Start Date: Circa 2012
Wait. No , really, wait.
Was it difficult? Did it feel awkward?
It is part of our daily lives. We were taught as children: “wait in line”, “wait your turn”. Maybe your first job involved waiting tables. We all seem to increasingly spend our lives waiting in traffic. Yet it seems that we are less inclined to wait than ever, less equipped and less prepared.
A neighbor and I discussed our both having grown up with parents who had been depression era poor, about how hard they worked and how little they wasted. She talked about a time when she rode a bus to school in Chicago and saw an ad for something called a “credit card”. She thought it would never catch on. Who would volunteer to pay more and get into debt for something they could not yet afford? You wait.
Our parents generation waited to go to school through the GI bill, then got a job before marriage, waited to have savings to buy a house and start a family, and waited until they could afford something to buy it. Now we seem to think that it is our birth certificates that decide what we should have: 21 – a nice car, 25 – a nice house. Let our parents wait for us to leave, let the bank wait to be paid.
Where did all this need for instant gratification come from? Some of it seems to be from the two media that appeared in the last 20 years or so: the internet and the cell phone. They have denied a generation of young people both patience and problem solving skills. As unimaginable as it seems, phone calls were once expensive (now its the phones) and logistically limited. You often waited until Sunday for the cheaper rates to call home. If something happened on Monday, unless there were body parts involved, you had to take some time and figure it out or wait for advice from Mom and Dad. Now you just hit the cell phone as the man on the Staples ad hits the EASY button. Why wait? Why think? Just ping?
In earlier eras when life required a great deal of waiting, people of limited means and very little formal education developed communication skills vastly superior to our own. Not limited to 140 characters, but very limited in access to paper and ink, every word was precious and carefully chosen. Thought was applied to its selection and the manner in which it was written. Now the same technology that denies us the opportunity to wait for answers also keeps us from waiting to form our thoughts and decisions. Why sit down and write a careful letter when you can tweet your instantaneous reaction, no matter how unfortunate it will be down the road. Your thoughts, and/or naked photos et al. are both universal and eternal as the internet is everywhere and it never goes away. Haste and desire for access allow you to express your thoughts as inarticulately as promptly. What could be better than unlimited, irremovable, dumbed-down content?
This seems to now affect all of our social behavior. Why make a grocery list when you can stand in the aisles calling home to check for what sort of cheese you intended to buy. Why have a pleasant visit with your dining companions and respect fellow diners when you can pop open the cell phone to check in with work, friends, children, etc. Presumably there is some sort of ego boost from going through life with the accoutrement of someone who works for Mission Control or perhaps a transplant surgeon, i.e. someone who genuinely needs to be “on call”
Even before the internet and the cell phone there was a precursor of where we were headed. Blame it on Ted Turner. He decided that people should be able to access the news at any time, without waiting. Surely this had a value to those who didn’t have a schedule based on the network. But the down side was the red light, the damned blinking red light telling the anchors that the camera was on, time was passing and they had to say something, anything.
Truth to tell there really isn’t 24 hours of news most days so they had to blather, thus begat talk news and worse yet “Breaking News”. Breaking news is all about being first and nothing about being accurate. Walter Cronkite had an entire day to find out if something he was about to report had any more validity than water cooler gossip. Now it is all about being first to get it to you, maybe wrong, maybe dead wrong, but we were first. Anchors are now experts on aircraft crashes, high speed chases, military expeditions, and hostage situations, always introducing their comments with “we don’t want to speculate” and yet they must because of that red blinking light.
Even the way in which we receive media is no longer stationary. We can’t wait to go to a bookstore so they no longer exist. Four hundred years ago the lower middle class would stand for hours to attend outdoor plays by Shakespeare, hoping for respite from a harsh existence by our standards. Now sitting in front of the TV is too much effort. The future success of every media company is mobile. You need to be able to watch on the road, in a restaurant, any time you wish and on the go. No waiting.
There is an aphorism to the effect that “time waits for no man”. But it appears we have developed a society where “no man waits for time”.
I don’t know where all of this will lead, but if I wait, just wait, maybe it will come to me.