How many times have you heard people say with a startled look ‘this year has just flown by’ it’s comical how shocked they are as if time has mysteriously robbed them of their year.
I have started thinking about the reasons behind this, and can’t help but wonder if it’s not somehow influenced by this world we now find ourselves inhabiting.
Why does life flash by at such a ridiculous rate that 24 hours just seems to go by so fast that before you know it you are RSVP’ing to year end functions ….
In this modern age ‘instant’ seems to be the way we live our lives .
Everything happens a hundred times faster than it did ten years ago
Instant cappuccino (which FYI tastes like puke ), Instant customer service, Instant banking notifications , Instant messaging, Instant data transfer , Instant connectivity to the entire world and most wonderfully Instant access to information . All these modern day instants that make our world incredibly efficient and easier.
We live in an age where immediate reaction is expected and most of the time demanded .Is that not why we demand lightening fast customer service from those that market quick reaction best ( the modern day service providers) … Try phoning one of them and see how annoyed you get when you wait more than a minute to speak to a service consultant and then notice how your inner demon manifests when they tell you it’s going to take 2 to 5 working days for your request to be processed …
While the world moves forward in this constant buss of everything instant , I beg the question...
Is time moving a hundred times faster due to this modern age, where everything operating in our world has now defied the laws of hours and seconds . And this tempts me to ask an even deeper question… how has this changed us? Are we mentally the same humans with the same emotions that we were a couple of generations ago?
Somehow I doubt that... I’m a strong believer in pre natal influences (IE: listen to Mozart and your baby would understand music) have a serious look at children born in this decade... They are fascinatingly advanced, able to handle and operate modern technology when they toddlers. It might have to do with the fact that their mothers handle so much technology during their pregnancy that when the kids are born they instinctively harness an ability…that’s the only way I can justify a 4 year olds ability to operate a complex Windows OS smart phone with more ease then my 59 year old father.
Has decision making, human reactions and emotions taken a fast forward ticket too ?
Do we decide on issues much faster because of this culture of instant … I have friends that have decided to marry someone within a year of meeting them and have ended a relationship in an hour , How about insurance sales man..Who can now get you cover in 5 minutes (over the telephone!!!!) an important life decision that takes only a few minutes …
Instant is a culture that has already showed its nasty side … just ask the millions of Americans that found themselves knee high in debt due to impossible credit card bills and mortgages … yet another form of modern day instant that has made accessing money you don’t have a 2 minute wireless transaction.
Are we more likely to act on impulse now then we were a few decades ago?
We all know that a few decades ago they took their time to do everything
They lived on the basic principle of patience and it definitely benefited them look at what long lives some of them lived … they never rushed their lives and that’s why “lay byes” were so popular because they could wait 4 months for a pair of shoes (scary I know) there’s absolutely no way I could live like that thank god for credit cards right ;-)
It would be interesting to measure just how much we have changed and if this age of modern development has changed our behavior so drastically that if our past generations had to look at us now they’d wonder in amazement about how we all seem to be living in fast forward
The imagery I’m getting here is that the way my Grandma spent her day 50 years ago to the way I spend my day now...if we had to video it she’d be in slow and I’d be in fast forward
It would take her 3 weeks to get several individual letters to her girlfriends and takes me a few seconds to email them all at once … really interesting when you think of it … but it makes me consider another element to all of this. Perhaps she had time to carefully consider what she was writing to them and me? well I don’t have time to ponder too much over it I just type and hit send …because that’s what the world of instant now offers us
Don’t get me wrong I am one of those instant people that can’t imagine surviving 50 years ago … it’s just my personality. The world of instant has made it even easier for me to be a much more impatient then I would have been if I lived back then.
Maybe it’s not about the times in which we live.. but about where we live
There are definitely places in this world where time has stood still. Where wireless information highways and the electronic age ceases to exist , where your Blackberry would be just an object and not something that is taken everywhere you go because you “ feel lost without it “ . The difference is that in those remote places everything happens in a schedule that nature determines. Maybe its places like this that we have to find ourselves going to now and again just to remind us that life in general does not have to be instant , so that we remember to enjoy life’s simple technology . The kind we often miss in this world of deadlines, traffic , month ends , crazy consumerism and instant gratification …
Maybe I’m just craving a long holiday and my motivation for this piece goes deeper. However I know that I’m going to stick to my “spring resolution” and enjoy every second of this new season or at least try to take notice of and appreciate the first blossoms and savor the first apricots and mangoes … you know what I’m talking about …those simple things that aren’t running on windows minutes coz god forbid we one day have all the networks in the world go down and we find ourselves shocked by an existence we forgot
Tashiani (Spring Chika) Padiachy
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