It’s a shame that clichés are, well, exactly that. Trite mantras that become diluted with overuse and come to be associated with finger-wagging mothers. That might actually only be a personal association — growing up in my household trained my Jiminy-Cricket-conscience to cluck, “two wrongs don’t make a right” and “a bird in hand’s worth two in the bush” in a sweet Dixie twang — but I digress.
But new words of wisdom can still permeate our culture — they just have to tell a fundamental truth of life, which is pretty tricky. When the stars and the blue moon align just right, a new aphorism is born. Much to the satisfaction of today’s 20-somethings, we now have our own cliché curveball to throw back at Mom — Sweet Brown’s ever applicable “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
No other catchphrase can piggyback on my day-to-day marathons better than this. If my browser doesn’t load and the spinning wheel of death lingers for 15 seconds, I quit all and reboot. Facebook and email taglines are delivered with a minute-sensitive timestamp. Time is probably the hottest commodity out there, seconded perhaps by the smartphones that live in our pockets to keep the digital oxygen flowing.
We seek instant gratification in the digital world — and the saddest part is, I find this tendency seeping into the dwindling time for people offline. When I was 15 I would dial my best friend’s home phone number to talk for hours on end about sweet nothings. Now I only use for my phone for business. Short, sweet and to the point.
But why have I become a Pavlov’s dog to machines? I associate efficiency with technological stimuli, and when they don’t deliver I stomp my feet Veruca Salt style. This impatience is perhaps best characterized by another modern catchphrase: “#firstworldproblems.”
As much as I hate to associate with such a movement, I find myself a subconscious propagator of the life of instant gratification. We’ve become a species of folks who walk into Starbucks and say, “Yes, tall coffee and, um, where’s my coffee?”
I find it pathetic that these luxuries are expected and unappreciated, but I’m a hypocrite. I can’t live without these staples of a first-world existence myself. The original magic of 21st-century perks has already been dampened to the point where we see these privileges as rights. We act entitled to have everyone and everything at our beck and call, but no one — besides Siri — should be held accountable to our every whim.
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