Emily Grant Privett

Have you ever found yourself tapping your fingers impatiently as you wait for your food to finish cooking in the microwave?  Does it feel as if minutes drag on as you wait at a traffic light?  The culture that we currently reside in is sadly obsessed with speed and convenience.  One isn’t happy unless everything passes quickly and accurately.  The short 30 seconds it takes to heat up your chicken nuggets and the one and a half minutes it takes to wait at the light is seemingly too long.  Technology is the main cause of this.  The world we live in has been affected by new advances in technology.

Technology has spoiled this culture and is in turn a major cause of such impatience.  Every day, new items are being invented that make everyday tasks quicker and easier.  People are becoming lazier and lazier.  Not only does the completion of a certain task feel too difficult, but it takes way too long.  Our culture is concerned with practicality.  Everything must work to make our lives easier.  Any little thing that can be bought to improve life will be used, as if in some way ease, happiness, and relaxation can be bought.  This society is a society of lazy people.  If something doesn’t have to be done, then why do it.  In the same way, if one can find an easier way to do something, then why not take that route.

As previously mentioned, cooking one’s food would be an example of this.  You stand at the microwave waiting for your food to cook.  You have just placed your plate of frozen chicken nuggets in the microwave, and it is only a matter of minutes before you are able to enjoy them.  The light comes on, and the turntable begins to spin.  As this happens, you wait and hope that those chicken nuggets are finished when the timer goes off.  The very last thing you want is to have to wait another 30 seconds because the inside of one of them is still frozen.  The original wait felt long enough; extra time added would be horrible.

One must compare this to the past to really deliver the point.  In recent history, microwaves didn’t exist and only a short time before that, ovens weren’t found in the everyday home.  The only practical way to heat things up was over an open fire.  This may sound simple at first, but heating something over a fire wasn’t as simple as just sticking pieces of food over flames.  To begin with, one would have had to gather wood and start the fire.  After waiting for quite some time for the flames to build, the chicken must be prepared.  There were no pre-packaged, pre-cooked, breaded pieces of chicken.  One must bread and cut the chicken himself.  After this was completed, it was time to stick it over the fire, and it would take quite a while to cook after that.  A simple two minute heating experience now would have been a long hour long process in the past.  Because of the invention of the microwave, or even the oven, mankind has become spoiled and expecting everything to happen faster.

Another example of this is waiting in traffic or sitting at a stop light.  Everyone has sat in traffic before.  When this happens, time feels as if it is dragging along.  One would want to be anywhere but there.  Sitting still or going at a slow speed for less than an hour on the way to Williamsburg feels like a terrible feat.  As before, one must look at a comparison to the past.  Before the car was invented, one was required to travel on horseback, by carriage, or even by foot.  The trip from Summit Christian Academy to Williamsburg would have taken hours.  Back then, one would be lucky to make it in an afternoon, depending on one’s mean of transportation, of course.  One would have probably greatly enjoyed being there in an hour, even if it included waiting in traffic for half of the time.  The change in technology hadn’t affected people of those days yet, when it had taken them hours to go such a short distance.  In times like today, with technology such as ours, waiting in traffic seems like one of the worst things to do, causing it to take us an extra 45 minutes to get somewhere.  When they weren’t able to experience such luxuries, one must have thought how much more convenient it would be to make it there in such a short amount of time, instead of several hours of walking or riding on horse.

The definition of convenience has changed.  In the past, getting from one place to another in a good portion of the day was rather convenient, as compared to now, where arriving at your destination without stopping for any reason would be considered convenient.  Another example of this is the sudden shift in reading materials.  In the past, people were lucky to be able to even get their hands on a book, much less know how to read it and study it.  These days, books are not in short supply and are being replaced with items such as the Kindle and the iPad.  Books were in short supply hundreds of years ago, and now, when people have the opportunity to use them, they give up that ability to use electronic versions of the same material.  Paper books apparently aren’t considered convenient anymore, and having electronic books are a much better choice.  It can hold several books on it at once and is transported much easier.  Technology has taken over society and replaced “old” or “outdated” items and methods with “new” and “fresh” ones that will supposedly make life easier, simpler, more convenient, quicker.

The fact that technology has created something “better” doesn’t mean that the “old fashion way” is bad or not worth doing.  An example of this is mops.  Over the past few years, several companies have created cleaning supplies that work better than the traditional dustpan and broom set, and clean deeper than the ordinary mop.  The have cleaning liquid in them.  It takes away the old inconvenience of cleaning one’s floors.  Just because these new mops and brooms have been created says nothing about the original method.  Using a traditional mop is a perfectly acceptable way to clean one’s floor.  As long as it gets the job done, than what does it really matter?  It is not to say that the change in technology is a bad thing, but to stress the idea that our culture isn’t the same as it once was.  This is a result of the rises in technology that have occurred.

In summary, the actions of humanity have become progressively lazier.  Everything is concerned with convenience, practicality, and speed.  If something doesn’t happen fast enough or good enough, then something must be wrong.  The current culture is a “me” obsessed culture.  Everything concerns the individual.  What can make me happy?  How can this make life easier for me?  Technology is one of the biggest causes of this because it provides the motivation for improvement.  Without it, the world would most likely be in a similar state to what it was hundreds of years ago, living the same sort of lifestyles.  The world will never be the same because of the more recent changes in technology and is currently feeding the human addiction to convenience, practicality, and speed.