There was a package on the front step, today.

It is Sunday, October 13, 2024.

The stuff in the package is relatively unimportant; in this case the point is that it was something ordered from Amazon, yesterday afternoon. Not only was it delivered the following morning, it was delivered on a Sunday.

As I looked at the package — sitting there on our kitchen counter — I pondered how fast everything in life seems to have gotten.

I remember well the whole process of ”sending away” for certain toys and such, when I was a kid.

You started with a paper catalog or advertisement, you filled out an order form with pen and ink, wrote a check (or begged your parents to!), put it in an envelope, affixed a postage stamp, dropped it in a mailbox… and waited for your order to arrive.

”Allow 4-6 weeks for processing” was a pretty common phrase.

Along with that came a familiar feeling of longing and expectation that has all been erased from the cultural landscape of 2024. Anticipation was a relatively prolonged experience.

I Want it NOW!

We have grown to expect everything to come to us now, or preferably yesterday, before we even realized that we wanted it.

This whole Instant Gratification culture extends far beyond just ordering something from far away.

It also applies to things like our favorite TV programs. It lies deep, there… because it manifests not only as being able to buy whatever we want to watch on demand, but the entire series drops immediately, so you can binge watch it, right away. No anticipation and speculating on what they are going to come up with, for the next episode.

We have completely lost the ability to wait for anything.

And many people have become impatient and intolerant as part of the process.

We have a fairly extensive and lush vegetable garden, and part of the joy is getting to watch nature unfold, to nurture something as it grows from seed in bare dirt to sprouts to full grown plants and then return to earth… over time.

I suppose my comment to all this ”hurry up culture” is that a day is still the same 24 hours long, and an hour still has 60 minutes… and those time units are exactly the same length they used to be, 50; 500; 5000 years ago. Are we really making our lives any better by trying to ever shorten every aspect of them?

I’m not convinced that we are. In fact, something tells me that we are losing certain nuances of what it means to be human in our eternal quest to get everything to happen faster.

I also look to that and can’t help but wonder about where the future will take us, if this trajectory continues. Will be reach a point where we don’t even do anything, anymore… and ”experiences” will merely be a memory implant of sorts that make us feel like we ”have done” something, without actually having done anything?

Other than "saving time," I am struggling to find any tangible benefit to any of all this. I definitely don't see how it enriches our lives...

Somehow, it all feels remarkably like certain dystopian futures depicted by some science fiction writers, in which the species ”evolve” into being nothing but endless rows of brains suspended in clear laboratory beakers, stored in giant warehouses… ”bodies” having become obsolete.

I'm open to the possibility that maybe that actually is someone’s utopia… but I am struggling to see how that constitutes the ”highest and best” for the human species.

Just stuff I noodle around, on a random Sunday!

Now I must unpack this box to get at its content, lest not doing so is dangerously delaying my experience of being alive!

Thanks for coming to visit, and do leave a comment if you feel so inclined!

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