What are you waiting for?
"Nothing."
This is the state of the world when it comes to consumption and there is a whole generation and a half that have never had to wait for anything that they have demanded, everything is near the fingertips.
I remember waiting for 21 Jump Street episodes every Thursday at 9 pm, and it never seemed strange. Now, binge watching is the order of the day - everything is on-demand and everything is demanded. If a ewbpage doesn't load in .016 of a second, rage kicks in - if the car at the stoplights doesn't start moving on the green in the same time, roadrage kicks in - the doors.
Impatience is an issue.
Being impatient affects emotional response, it affects expectations, it affects the feeling of entitlement and perhaps most important, it makes it very difficult and unlikely to invest into something long-term. Without patience, one can't take advantage of the compound effects, the small amounts that add up to something much larger than the capital invested. But, this doesn't apply to just money, it applies to pretty much everything.
Last night I was talking with friends about skill development and how for example, any job requires a cluster of skills of lesser and greater importance. Being great at the core requirements doesn't mean one is good at the job. I used the analogy of an ice hockey player who can skate very well, but is poor at hitting the puck, or another who can skate well and who has good stick skills, but is unable to be in the right position at the tight time. To be a decent hockey player, all requirements have to be at least to a passing grade, for a professional, much higher.
But this also has other implications. Most people focus on where they are comfortable - what they are interested in and already good at - and neglect the difficult and uncomfortable. However, because of the work they are putting in, they build an expectation that they deserve a certain outcome, a level of entitlement. Working hard isn't enough, working at the right things is also a necessary requirement.
This also applies to other aspects of life, including social movements. We have created a system where we are able to communicate en masse and "participate" in all kinds of actions to get the feeling that we are doing something, even if not much of consequence ever gets achieved. Often, we take part based on social conformity and follow the herd, wherever the herd goes. This process is an opt-in situation and works similarly to a salesperson aiming to get the buyer to always say yes - one yes leads to the next and eventually the purchase.
The problem is that while full of drama and emotional spikes, these types of movements do not generate the long-term investment needed for healthy change, the small daily shifts that compound against each other to become a restructuring of the entire system. If anything, it is the reverse, as a group of people emotionally charged are easily led, easily manipulated and while each individual feels that they are part of something greater than themselves, they do not have a holistic view of the group itself.
These days, people get addicted to the emotional highs and feeling of mattering, which means that once the social charge has subsided, they look for the next bandwagon to get on, they move along, even though they haven't yet made a difference - but they feel they have. This leads a lock of focus and a far too short timeframe to make any significant change.
The spotlight might have been drawn for some time, but because the next news cycle invades and takes public attention, it is drawn away again. Why change the system when you can just weather the storm of public outrage and then continue on business as usual, when the public eye inevitably turns away a few moments later?
Impatience creates a lack of focus of attention and attention is a scarce resource, which is why the attention economy is so economically valuable. Real social change takes a great deal of attention to shift the paradigms and this focus has to be sustained over a significant amount of time. When the attention can keep being drawn away and split, it means that the system itself can stay in place as there is rarely enough energy to force the changes and then, enforce the changes. People participate and then forget to keep an eye on what they had "fought" for.
The next problem with all of this is that many of these events polarize of the population and while two groups might find solidarity at one event, in the next they are at loggerheads with each other. This is creates a highly fragmented group that can continually and easily be turned inward upon itself to draw attention to or away from topics by those who control the narrative.
As I have said before, the narrative isn't the story in the news, it is the one each of us holds about the world and the one that makes our purchase decisions, on everything from whether we "get fries with that" to which political slogan we support. At the end of the day though, we are subject to manipulation and, we keep buying-in to the system as we keep consuming what the system puts on our plate of attention.
If you want change in this world, eat differently and understand that real and lasting change takes time. Patience is a virtue for a reason, but it isn't about waiting, it is concerned with the outcomes of action. But just like the cluster of skills needed to develop, where that activity is placed matters. It might feel great to be part of a social movement, but it rarely leads to where people want it to go, because the leaders of it do not want it to go there. You can't change the system by asking those who benefit from the system just the way it is, to change.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]