Life In An Instant

2010. The year of the instant. We want everything right here, right now. Our coffee, our taxi, our train. The credit card transaction we pay for our microwave meals with. Conversations through computers. Loans. Knowledge. Answers. Insight.  Cosmetic surgery in your lunch hour, marriages of conveinence, any form of modern communication. People want to be instantly attractive, yet they don’t realise jeggings don’t work on guys! These are the things that our 2010 lives are based around, when was the last time someone was actually content with waiting for something? Why does everything have to happen right away?

Why is it if you’re away from your phone for 2 hours in a cinema as soon as the credits role, out comes the mobile and you’re there checking what you’ve missed. Replying to the text messages or laughing at a picture on facebook. (Of course that’s if you’ve actually followed the rules and switched off your phone in the movie theatre!) Ever wondered why most of your creative thinking and ideas come to you in bed, or in the shower?

Using a phone whilst driving, updating your followers as you eat your dessert (after previously informing them of your starter, main and wine selections!), then there’s checking what the celebrities who aren’t actually celebrities are doing and awaiting their next myspace ‘pout’ picture. Adverts on the television, on billboards, online, showing that you don’t need to wait until payday in order to purchase the you want that of course will obviously enhance your life, now you can borrow cash – why not wait the 7 days?

Google instant has now been launched too! As if waiting the 0.11 seconds for search results was too long, the websites and links now appear as you type what you’re looking for! People want to be instantly recognisable. Instant fame and instant fortune. Scratch cards are the perfect example of the fortune bit and I saw an article about the fame bit the other day. It was about Mario, yes, the video game character, but he’s been around 25 years now, and is more popular today than ever! Instantly recognisable, and the face of nintendo forever. Do you think kids would recognise him more than they would, say, Jesus?

With Mario you’ve got the wii, the DS and all the other platforms on which his face is plastered. ‘It’s-a-me, Mario!’ is shouted out as he appears on the screen and of course, the players of these games know that if he dies, he comes back from the dead so they can continue playing. Do they not know that is what happened to our saviour? Jesus may not have computer games boasting his face, but he has hundreds of thousands of  buildings, dotted all over villages, towns, cities, countries, this entire globe where his face should be the centre. What bigger brand is there than Christ? And he’s been around a lot longer than a quarter of a centry!

Isaiah waiting 70 years to hear from the lord, SEVENTY YEARS! these days we can barely wait 70seconds as we skip through the adverts using our sky+ remote. we need to realise that sometimes, things happening fast, the speed, the quickness of things isn’t always a benefit, and time is a precious thing that should be used as a quality, not a quantity.