The Quick Fix Culture

We live in what most people would easily consider the most exciting time in humanity. Internet has brought around a social revolution and today we can support a lifestyle that just 10 years ago would be considered pure science fiction. Everything’s in our phone and we are connected to it 24/7. Our physical world no longer restrains us, being able to communicate with people halfway around the world like they were sitting next to us. It still is truly fascinating to me that we take all of this for granted.

These services come at a cost though. The instant gratification framework we’ve been slowly settling on spills into our daily, real world life. We want to be attended promptly at the DMV or the post office. It feels like the people in front of us are in line at the grocery store are deliberately taking forever out of spite. We rush to close a project thinking it’ll take just a couple of minutes. This would be so much easier if I could do it online.

We have things to do, places to be, people to see. We don’t have the time to wait. Time is money.

We have lost the concept of building towards an objective. We slowly forgot what it means to build something, putting the hours day after day and see it come together. We are so focused on the end result that we’ve become disinterested with the process. The process *is* the end result as far as I’m concerned, and something becomes the end result when you stop working on it.

Students today fail to grasp the concept of going to a library to do research. Googling a question has become the golden standard for becoming an “expert” on the matter.

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