Is a culture of instant gratification creating a culture where we care less?

Is a culture of instant gratification creating a culture where we care less?

My father is a baker, and a chef.

I grew up, for much of my childhood, with my father owning a quirky (but delicious) restaurant and bakery. He would, many days, be gone out of the house by 4am to begin the morning’s fresh croissants (he’s not just a baker, he’s a French baker ~you can flick your nose here if you want~), and in bed by 12am, after closing down. A beautiful part of my relationship with him throughout my childhood was built while cooking and baking. As a child he would assign me jobs that were age appropriate but would allow me to be a part of the process. Much if this involved sifting flour, cracking or whipping eggs, measuring heaping spoonfuls of flour and sugar, and the most important job of tasting batter (still my personal favorite). My dad took (and still takes) great care in his art: room temperature eggs matter, sifted flour matters, unbleached flour matters, etc. This last point reminds me of the time when we were cruising the bulk section at the locally-owned grocery store down the street from our house, when he stopped suddenly, got down almost entirely onto the floor, peering intently into the barrel of self-scoop flour. He then reached in, rolled some flour between his fingers, examined it again, and proceeded to kindly inform the store that their flour labeled unbleached, was, in fact, bleached. To the untrained eye, it looked like white flour, and plus, who really knows the difference? Needless to say, the man cares about his art.

But this leads me back to my original question, in a culture where we have instantaneous entertainment (read: distraction), perceived connection (I’ll let you decide whether it is real or not), and information, are we forgetting (or perhaps never learning) how to care? My father, part of the Boomer generation, tells me stories about handwriting everything in college. Come business school, he typed his papers on a type writer — which meant one mistake and the whole page had to be started over, or one had to very carefully white-out the error.

For my entire childhood my father kept his collection of the Britannica Encyclopedia in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf across from my bed. I never knew what these fat, navy-blue, heavy, matching books were. Yet the amount of nights I fell asleep reading the word, again and again on all the books’ spines — just barely able to make out the word in the faint stream of hallway light: Briii…tttannnnn…iiiicc…aaaaa — really quite a lullaby of a word if you say it in your head enough. It turns out, I learned when finally asking him, that these books were the original Google, as het put it. In order to find something out about a specific question to something, one had to thumb through the book, alphabetically, for answers. Nowadays, if a search-engine takes longer than two seconds to load the mere 300,000 answers (or more) to a burning question of something along the lines of, “why don’t giraffes yawn?”* then by the third second of waiting you decide that, ugh, it really doesn’t matter that much anyways.

Of course, we are looking at many differences here. Looking up a random fact that someone doesn’t really care about (like giraffes yawning) is very different than someone who seeks out information regarding what they love and choose to as a path for their lives (ie cooking, delivering babies, being a musician etc etc). But my point is that, our world has changed from the patience of looking something up in a thick book, to a world where everything is at our fingertips through the world wide web. And if its not already at our fingertips, then it can be in a matter of 24–48 hours without more than the tap of a thumb (and perhaps nervously checking a bank account balance, again only using Mr. Thumb). It appears our generation has lost the art of patience; we are not good at waiting. We don’t understand what it is like to not know, and have to wait, and to not have a thing or an answer with the swift click of a button. So, when it comes to more patient or caring tasks like say, sifting flour, we are perplexed by that, or perhaps, on the extreme side, unable to care enough to do it. Why? because it takes longer. Will the sifting really make a difference? Well, in terms of the fact that in the end you will still have a cake, whether the flour was sifted or not, then maybe it doesnt matter; maybe the exact balance of the flours, or lightness and fluffiness don’t matter all that much, because, in the end, its still an edible cake. But the patience of sifting—that extra moment of care—just might make the cake the best it could be.

Of course, there is a balance. The pendulum of the Boomer generation perhaps took delayed gratification too far, as it was a generation of (forgive me) retirement-obsessed workaholics (I recognize that might be an unfair generalization that many, including my father mentioned here, do not appeal to). But looking at the generation as a whole, that has been an accurate theme. Perhaps retirement-focused workaholism is an example of when a very helpful skill of patience and delayed gratification has gotten out of balance and goes too far. But on the other hand, the pendulum might have swung too far the other way with my generation, with a culture of impulse purchases, and disregarding the tasks that may take us a little longer to do because it does not appeal to our instant gratification/instant entertainment conditioning.

When you have to wait for something, work for something, live without something for a while, (an answer to a scientific question, and handwritten letter in the mail, etc) it helps you understand the value of it, it helps you care more about it because it requires more care and effort in the first place. So, in a world where we wait for nothing (except for pandemics to end), we lose the value of what not having everything right now teaches. We miss out on learning to savor the sweet words in a letter that we know we will not have a response to for a few days or weeks. Instead, we quickly speak a text while driving, walking, doing dishes, or swiftly type an email on whatever favorite porcelain throne you use to catch up on your emails.

Perhaps, if I may go as far as to say, and in the worst case, this impatience and lack of care leaks over into our art and vocation as well. While of course we care (or hopefully do) about what we do in our lives, I can’t help but wonder if the sincere practice of care is being lost in our world of instant gratification. While I greatly appreciate what knowledge at our fingertips provides us with, in terms of medical safety, advances, ease of research, safety of sharing a location with a loved one, (just to name a few). But I also think it comes at a cost of a practice in patience and care. The harder we work for something, the more value it gains.

I can’t say that I know anyone who sifts their flour when baking, other than my father. But then again, I also can’t say I know anyone who makes a better cake than my father. Lack of patience, lack of care, may come at the gain of speed and convenience, but comes at the cost of quality, and of care. So while there are countless wonderful additions to a world of instant information — and thus instant gratification — it is not conducive to a culture of the practice of caring, cultivating something in a slower way, building it, sitting with not knowing something for a little while, and investing time and energy into it figuring it out. It is that type of effort that leads to creating and living in a way that is full of patience, presence, care, and value for, on a small scale, the task at hand, and on the larger scale, for our life’s work.

*since you’re dying to know, and if you haven’t already looked it up, giraffes don’t yawn because of the large distance between their head and their lungs. This means that they have special adaptations for breathing that likely render yawning unnecessary. Thank you google for the 529,000 result in 0.52 seconds.

photo taken from fineartamerica.com, Brandon Alms.