Your Estimated Delivery Date: Be Patient and Wait
Living in the first world, we get to have almost anything we want instantly. You suddenly wonder how many siblings Putin has. Ask Google. Boom, within a second — 0.87 seconds to be exact — you have the answer.
The internet definitely improved our lives. It’s now hard to imagine having have to go to the library to find answers to our questions. It saves us a lot of time and effort. And it also made us a lot lazier and selfish.
You see this cool pair of sneakers on Instagram, so you order it on Amazon. Within a day, it’s here. You get to wear it tonight and will be on your Instagram. You are hungry and feeling like that avocado bacon burger from the shop 2 blocks away. You go to your food delivery app because getting up from the couch and putting on pants is just too much of an effort. Before you finish another episode of House of Cards, your door bell rings. Your avocado bacon burger and sweet potato fries are here. Fries are a little mussy so you complain.
From toilet paper to food, we get pretty much everything we need delivered to our doors, we don’t need to go to stores ourselves anymore. This is incredible. But we are now so spoiled, if we don’t see our orders in the mail box the next day, we are not happy. Food delivery used to be pizza and Chinese food till recent years. Now we have all kinds of choices, get to have them without leaving the house, in our pjs, and we still complain! We complain that it took more than half an hour or the food wasn’t warm. No wonder a lot of us struggle to build a career or relationships. We’ve lost patience and tolerance to work for something.
I love waiting for something to arrive. A couple of days ago, I ordered some books on Amazon and they haven’t arrived yet. One will arrive sometime next week, and the other one won't get here for another 2 weeks or even 3. And I’m totally ok with it. I actually enjoy opening the mail box everyday, and waiting for them. I have something to look forward to everyday when I get home. A lot of things in life, the waiting part could be as exciting as the actual events. Take vacation, for example. When I was little, I was so excited for our vacation to Spain we would go every summer. Packing for the trip was the highlight for me. It’s finally a week away and I pull my suitcase out of the closet. I’d pack all my favorite clothes imagining myself walking down Sevilla in that blue dress or laying at the beach in Barcelona with that orange bikini. Even now, I love counting the days till I get to have a little break from the ordinary life. Planning for trips gives us the excuse to daydream about places we’ve never been and this makes our mundane days a little more fun. Be a vacation or books, looking forward for something is the fuel for life.
We’ve lost the art of waiting. When we can get things instantly, we put less value in them. As a result, we get bored with them easily and keep consuming more and more. But we are never satisfied.
So I’m worried about our future. If we can get our stupid sneakers and books within a day and dinner within a tv episode, what comes next? What we have now was something hard to believe a decade ago, but a lot of us have already forgotten to appreciate this amazing commodity. Now that our society and technology is changing rapidly, what’s next? How spoiled, how lazy are we going to get? We will stop walking to stores, restaurants, then we won’t even need to walk to our own door?
We might get our deliveries in a matter of minutes, but most important things in life won’t. They are something that we have to work for and will take time. Your dream job isn’t a couple of taps away. Your future partner won’t show up at the door. Or maybe, someday even they will. And we will still be complaining that it took more than half an hour.
