Immediacy is the name of the game – at what cost?

“The time you think you are missing,
misses you too.”
Ymber Delecto

Patience is for losers…for successful people, everything appears with a simple snap of their fingers – at least that’s what the media and technology around us make us believe…but if we look underneath the surface, the price we are paying for believing in this motto is enormous.

Below are just some examples of places we get these messages from. I’m going through them one by one so that you can become aware of how they impact in our perceptions and, ultimately, in our lives:

Medicine – In the field of medicine, how many times do we hear the phrase ‘fast relief’? In a society that cannot wait, being fast is the name of the game. The ‘good enough’ solution will be taken instead of the ‘great solution’ if the great solution takes longer. Let’s say that we have a headache. Going back to the basics, a headache is a way of your body telling you that there is something out of the ordinary happening with it – some examples would be: you are dehydrated, you are too tired, there is too much noise around you, it’s too hot, etc. Instead of looking at the root of the cause, we want a solution that will work fast. (this point raises another very important question which is about ‘treating the symptoms but not the cause’ – but that’s the subject of another post entirely).

Internet – some of you still remember the time that we needed to go to the nearest library in order to research information on a given topic. Those days are well gone and the internet can now give us access to relevant information at our fingertips in a fraction of a second. We can even email an expert in the field and join specialised forums focused on that topic.

Movies/TV – Have you ever noticed that we never see ‘mundane’ actions in movies/commercials? Actions such as paying for the bill and waiting for the change, parking the car, waiting in line to be served. Of course the movie would be much more boring if these actions were actually shown on it but the side effect is the distortion of our perception of how long things really take to be accomplished – we want results NOW! In fact, one example is that restaurants have a way of coping with human impatience by having a well thought out system in which there is something happening every couple of minutes (bringing the menu, coming back to take the order, bringing the drinks and finally bringing the meal). Imagine if we had to wait for a whole 10 minutes! for the meal to be ready without any interactions in between?

But what are the implications of this impatience and immediacy?

Two main implications come to mind:
a) We don’t enjoy every single step of the way – we become so focused on the destination that we forget to pay attention to the beauty of everyday life. When was the last time that you sat down quietly in a park bench and spent over 15 minutes observing the tree leaves dance with the wind?
b) The other implication is that we don’t become masters at anything as we don’t persevere. (this topic is so vast that it will also be covered on a separate posting).

I would love to start a dialogue on these topics so please take a minute or two to post a reply below with your views. Thanks for reading.