Myself

Instant Gratification

We fine-tune our moods with pharmaceuticals and Spotify. We craft our meals around our allergies and ideologies. We can choose a vehicle to express our hipness or hostility. We can move to a neighborhood that matches our social values, find a news outlet that mirrors our politics, and create a social network that “likes” everything we say or post. With each transaction and upgrade, each choice and click, life moves closer to us, and the world becomes our world.

An excerpt from a sobering essay by Paul Roberts, adapted from his book The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant GratificationAmong other things, the article talks about rehab from internet/video game addiction, a proliferation of choice brought about by magnitudes of efficiency in the marketplace, compared to a few decades ago – “market-driven narcissism”, he calls it – and ultimately, the attempts of a few to withstand this economic and marketing onslaught on the senses. It links ideas such as the trend of companies to aim for short-term profits rather than entrenched long-term vision to the societal shift towards short-term pleasures, the Buzzfeed list and the Upworthy article instead of a New Yorker piece.

This hits home. While the article talks about the American population, I feel it applies everywhere, even to Indians. Hell, I once considered myself insusceptible to the charms of the free market, but obviously, I am not as smart as I think. Every morning, the Internet ensconces me in its comforting womb, and suddenly I blink, and an hour has gone by. Friends tell me how their reading habits have dramatically changed, especially with long-form articles. It is easy, so easy, to stumble across an article that is an extract from a book, and to open up Amazon immediately to order the book (Meta commentary, bitches!). Even though there is a pile of unread books already in my living room, and I just ordered another graphic novel just a day ago and it’s still in the mail.

I spent most of my teens and twenties sweating about packages in the mail. There was a six-month delivery cycle, on an average. Especially with comics, which I would buy in bulk, send to one address in the US, and then at some undetermined time in the future, a helpful traveler would consent to carry a few – or in some cases, all – of the packages back to India. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I remember forking over a 100 rupee note (about $1.75, by today’s exchange rate) when I was a student – at a time when 100 rupees would get me comfortably through a week of non-hostel-food activities, to someone in IIT Madras just because he said he could get me a DivX of Natural Born Killers, burn it on a CD, and send it to my college address, in the post. He sent it, sure, but it would not play on my Celeron 32 MB RAM machine, and I had to ask someone to use their computer so that I could finally watch it.

It was a letdown, of course. I had read the script before, and Oliver Stone’s final cut was a watered-down version of what I had going on in my mind. I remember that biting feeling of having wasted 100 rupees on – this fucking movie? – and contemplated what I could have bought with that money, 10 comics from Best Book Stall, or 2 Terry Pratchett novels, or 5 other movie rentals from the local VCD library.

But you know what? I also remember that agonizing month-long wait for the CD. The act of looking forward to being gratified, to the Next Big Thing on the Horizon. And for all the numbness brought about by the relentless assault of Hype machine working overtime, there are still moments that surprise. There is music that finds you at the right time, and experiences that slide right into your life, like a stranger on a park bench who says a casual, tentative hello, and begins chatting with you with a familiarity that you never thought could exist between two unknown people.

Instant gratification is all around us. But everything need not be about instant gratification. Right?

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