NOW!

Is everything instant these days?  I remember the first giddy days of dial-up internet (and rotary phones!) and how cool it was to be 'online.'  It was actually a thing to walk across campus to check your email in some distant computer lab at strange hours of the night (you know, like 10:30).  It was pretty phenomenal when they actually got internet in the dorms my senior year.  Now everyone has the internet in their pocket!  As much good as technology has done us, it also comes at a price.  This insistence on instant internet now applies to pretty much everything, including but not limited to relationships, health issues, food, shopping, investing...you name it, we want it now, and not just now, but done our way.  We all think we should have an opinion on everything (even things we know nothing about) and that our opinion should matter and not only matter but it should be enacted NOW.

Obviously that doesn't work very well because with 7 billion people on the planet that means there are seven billion differing opinions on everything.  So whose opinion do we enact?  And since it needs to be NOW, we can't possibly consider what the possible repercussions might be, you can see how this can get messy, fast!  Imagine ordering a pizza for 7 people (another common college phenomenon), do you think any of them will agree on anything?  Not going to happen, let alone trying to get a billion times as many people to agree on something as simple as lunch, how much less so on more important things?  Now that's what I call a mess!  But then we aren't called to solve such problems, at least not on our own.  We need only worry about the six other people in the room and their pizza preferences, or whatever our current situation may be.

Much easier, or so you say, except for the NOW phenomenon.  Susie just broke up with her boyfriend of five years.  Megan just had a miscarriage.  Marvin's father is dying of cancer.  Jon never met his father...who wants pepperoni?  Jon's a vegan.  Megan is gluten free.  Marvin can't have tomatoes.  Tim wants to know if it's organic...  We can't order a pizza, let alone fix all the problems festering beneath the surface just in this room, let alone the world, but somehow we feel we MUST fix it all and NOW!  But life isn't like that, at least real life.  Maybe some of those 'sim-life' games or social media sites create that sort of reality, where you just delete it or change it or log-off if you don't like something.  But real life is messy and slow, so are real relationships.  You can't just log on to some app, swipe a few times and come across the world's best boyfriend and bam, you have romance for life, NOW.  Nope, that ideal man was once nothing but a dream, then a baby, then a grubby little boy with scuffed up knees, then an acne prone teenager...a real relationship will take more than a few texts to establish and even more to maintain.  There will be dark nights and long days along with the laughs and the good times and the smiling social media pictures.

But we don't like slow or messy or imperfect or flawed.  Pain, misery, grief, suffering are abhorrent to us, that's why we like online realities, for online such things can be minimized, ignored, deleted, reinvented in our own image.  But facing adversity is how we live, learn, grow, mature.  No wonder we live in an age of forty-something adolescents!  Neverland is not found 'second star to the left and straight on till morning,' rather it is called Facebook or Instagram or a thousand other online forums and communities wherein our avatars live and move and have their being while our souls languish and die in a reality we do our very best to ignore.  As wonderful as technology is, sometimes I'm not sure it is worth the price our society, culture, and relationships and each of us as individuals must pay to indulge in it.  But it isn't likely to change, at least on a cultural level, anytime soon so we must each deal with it individually.  Here's hoping that each of our lives is deeper, brighter, broader, and more vivid than our online persona!