Where are we heading?

As our communication networks are growing, our worlds are shrinking and possibly so are our patience levels. We just don't know how to wait for anything anymore and inevitably, this has got to be crawling its way into our personal lives as well.


So let's see. When was the last time I 'BOUGHT' a music cd or watched a video on television and tried hard to find out when the music release was, make a beeline to the local music store and pay for that cd, bring it home and plug it in? I do not remember. All I remember now, is free music downloads the day the music releases and I have not paid a dime since at least five years. There used to be some pleasures attached to buying music, borrowing friends' cds, making a personal playlist for a loved one, painstakingly cleaning the cd case and treasuring it. Neither have I used a cd nor bought one in a really long time. Sometimes, I do pick up my case to clean the dust off it and I find someone's gift, a note on top and I still do smile, but this is a pleasure the generation after me will not ever know of.


Then, in the past years, I find myself often shopping and even as ludicrous as it sounds 'window-shopping' on my computer. When I know someone's birthday is coming up, or I need some stationery, or some books, I instinctively know I need to look up flipkart.com or ebay. I do not remember having bought a book, written on the first page inside and giving it to someone in a long long time. The convenience scares me. There used to be a time I used to marvel at jokes I heard on sitcoms about Americans collecting coupons for discounts and going shopping on those days to those places, however far off. I'm heading there, except now I know of promo codes and dicount codes to get the best deals on sites, at a mouse-click's distance. And I'm recommending them out there like a pro. Apparel, footwear even, wherein it would be absolutely impossible to buy a pair without slipping it on, is now a click away and maybe that's good, maybe bad. It's just a whole lot different from what shopping used to mean to me when I was younger.


Social Networking. Yes, I do get to connect with a lot of old friends. I get to see what they're doing in their lives. But I find myself talking less and less to people. It's like I know many of them, but I don't know more about them anymore. We're less connected and a lot more wired nowadays I suppose. When I look at their lives, their updates, their photos, I feel good that I'm well informed, but it beats me if they ever intended that information for me. I mean, do you remember how it felt to wait for your best friend's birthday snaps to get processed and wait to get to school the next day and look at them over the snack break. But I doubt, my children will ever have those little pleasures. They'd perhaps have the pictures uploaded on their pages before they got home and a million likes to go AND it might not even be my smart phone they've used, but their own funky ones.


Our language! I cringe at the sight of words like lv,lf.frndzz,v,wt4me. Where did our English just vanish and what are we putting on our resumes if we can't spell words like friends, life, wait normally on a keyboard we can conveniently chat at speeds stenos boast of. We've created a new language and heavens alone save the examinations such people's children will take and the scores they will make.


I say it permeates our day to day lives in tangible ways as above but in a lot of unseen, intangible ways as well. I feel we've become more impatient because almost everything in life has become convenient nowadays. Yes, we have more time to do a lot of other things, but what are we really heading towards? A life of isolation where we all have our computers and will get strokes if the internet is down for a bit? We send someone a message and we expect a reply that very moment, because we're sure he got it. There's no way in this age or day, my message or email wouldn't be delivered. If he didn't reply, he didn't see it. Paranoia. How can he be ignoring me? How can he not respond? 


Rewind to not so many, but maybe 10 years ago. You were lucky if you had an internet connection with a PC and even luckier if it worked. But do you remember noting down email addresses of people carefully, typing out long emails to them and not receiving replies for hours, days? It seemed alright. They'd look at it when they could and reply and you'd look at it when you could make a connection. And that worked. 


When you sent someone an SMS, you checked the delivery report to see if it said 'Pending' or 'Delivered', check the time of delivery and then mentally sigh with relief because your message made it. Today, you know that you've sent it, he's received it. Even if he's on a call, he got it. And that makes us so impatient because we know it's possible. It's possible to acknowledge receipt, to respond, fight, solve, argue all in an instant. And that's what's going wrong. 


We've become more sensitive than our touch-screens, our brains have begun to work faster than our processors for sometimes the very wrong reasons. We've become more impatient in conversation, in our relationships, in our marriages and we've forgotten how to give somebody that space they truly deserve. To think, to ponder, to gather their thoughts and react. We're forcing the quieter ones to crawl deeper into their shells, the sober ones to find outlets for madness and the already loud ones to cause cacophony. We are heading towards a louder, more clamorous tomorrow, very different from the yesterday we lived  and if we play it wrong, a tomorrow distinctly unhappier than the one we saw yesterday.