Growing up, there was a time when I wrote to my distant relatives. Went over to the local post office to send it out. It was an exciting experience. Even the later part of waiting for the ‘possible’ reply was thrilling. It was a neat moment wrapped in a little envelope. It was quite convenient for the time, something my parents kept highlighting. In their day, even getting the word out through telegram was a process. I felt happy about the time I lived in.

And now, this. It took a generation for communication to reach a week’s long wait for a letter. Now it seems like the time-to-something keeps reducing every 2 years. Everything is instantaneous. It is perplexing how something as desirable and fictional as the speed of delivery has become a dire need.

…where I used to wait a week for a response, there were some things that were noteworthy. Since it wasn’t a two-way communique, I used to be creative in writing a sort of monologue. Writing those letters gave me perspective about my own life. We were always ‘fine’ in our letters. It was a magical time. I suppose there were letters exchanged among other people that weren’t so joyful. But there still kept the wonder alive.

Wonder when the person would receive the letter, wonder when they would write back, wonder what it would be. This wonder filled me with excitement. Excitement and longing, the basic ingredients of desire. More often than not, the wait was justly rewarded.

Now, we take the wait as a thing of the past. It’s not. It’s a part of human nature. The only wait right now is used by top marketing companies to build up excitement before a launch. But even that is sometimes fueled by frenzy, frenzy from a collective. The wait is agony, not pure and exciting. Rewards then have to work a very tight line. Even when they are positive, they tend to be fleeting.

We have a lot of tech but not much to do with it. We may be content, but we are told we shouldn’t be. Patience is no longer a virtue. Impatience is celebrated. We want instant coffee, instant rides, instant payments, instant access to everything that we want, instant food or product deliveries, instant validation, instant redressals. Everything is ‘needed’ instantly. Impatience, in a consumer-driven world, is taken as a right.

It’s not just the consumers. Companies are impatient to the point that they are no longer any real developments. What’s the big difference between a smartphone you bought last year to what you have bought now? Companies don’t want to spend too much time making great products, they want to play on consumer impatience. They are banking on it.

Is the consumer really impatient? We are. At least on the outer layer.

Johnny Carson once said a New York Minute was the time it took a driver to honk behind you when the traffic light goes green. Relatable isn’t it? A New York Minute is the time we wish for every possibility, every challenge, every task, and every opportunity placed in front of us, to fully resolve.

We are all running, and we are told to run faster. We believe, if we don’t we will be left behind. The city streets are then just a race track where people are competing against one another. It’s not out of malice. They would occasionally stop by to help a person in need. But they would get back to running, making up for lost time.

It’s all fine up till now. Yes, life sometimes is a race for everyone and we must run to get where we want. But the impatience of the current generation, or for that matter, everyone in this era, is direr than that. We don’t really know where we are running to. We are conditioned to run without a clear destination.

We want to be the richest people, but we really don’t know what we want to do with it. We want the biggest houses, we want the best gadgets, we want all the amenities derived out a flawed system which runs on itself. Some of the luxuries we yearn for are totally nonsensical.

When I was young, I wanted to be an astrophysicist, but I hated the math. Soon I realized that it’s the unsolved mysteries up in space I loved. So, I became a writer. I went after it and now every work day is fulfilling. I am not running. I just write as it comes. And even when I run, it’s after an idea, a thought, even a branding relation (as I tell brand stories for a living). I don’t run to get a new iPhone or the latest shoes. I was and am insulated to the impatience out there. But I don’t know how long that would last. Lack of impatience now is cause for social banishment.

A New York Minute. It’s the time it takes between the manifestation of our desires and the sudden impatience we get to have it right at that moment. There’s no wait time. It’s conditioned in us now.

The wait, the nurturing of our desires gave us control over our thoughts and emotions. Waiting develops character and personality. That’s the part in our society which I believe is worst hit. Impatience has made character development a rarity.

As a people, we would always search for aspiring character traits, but since impatience has redressed our standards to the lowest historical points, we assume many deceiving character traits as positive, just because they are easily emulated. Gone are the true role models, we are all Beiberians, trolling Instagram for hashtags that make us feel relevant as we run.

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Is it really that bad? If you skimmed to the end, I will leave an analogy here, so it makes more sense.

When you take animals out of their natural habitat, condition them to jump through hoops for treats, that’s the world they will come to know and understand. When you put them back in the wild, they won’t survive. They didn’t develop the necessary skills.

That’s what is it with us now. The instant gratification we have become so used to, addicted to, has subjugated our instincts and intellect. How many of us can make it our own without this nonsensical system of validations around us? It’s time to unplug, to wake up.

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If you didn’t skim through, there’s still hope for humanity. Wake up as many people as you can and perhaps the next generation would have a fighting chance.