I read an article, The New Internet, in Relevant Magazine's 59th issue and was dumbfounded. This is what part of it said:
"The most immediate of the Internet’s big changes is an evolution in speed. Recent innovations have made it possible for the Internet to run 250 times faster than its current top speeds, and the National Science Foundation is asking tech-heads to build apps with an assumption of zero load time. Zero load time. In the very near future, waiting for a website will be a thing of the very distant past." (click here for the full article)Wait, the idea of waiting is soon going to be a thing of the past? Have things gone so far to make the idea of waiting a bad thing or an inconvenience?
I just wrote a message for a service this Sunday on the idea of being satisfied and what dawned on me is that the culture we live in today, at least in North America, is one of being unsatisfied; nothing is ever enough. Why?
I think that we are looking in all the wrong places and therefore instant gratification is the only thing we can actually grasp and see.
Thinking about instant gratification leads me to thinking about the ultimate instant gratification, porn. I heard a stat the other day that said that porn websites dominate 80% of the World Wide Web. Can you believe that? 80 percent of what is on the web is porn. Take that in for a second. Is this what we want as a society?
Instant gratification is all my generation (born in the 80s) knows. We only know things as fast and instant. Even more, the generation now that I am dealing with as a youth worker doesn't even know what it's like to not have the internet!
In all my studies I keep on being reminded of where true satisfaction lies. It is not from the world we see, or the culture of the past, although He did walk in this world.
Instant gratification is like junk food because it seems good at first, but it leads to an unhealthy lifestyle that just craves more of it; the more you eat, the more you want. We need to get back to what lasts, to what sustains.
Let me know what you think.
Till next time...
Thanks for your thoughts! I agree that instant gratification is what we often get in our society today, of course. It truly is incredible how self-serving and demanding we are naturally. And how quickly these thoughts go into negativity. How often do we act as if we're operating from the standpoint of: if it's not instant it's not good. Good things take time, period. Waiting is a skill and patience is developed. We need to exercise our waiting muscle more than ever now! And we have the power to choose to be unsatisfied when we have to wait or to be satisfied, patient, and positive. All the power to those of us who are able to be satisfied, patient, and positive in our world of instant gratification.
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing!