Instant Gratification

Have you ever stopped to realize how reliant we are on instant gratification?  I mean really reliant on it.  I can say that I had a moment of clarity this past weekend when the epitome of my Instant Gratification broke!  Now, I am not proud of this.  Not proud at all.  But a little piece of me died this weekend.  Our Keurig coffee maker officially stopped working properly!!  Who would have thought that I would have become so addicted to (not only the caffeine), but the instant satisfaction that the Keurig brought to my life.  Sure we have an "old-fashioned" coffee maker - and I say that semi-seriously - but I had forgotten how much "effort" (again, I am being dramatic) goes into using one of those.  Thank goodness we still had coffee filters in the cabinet!  So I busted out the old coffee pot, put in a trusty filter, and realized we didn't have any coffee other than the K-cups.  So, I took a knife, cut open those K-cups, and dumped them in the coffee machine.  Then the waiting game began.  I couldn't just press the button and within :30 seconds I had a warm cup of coffee.  The coffee maker takes time to warm the water, and then to brew the coffee.  I had to wait a good 10 minutes!  Before the Keurig, I didn't think anything of the wait time, but now, knowing that it was possible to have coffee that quickly, the waiting game was rough.  In the end, though, I was so proud of myself for being resourceful and for remembering how to use the damn coffee maker.  Oh the little things in life that we take for granted.

Besides the Keurig coffee machine, there are so many other examples of how we, as a society, have become obsessed with instant gratification.  Next on the list - text messages/email.  Instead of picking up the phone and calling one another, or heaven forbid you write a note and send it with a stamp to someone, we have resorted to email and text messaging.  And the expectation has now become that if you send an email or a text, that you will get a response immediately.  I have taken plenty of courses through work that encourage you to not respond to emails right away - which to me is ironic given the most guilty participants of this "you better respond now" movement is corporate America, but that's neither here nor there.  Now whether or not I follow this advice depends on how busy I am throughout the day.  The experts out there say that you shouldn't stay logged into your email all day long, and you certainly shouldn't have notifications set up that tell you every time you get an email in your inbox.  They say that you should set up an allotted amount of time everyday to check emails and only do it then.  I think, in theory, this is a great idea.  However, the expectations exist for a reason.  People want a response as quickly as possible.  So if you are the only one on an email chain that checks their emails periodically, you are inherently the a-hole; the one person that doesn't respond with an answer as timely as everyone else, and therefore YOU hold up whatever process is waiting.  It has almost become a race to see who can respond first.  It's generally the first responder that can pass the buck on to someone else as well.  I have to admit, though, that if I hear my Blackberry vibrate, then I am definitely going to check it.  It's just how I am programmed.

But let's not forget how awesome it is to go out to your mailbox and find a letter in there or a "just because" card.  Nothing makes me smile more than getting a piece of mail that isn't a bill or junk!  If we focus too much on communicating with one another via email or text messaging, then lose sight of the human aspect that writing a letter brings.

So Keurigs and emails have ingrained in us a sense of instant gratification, but so have debit cards.  You know, as a kid, I had to know how to count money.  I had to know that two nickels made a dime and that four quarters made a dollar.  In this day and age, everyone uses debit cards.  I like that commercial  for the Visa Check Card that shows how easy the world works when everyone swipes their card.  It also shows how the world stops when someone uses cash.  There is some truth to that commercial; we can quickly get through a lunch line if we simply swipe our cards (that is, if the card-swiping machine is working properly), but we can't forget the fundamentals of knowing how to count money!  This is quite the analogy for life, don't you think? 

Moral of the story: even though we are surrounded by things that help to make our life easier and move more quickly, let's not forget how to use our coffee pots, or snail mail, or cash.  You never know when the Keurig may break.