Instant Gratification

[MachineGhost]

[quote=https://theamericanscholar.org/instant-gratification/]On the surface, stories of people like Brett Walker may not seem relevant to those of us who don’t spend our days waging virtual war. But these digital narratives center on a dilemma that every citizen in postindustrial society will eventually confront: how to cope with a consumer culture almost too good at giving us what we want. I don’t just mean the way smartphones and search engines and Netflix and Amazon anticipate our preferences. I mean how the entire edifice of the consumer economy, digital and actual, has reoriented itself around our own agendas, self-images, and inner fantasies. In North America and the United Kingdom, and to a lesser degree in Europe and Japan, it is now entirely normal to demand a personally customized life. We fine-tune our moods with pharmaceuticals and Spotify. We craft our meals around our allergies and ideologies. We can choose a vehicle to express our hipness or hostility. We can move to a neighborhood that matches our social values, find a news outlet that mirrors our politics, and create a social network that “likes” everything we say or post. With each transaction and upgrade, each choice and click, life moves closer to us, and the world becomes our world.

And yet … the world we’re busily refashioning in our own image has some serious problems. Certainly, our march from one level of gratification to the next has imposed huge costs—most recently in a credit binge that nearly sank the global economy. But the issue here isn’t only one of overindulgence or a wayward consumer culture. Even as the economy slowly recovers, many people still feel out of balance and unsteady. It’s as if the quest for constant, seamless self-expression has become so deeply embedded that, according to social scientists like Robert Putnam, it is undermining the essential structures of everyday life. In everything from relationships to politics to business, the emerging norms and expectations of our self-centered culture are making it steadily harder to behave in thoughtful, civic, social ways. We struggle to make lasting commitments. We’re uncomfortable with people or ideas that don’t relate directly and immediately to us. Empathy weakens, and with it, our confidence in the idea, essential to a working democracy, that we have anything in common.

Our unease isn’t new, exactly. In the 1970s, social critics such as Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Tom Wolfe warned that our growing self-absorption was starving the idealism and aspirations of the postwar era. The “logic of individualism,” argued Lasch in his 1978 polemic, The Culture of Narcissism, had transformed everyday life into a brutal social competition for affirmation that was sapping our days of meaning and joy. Yet even these pessimists had no idea how self-centered mainstream culture would become. Nor could they have imagined the degree to which the selfish reflexes of the individual would become the template for an entire society. Under the escalating drive for quick, efficient “returns,” our whole socioeconomic system is adopting an almost childlike impulsiveness, wholly obsessed with short-term gain and narrow self-interest and increasingly oblivious to long-term consequences.[/quote]

[MachineGhost]

This seems like an interesting related article:

Exes Explain Ghosting, the Ultimate Silent Treatment
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/fashi ... tment.html

[Greg]

Humans are crappy to one another and society seems to help that more now. Kinda depressing. I can certainly understand then the loss of empathy for those that have different problems than yours and not treating them with respect.

[MachineGhost]

Humans are crappy to one another and society seems to help that more now. Kinda depressing. I can certainly understand then the loss of empathy for those that have different problems than yours and not treating them with respect.

Dare I say it that maybe the Invisible Hand of The Free Market goes too far???

[Libertarian666]

Humans are crappy to one another and society seems to help that more now. Kinda depressing. I can certainly understand then the loss of empathy for those that have different problems than yours and not treating them with respect.

Dare I say it that maybe the Invisible Hand of The Free Market goes too far???

I haven't seen any evidence that the Visible Fist of government has better outcomes.