Impatience is the New Life

‘Impatience is the new life’ says a TV commercial. When you think about the life around, the phrase seems to be true. We the new generation are focused, practical, and more intelligent but we are more impatient and in tolerant. We want everything lightening fast. For us there is no tomorrow. We want everything right here right now.

To an extent, I would say it is good but we are losing the charm of enjoying life while running after everything in life. There is no time to enjoy the hard work we are putting into making our future secure and better. We look down upon people who were born few years before us as they struggle to catch up with the new world and new technologies. Our patience levels are so low that we get bored with things in days or in few hours too in some cases. We buy the latest music player or mobile phone today and get bored of it after a week. Change is the buzz word. We want everything bigger and better and we cannot wait for things to happen. We all are running after everything so much so that we do not want to stop and see if there is a better option available with a little patience and little thinking.

We do not want to wait at the traffic signals; we do not want to wait in the queues. We do not even wait for our salary (hail the credit cards, we can shop now and pay later) to buy what we want. Maps are a passé; we want GPS systems in our cars, phones, (may be in our minds too in sometime). We want everything at finger tips and at our call. We want bigger homes and better cars. We want the latest gadgets and the best holidays. This impatience has made us intolerable to a great extent. Our wants are growing at a faster pace than the availability of choices. Amidst this run for life, are we forgetting to be happy? Aren’t we becoming more frustrated with life?

We want to get happiness out of the virtual world. We have forgotten the beautiful planet we live on. We do not want to stop by and see the beauty around us, we do not look at the rainbows anymore (I wonder if the kids today even know what a rainbow is), we do not like to find faces in the clouds anymore, we have forgotten how fresh breeze feels as we work in AC offices and commute in AC transport. We meet our friends on Face book. We change our jobs like our clothes. We have stopped putting efforts to solve things or to get out of situations. Anything that stops our speed has to be chucked out of life. We have started walking in and out of marriages like we walk in and out of stores. We do not want to understand and adjust. We do not want to give second chance to anything. We have forgotten that we human beings have the privilege of expressing ourselves, being creative and enjoying life. Lot of options does not mean running after or accumulating everything available to make life better. We are trying to change our lives as we change the channels on the TV.

We are always in a hurry. I don’t know if it is good or bad to have things at your call but it sure is taking away the excitement of things we used to enjoy as kids. Life is becoming a struggle between keeping our weights down and spirits up. We talk more to people on face book than to people around us. Everything and everyone is just a click away but yet we are not content. We are not happy with anything in life. We first yearn for everything and then want to run away from it. The contentment we had as kids is missing in our fast paced, impatient lives.

Once upon a time when life was simpler we had the luxury of coming home from school and heading out to play for hours. We would wait for 6 days to watch Mickey Mouse on Sunday mornings, we used to call up our friends or meet them to talk to them. There were no social networking sites but we still bonded with friends. Once upon a time when life was good we would wait for festivals like Diwali to eat special food prepared by our moms, we used to wait for summer holidays to play out whole day. Once upon a time we actually used to live life and not exist.

Today the games we play are on computers, we can watch the programmes we want on the 50+ channels available 24x7. There is no need for us to wait for special occasions to eat special sweets or food. All that is just a phone call away. Our impatience and the need to have things when we demand has changed our lives completely and today we just exist running after everything we see. Whether we need that or not does not matter. We have everything but we are not happy with anything. Has the availability of money, technology come at a cost of our happiness? Is that the cause of our impatience?