Mentalechoes

I found this little bit today on the BBC News site.

Most metrosexuals will know that blogging about their podcasting is perhaps a bit passé, while flashmobbing is decidedly retro.

Well it made me laugh! I knew all about the blogging and podcasting bit, but the flashmobbing had me totally stumped. So being the curious bastard that I am, I just had to find out. Wikipedia had this to say about it:

when a crowd converges at a specific time and place, to participate in apparent random acts, and then dissipates.

So it’s basically a high speed - ninja strike - demonstration by a bunch of people pissed off about something (or someone). Pretty much a Greenpeace rally on speed.

You know it’s all a sign of the times we are living in now; the age of instant gratification, where we wait for nothing and want everything at our fingertips. It’s like we have no time anymore for anything, and no desire to wait. Even protesting is changing in the new millenium. I mean I remember going on a Free Tibet rally in London 5 years back and it took the bhuddhist center weeks to organise. Not anymore! If you want to protest, get a bunch of eco-terrorist types, and charge an offending place like stormtroopers, and then leave. It doesn’t take more than a few hours now.

I often wonder though, for all the advances in what I call instant gratification technology (media download sites, portable media players, and the like), we seem to have less time to use any of it. Most people in the first world are working longer hours, both parents have to work to earn enough money to support a family. None of the technology we use is helping us to work less or spend more time with people we want to spend more time with. So what’s the point of it all? It’s almost like we as individuals have become like mice inside an exercise wheel; we are frantically running as fast as we can, but we aren’t actually getting anywhere at all. At some point I think you have to stop and ask, what is it all for? If we continue living in a society that wants everything now, and treats everything as disposable, then what is the value in anything our lives? Including ourselves and the people around us!

It seems to me that the real value of not being instantly gratified in all our desires, is in the feeling of appreciation you get when you do get the thing you desire. If we get everything now, then we ultimately will become bored with everything we have, because we will only be interested in the things we don’t yet have, and how to get them.

Everything becomes merely a thing of the moment, and we lose all sense of value.

Perhaps the real value of waiting is that we ultimately give ourselves more time to live our lives in a way that will actually make us happy, rather than just running from one quick fix to the next!

Padwanna!