The microwave oven is marketed as a labour-saving device. To be sure, the fact you can heat up a dinner in five minutes that would normally take you between 30 and 45 minutes to prepare is attractive when you feel your time is short.
However, I have come to believe that the microwave and other labour-saving devices have not saved us time so much as they have deprived us of patience.
Every day I see evidence that we have lost patience with ourselves, with others, with systems, and sometimes with life itself. We live in such an instant culture that we forget time often has to unfold simply, one grain of sand at a time through the hourglass.
Every day I scan the headlines, and this week I saw The Telegram has started a running tally of the road accidents on the highway by Butterpot Park. We are up to 20 at time of writing.
I don’t know all the details for every accident but the RCMP have said many drivers are going too fast for the weather and road conditions at the time.
That’s pretty scary. Where do you need to be that you will risk life and limb going that fast?
I live in the East End, and in the last 20 years, I have seen a big change in the traffic coming down Torbay Road. Now that the arterial is open to Torbay and beyond, people coming down Torbay Road after leaving the Outer Ring Road or the new bypass often continue to drive at the same speed they were driving on the highway.
The result has been not just an increase in the number of cars running a yellow, but also in the number of cars running a red. I have also noticed we have more trucks on the road. In winter this poses a challenge, because velocity and slickness add up to significant momentum.
But traffic isn’t the only place where I have seen a distinct lack of patience.
I have friends who say they get a call on their office line, then on their cell, perhaps a text, and then an email inquiring about the request. Often these missives arrive within minutes, if not hours, of each other.
Unless someone is critically ill or it’s an emergency, do we need to unleash that level of contact?
Every day we get a barrage of information and all of it asking for immediate attention.
The observation made me think: have we forgotten we are all in it together? Has our need for instant gratification reduced our natural impulse to be patient and kind? Has instant culture fueled a lack of understanding and consideration?
I read about one individual who returned from vacation to find more than 300 emails in their inbox. Overwhelmed, they selected all and sent them to the trash. The surprising result: the world did not end. If it was really critical, the senders got back in touch.
I don’t advocate deleting all your emails if you are truly concerned about what might get lost. However, we need to take a step back and ask how urgent is urgent?
One of the things I enjoyed about Snowmageddon was the lack of urgency in my life.
When I finally got to the grocery store, I was quite impressed with the absence of panic. I had somehow imagined it would be like a Black Friday scenario where the manufactured scarcity of the “sale” drives people to behave in ways they might not ordinarily do so.
I asked the cashier how things were going.
“We are all in it together,” they said. “It is what it is, and we may as well be nice to each other.”
The observation made me think: have we forgotten we are all in it together? Has our need for instant gratification reduced our natural impulse to be patient and kind? Has instant culture fueled a lack of understanding and consideration?
I don’t have answers to these questions, but I am curious and I’m looking at day to day interactions with a new lens.
Joyce Meyers says patience is not simply the ability to wait — it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.
I’m intrigued by the idea that it is perhaps time poverty that is driving instant culture, and if yes, what can we do about it?
Martha Muzychka is a writer and consultant living and working in St. John’s. mail: [email protected]
