Instant-ness: A modern day problem

Dedicated to a special friend:

A few months ago my best friend wrote to me saying “I miss the instant-ness of our friendship” and I knew exactly what she meant and was extremely heart sore.

Now part of the problem is that we used to live 10 minutes away from each other and now we are living thousands of miles apart, so gone are the days when I could hop in my little car and “just pop over for coffee”. But I think she was also hitting upon a larger but profoundly modern problem. Living over seas makes more complicated instant communication: text messaging, quick calls, quick coffees. We are living in a world where not only do we want everything now but also… we get it!

Those technologically savvy people may be thinking but we have twitter, Skype, facebook, smart phones how much more instant can you get… And yet sometimes I am forced to question that with every little bit more connected we get, are we in face getting that much more isolated from deeper human connection? Maybe I have an old fashioned thinking but to me there are just some conversations that it doesn’t seem appropriate to have through a computer screen. And there are some moments that a tweet of facebook status doesn’t seem to do justice, it at least should be in pen and paper and better yet standing in front of that person that you love so dearly.

I miss my friend. I miss being in a grocery store and thinking “O, she would love this!” buying it and then taking it over to her house 20 minutes later…. Skype doesn’t fix that.

And yet, I am forced to think of friends hundreds of years ago parted by oceans that it didn’t seem possible to cross. Young lovers parted by war. They would invest so much time into writing letters, telegrams and sending parcels out into the unknown because of the value they placed on the relationship… and yet often I these days one can be too busy or preoccupied to send an instant message… And what about that of how impatient we are. If someone is more than 5 minutes late all I have to do is send a text and a new plan is made. There was a time where you would dream of changing plans or being late because there was in no way the communication lines in place to get your message across, it would be so rude. And yet it seems in my generation we have such a lackadaisical attitude towards time and appointment keeping and sometimes I wonder if it is not actually at a more fundamental level actually an apathetic attitude towards our relationships because of the instant-ness we have become so familiar with.

None of this is a rant at my friend. I think what she was getting at was there used to be an ongoing, seamless dialogue that flowed through our friendship that living so far apart is made difficult and I agree it is… But it is just so funny to me that something that is a problem to us today wasn’t even an option hundreds of years ago….

 And it makes me wonder how many of our problems today won’t even vaguely concern us in the not to distant tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by, K x