Culture of Instant gratification

Having a culture that demands instant gratification is a thought conflict. Almost everything in life is better when it is planned out. The only exception is the occasional impulse event, used sparingly so that things remain impulsive instead of having impulsiveness become the new normal. You get things right when you plan things out. If you are going to take a trip for an enjoyable vacation you plan things out so you can spend as much time while you are at your destination enjoying it. If you just show up to your location you will waste time looking for things to enjoy.

The ever increasing demand for productivity has turned us into a society that seeks instant gratification because things move so quickly. It is a sad state of affairs when you can not enjoy time with a loved one on a lazy afternoon because you can't keep yourself entertained constantly. What is worse is that this culture mentality is starting to have effects on important things. All things.

One example would be the current election cycle. People are angry with the current administration because their are implementing things that will take a long time to come to fruition. Health care for example. In the long term the health care bill will reduce our nations expenditures on medical costs. Argue what you will but when everyone pays into a system the people who don't need coverage can't opt out and create a death spiral. It is the way of insurance. Only old people can not be on health insurance because they are using it, the young have to be too. I am young and do not have health insurance because I don't need it. When the health cooperatives appear and provide me as an individual with group rates I will because it will be cheaper and I will then help subsidize older people's health care costs.

Another example is climate change. Even if you do not believe in man made climate change our throw away culture can not have no negative impacts on the environment. It just can not. You can not throw away plastic silverware and assume that burying it in a whole in the ground will not lead to some form of negative impact. We can not burn copious amounts of gasoline and have a metric truck ton of carbon dioxide flood the air with no negative consequence.

Both of these problems are a result of instant gratification. Health care premiums will likely continue to go up in the near term until the cooperatives go into effect, they would have gone up more in the future anyway. But by passing the legislation in the future with this plan set in motion things will calm down and we can reign in our national deficit attributed by health care costs and Medicare/Medicaid. The environment can be saved if we thoughtfully plan out how to purchase things and think about the effects our purchases may have in the future. We plan for the impact of our decisions instead of just making them haphazardly.

Until we combat our need for instant gratification we will doom ourselves to a very bleak future. Unfortunately, instant gratification is much more common that planned thought.