My generation is obsessed with wanting everything NOW. Facebook, Twitter, online shopping, internet dating and fast food have all contributed to this. We don’t wait for Christmas anymore – we buy it for ourself to get delivered the next day and open it as soon as possible. Newspapers are dying because they take too long to produce and to read. Families huddled round the wireless are gone. Books are so last season. Plastic surgery can change us instantly and plastic in our wallet can mean instant gratification. Politics websites, celebrity gossip forums and 24 hour news mean we know everything even before it’s happened.
So is this a good thing or is it detrimental to us as a society? Are we just more efficient these days or are we just more restless and impatient?
Karl Marx famously once said “Religion is the opium of the people.” Pre-recession it was shopping that was the drug of the masses. As a nation we don’t make anything anymore – and we haven’t since the 1970s. So we just shopped instead and filled our homes with things and decorated ourselves. Clearly, that didn’t work so now we are doing a fair bit of soul searching to decide what our new mephedrone will be.
Some put their energy into their faith, others their fitness (we are the most obese we’ve ever been – perhaps this is down to our reliance on convenience foods because we’re too busy to put anything that takes longer than 5 precious minutes into our bodies and then we invest in a weight loss programme that will get those pounds off asap), some the environment and others try to fight the system; the Occupy movement filled me with hope initially – political consciousness was still alive – but now it seems that has been crushed because it makes the streets of London look a bit untidy for the olympics. And we wouldn’t want that.
I’m not saying there isn’t hope; there is – and lots of it. But we are all searching for something at the moment and the trouble is we are not sure what it is yet.
Wanting something in the moment can be a positive thing. We can get things done. NOW. And those things can be a force for good. But like in Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirrors’ series (where everything in somebody’s memory could be retrieved instantly) it can also be something quite dangerous. Not everything can be done with the click of a button. Waiting can teach us a lot. Patience is after all, a virtue.
