Rewatchable (Premium)

Like any couple, my wife and I have had our disagreements, but it’s notable—and maybe mostly luck—that we’ve had few major fights over the years, certainly nothing that either of us later regretted. And though we have real problems like anyone else, uncertainty about the future, worries about our kids, and so on, our biggest day-to-day issue is decidedly less dramatic.

In what is perhaps the ultimate first world problem, we will sit in front of the TV, me paging through multiple online services with the remote, her on her phone, both of us searching for something—anything—to watch. It is in these moments that we reach a dark nadir of our relationship. As the minutes tick by, we become more and more frustrated with each other’s inability to solve this problem. In the most painful of these nights, we often spend more time looking for content than we do watching it. And whatever we end up watching is often a compromise, a true-crime documentary or other one-off that fills the suddenly short time we have left before bed. So we sit in the dark, half-watching and stewing in frustration.

Or, at least I do. These nights are the proof point for one of my ADD-related pet peeves, that I never be stranded with nothing to do during downtimes. I prepare for plane flights by making sure that I have music and podcasts downloaded to my phone, and videos downloaded to my iPad, just in case. (More often than not, I just open a laptop and write, though I do listen to music then.) I likewise have several reading apps on my phone, and always have Kindle e-books and audiobooks downloaded and at the ready. I’m like the digital content version of an end-of-times survivalist. A content prepper, if you will.

I hate these downtimes. It dates back to my childhood, when I’d grab a cereal box and read each side of that while eating breakfast if there was nothing else at hand. When we visited the accountant the other day in the middle of the afternoon to sign our tax forms, we ended up waiting about 15 minutes before we saw him—it was Tax Day, after all—and I regretted not bringing my laptop as I was in the middle of something at the time. But the worst example from this year was back in February when we renewed our temporary residency in Mexico: We spent over 90 minutes waiting in line before we talked to anyone, and then another 90 minutes after that before finishing up, and we weren’t allowed to use our phones the entire time, even to read offline. I was almost literally crawling up the walls. Oh, the humanity.

But it gets worse. I am, after all, the guy who responded to, “You really are a glass half full kind of guy” with, “You have no idea: My glass isn’t half full, it’s empty, and I’ve noticed there’s a crack in it, and now I’m just waiting for the internal bleeding to start.” Yes, that really came out of my mouth. And, yes, I said that to my wife.

More specifically, I experience a special kind of hell in the...