Instant gratification in the age of isolation
It’s Groundhog Day (again) and I’ve been thinking
about the notion of waiting.
by Genevieve Phelan
A lot of us have been doing things we wouldn’t normally have time or patience for. We’ve dredged them up out of the overflowing fuck-it bucket. Some have artfully festooned focaccia with tomatoes to make bread. Others have meticulously colour coded bookshelves. An insane percentage of us, it appears, has taken to running in the wild.
Instant gratification is the desire to experience pleasure or fulfilment without delay. Basically, it's when you want it and you want it now with a Veruca Salt like urgency.
I know this is no groundbreakingly new phenomenon, but we haven't really had to wait something out like this in, well, ever. There's no shortcut, hack or tutorial to get us through. Vaccines can take aeons of trial and error and a small country’s worth of brilliant minds. And so in this strange purgatory between BC (Before Corona) and AC (After Corona), my ability to wait and find contentment in things has been put to the test. A magnifying glass has indeed been held up to my tolerance for doing stuff, as I only find solace in 6 second Tik Toks now.
Because we're not working in a normal capacity and functioning at a regimented high throttle pace, we’re missing Quotidien instantaneous satisfaction. An espresso martini at whim from a hot bartender. An interstate flight booked for tomorrow. Flipping the table and storming out of a shitty job to find a frilly new one.
I've realised lately just how impatient I am, wanting to put the least effort possible in to get the immediate, glittering, idyllic result I want in every facet of life. But where’s the genuine fulfilment? I get hot when I have to wait in lines, read long articles, start a cult series, or edit my work. Most of all, I get angry at the things I am not good at. And then I refuse to touch them with a 10-foot pole because I assume I can never be good at them.*
*No, you simply cannot become good at them overnight.
It’s hard to recognise being lazy with your time when you are actually trying quite hard at something in occasional, fleeting bursts. I feel this transcends the smaller, everyday agitations and impacts things like impatience in love, too. ATT: all dating apps. It’s trite, but how unanimously over the Getting To Know You conversations are we all?
If I have to recycle the same embellished life facts one more time and endure more underwhelming banter and ask another halfhearted question, I think I may finally file that application for the nunnery. Then again, I was walking The Tan the other day and saw an attractive man with a fresh puppy and refrained from catalysing a lovely meet-cute despite desperately wanting to. That was a high risk move and far too much effort for unlikely ROI. Put ‘romance’ in the Too Hard basket, too, please.
The days in which I feel my most instantly gratified are usually synonymous with a ‘normal world’ monolithic hangover. These render me physically unable to stand up and do all of the things. When I’m hungover, my desires and interests are stripped down to most basic, primitive and urgent wants and needs. They usually consist of SATC reruns, the panacea of KFC popcorn chicken (inconveniently not on UberEats), aforementioned dating app surfing, Insta-scrolling et al. Turns out these are also the most wasted and guilt-inducing days of my life. I hate them.
When I have a problem or a pang of hunger or a desire for something, I can usually fix it instantaneously with a tap or two. Yesterday, I desperately needed a croissant and thus put the carborific utopia that is Lune into maps. I marvelled at how stupidly buttery and Paris-like this flaky boomerang was and then I wondered how many hours of toil and generations of recipes and love went into it for me to ravage it in a matter of seconds out of one hand as the other held the steering wheel. How early did your baker get up this morning to birth you? Sigh. I should’ve stopped and savoured that $6.50 croissant.
It's only been in the past few weeks that I've questioned how detrimental this constant haste to attain everything immediately is to my ability to feel genuine accomplishment and satisfaction.
Why are we so quick to forgo putting the time in? Perhaps it is because we are in a constant state of overwhelm, edging towards malfunction. Between imperative headlines from pop cultural watchdogs, to prolific podcast playlists and bookmarks of long form articles to get around to, it’s all a bit much.
Those headlines are peppered with superlative lingo, telling us what we ‘need’ to buy, ‘have’ to watch, ‘must’ read like they are vital to life’s existence. Lists like the ‘10 shows you have to see right this second or die in a hole!’ and ‘this podcast will literally change your world!’ and ‘if you don’t make this banana bread you are inept as fuuuck!’. Then we want it all at once and rush, rush, rush to consume them simultaneously like we are at a glorious hotel breakfast buffet but the Uber to the airport arrives in five minutes. This is where we perhaps subconsciously decide to give up (and throw up). The Too Hard basket starts to pile up like the one for your washing.
I think one of the only ways we can overcome the whole instant-grat beast is by selectively choosing to persevere with things that we know are hard and gruelling. It’s the stuff that requires consistency: i.e., forging a lifelong friendship, running 5km, becoming bilingual or farming potatoes that can ground us again. They take time and effort and they must be sustained, watered, tended to.
As my old friend Oscar Wilde once said, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If it is worth having, it is worth waiting for. If it is worth attaining, it is worth fighting for. If it’s worth experiencing, it is worth putting aside time for.” Yes, Os! While this is a generational conundrum and one that we (ironically) cannot solve at the drop of a hat, 2020 has so far been a teeth-gritting, thumb-twiddling lesson in waiting that has reacquainted us with meaningful gratification. Writing this article is not instantly gratifying. I’ve left the desk for two coffee breaks, a walk and checked my phone a few hundred times. I’d like to be done with it now.
But Mr Wilde is right. If you had to round up the things that you’re really, seriously proud of achieving in your life, I can almost guarantee you they wouldn’t include a 10 minute ab blaster at-home pilates routine in your living room. They would be what you toiled over and were disciplined enough to accomplish steadily over time.
I guess when we’re released from captivity and into normality, we have to keep stretching our bandwidth of patience. We have to linger at the bar a little longer, waiting to nurse an artfully curated, complex cocktail instead of downing a cheap vodka soda. We have to resist, at times, the impulse decision. It’s an old adage for a reason: good things come to those who wait.
Words — Genevieve Phelan
Image — Source here
