“I like the idea of being proved right, I’m not necessarily curious about the subject,” my teenager, currently in the throes of her final exams, said about mathematics, a subject she convinced herself to be “bad at”. In my generation, every conversation involving a parent and a child would culminate in the padhai talk. It’s just the opposite for my daughter and me: Padhai talk always leads to something so non-sequitur that padhai goes and drowns itself. This one led to the idea of instant gratification. Unlike other subjects, a mathematical question is designed to elate or deflate you almost immediately. Zero-sum game.
Is it a wonder, then, that mathematics is ruling the world by way of algorithms that are designed to keep us addicted to the perennially cascading instant gratification content? And the timeframe for the definition of ‘instant’ is getting shorter and shorter. Within a decade of video consumption online, the hook time has come down from a minute to three seconds, for example. If a video can gratify the viewer within the first three seconds, great! If not, it is doomed to be scrolled up. Same with people in physical settings, perhaps.
With ever-growing socio-professional networks, instant gratification rules most of our interactions. A new person is barely given a chance beyond a blink, and thus the need to be at one’s performative best almost all the time. There’s something inherently cruel about this. Our inability to wait has created a society where inequalities have deepened exponentially. Because we cannot wait, we must perform beyond our means and reward the same in others. Isn’t this essentially the principle of 10-minute home-delivery e-commerce businesses? Or of the live streaming breaking news scenarios? Or flash fictions? Or speed dating? Or artificial intelligence (AI)? Or sex without foreplay?
The psychology of gratification aside, is this constantly shrinking frame of the instant even sustainable? We know from economists, and even casual observers, that instant delivery businesses thrive only on the availability of cheap and desperate labour. Because the delivery boy is a, rather instantly, replaceable element, the business goes on till the desperation is kept under limits. But we also know from history that socio-economic despair can be checked thus far and no more. How far that moment of the end of gratification is, we know not yet.
Another issue with the culture of instant gratification is that it promotes a false idea that the consumer is in control. Is that really the case, though? Just because we can choose to order food from the joint that is delivering the fastest, and can pay for it in less than a couple of seconds, we feel omnipotent. Paradoxically, this is precisely how we lose control, and there are reams written on it already. But who has the time to read them! We consume only slides now, and because there’s other information waiting for its three-second pitch, it’s a miracle if we retain anything.
It feels rather counter-intuitive that we, in the age of ever-increasing life expectancy, would still want everything instantly. It’s just as if we have moved to a countryside mansion from a tiny city apartment, and we are still cramming it with pieces of furniture and consumables, so we can’t move without tiptoeing, yet again. We have acquired space only to stuff it. We cannot move around without banging into something, toppling something else over, and are unable to close doors.
Maybe the Heisenberg principle explained it a century ago. Applying his uncertainty principle here, it’s impossible to determine the speed of ‘instant’ to make an informed judgement about gratification. Conversely, we don’t even know the location of our gratification to decide the speed at which it is possible. We are the “hollow men,” about whom T S Eliot, a contemporary of Heisenberg, wrote in 1925.
“Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning.
…
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal
