of old age: constant phone calls from mostly illegitimate businesses trying to sell you something.

After I turned 70 several years ago, these folks began calling me...