We live in an age of the instant.
Everything we do, whether it’s a task to complete or a destination to travel, everything simply must be accomplished immediately — and if it isn’t, we get angry.
“I can’t believe we had to wait half an hour before taking off!”
“I can’t believe my parcel arrived an hour later than Amazon said it would!”
“I can’t believe this GIF is taking more than a second to load!”
It’s something we all do. If you claim to never have been upset over a web page faffing around for more than a couple of seconds or Netflix inexplicably buffering when you have a perfect connection, you’re lying. Heck, I used to grumble daily about slow trains on my grind into the office in London, sometimes going so far as to message friends who were entirely indifferent to the situation about how annoyed I was (of course, complaining about South West Trains is perfectly valid and deserving of an entirely separate article — watch this space).
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting things done quickly; it’s a fairly primal trait. While things have moved on a bit from the days of eat quickly or risk starving/being mauled by a jaguar, we certainly spend enough of our lives sleeping and stuck in traffic jams that it’s understandable to feel aggrieved that services we’ve specifically paid for are still delaying us, like when the car rental place has one person on the desk with a long queue and four in the back room inflating balloons, with the only compensation a measly sorry for the wait.
Only this lack of patience has bled through to virtually every facet of our lives as it’s been slowly exacerbated by first the internet, then more specifically social media. Justified frustration with poor service has become an unhealthy human condition; something being insidiously ingrained into our species as children grow up with screens and Whatsapp instead of the outdoors and books.
I always say, as naff as it may sound, that the key to a better world is and always had been through children. Pretty self explanatory, right? It’s our kids who are going to be running the world before long, and their kids after them, and their kids after them, and so on and so on... If you really think about it, the only reason things are basically the same as they’ve always been is because we keep teaching kids the same things.
But if we can encourage their imagination and creativity? If we can raise each one of them to really think about our place within the universe and ask pertinent questions? To be skeptical of authority figures telling them what to do? To respect others? To be kind? To differentiate between what’s actually important and what’s sending our species towards a pathetically premature death (like realizing we should be funding stuff like space exploration, healthcare, environmental safeguarding and education over the military and idiot politicians’ rhetoric campaigns)? If we can do that then, just perhaps, things will get better.
And, you know, if we can raise them on books and thinking instead of Candy Crush, that’ll probably help too.
Indeed, there are plenty of things wrong with how we’re collectively influencing younger generations, but instilling impatience is up there with the worst. It’s teaching children that patience isn’t a virtue after all. That composure, tolerance and self-control aren’t values to be cherished. That spending time on something = inefficiency.
How detrimental that could prove to be.
Has the previous two decades of insane technological advancement signed the death warrant on such virtues? Is there a genuine chance art is going to suffer or disappear entirely because we don’t value dedication to creativity?
Perhaps these sound like hyperbolic questions, but that’s only because it’s something we don’t want to think about — don’t want to, or simply can’t, what with our brains overflowing with low value, short-form content every second of the day.
I’m genuinely worried that authentic talent is going to be lost. Look at it on an historic scale and there’s a pattern; when once we understood how to make things — like how to weave clothing or hunt for food — we now troll the supermarket trying our best to avoid genetically modified potatoes.
When once we spent a great deal of time and effort crafting breathtaking buildings which stand to this day and continue to be marveled at, we now make efficient boxes. Bland, livable boxes packed together as tightly as possible without a hint of character but plenty of fiscal potential for the owner. Do we think people a hundred years from now will be marveling at millennial architecture? Do we care?
When once we gave our artists free reign to craft majestic operas and paint emotive works of art and tell incredible stories over a period of hours, we now have publishers who machete books down to under 300 pages because “people just don’t want to read thick books”, SEO plugins on Wordpress telling us to stop writing paragraphs consisting of more than two sentences, and complaints about movies running over 120 minutes. I know Michael Bay is a thing, and sure enough there’s plenty to be said for brevity, but sometimes movies just need time to tell their stories.
The former are very broad examples, of course, and it’s silly to imagine we should all still be making our own clothing or hunting for food, but this doesn’t mean there hasn’t been something lost — something fundamental that we’re never likely to regain. As for the deterioration of patience and artistry, it’s an example following that pattern, only brought into much sharper focus because of how quickly it’s happened. Instead of centuries, we’ve gotten used to technology’s instantaneous, addictive efficiency in a couple of decades.
We’re on an evolutionary precipice like never before.
As economies value financial efficiency and quantity over quality, the average public now values popularity over talent. We have “celebrities” who are famous for sitting around a house arguing with one another and for being watched watching television. The overall state of TV, which I dare not get into, is bad enough, which makes it so alarming that that it’s not even the worst offender.
Social media may have started with the best intentions, but what it has gradually done is glorify mediocrity. We’ve reached such a strange point where we heap attention on individuals who don’t really do anything. They have no credible talent and their content just isn’t good enough. Yet they’re runaways on YouTube or Twitter, spewing out the same inane content day after day without any form of individuality or purpose other than to earn likes — and we let them do it.
We’re allowing this poor content to dictate our recreational time because…well, why? Because it’s too much effort to read a book or think about important questions? Because the world is so horrible that it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t exist and instead get lost in a vacuous hole of idiots earning 10x your salary and filling bookshelves for no other reason than because you’re on their page?
Gosling said it best in La La Land:
“They worship everything and they value nothing.”
Indeed.
