Everyone always talks about how modern technology has eroded attention spans, and I'm not here to argue against that, but what always gets me is how much it has eroded my patience.
I'm old, so I remember using dial-up internet back in the late '90s / early '00s. I say this because it means that I remember being able to wait a full five minutes for a single low-res .jpg of InuYasha to load line-by-line on my computer monitor on a good day. I remember being able to wait for the dial-up internet to even connect. I remember being fully content to wait close to ten minutes for a geocities page absolutely loaded with midis and blinkies to load. I was fine, even happy to wait for these things.
Now? Well, I pay for fiber internet. So now if a page takes more than .00002 seconds to load completely, I start to get irritated. Whereas back in the '00s I used to be just fine with pausing a YouTube video, doing other things for fifteen minutes, and then coming back so that it would be fully buffered, now if a video lags for even .0001 second I start to get pissed. I am fully ready to power cycle my router if my internet lags for even one second, much less the full minutes that internet-on-a-good-day used to take in my childhood.
And it's not just that! I used to be able to wait ages for packages back before two-day (or next day, or god forbid same day) shipping became a thing. Now it has gotten to a point where even the two days feels like a lot. I'm making this post because I looked at my "order placed" emails in my inbox, particularly the Etsy ones, and I found myself thinking, "I wish when we bought things online they just materialized in our houses." Honestly what the hell, self. This is not that serious. You can be patient a little bit.
It's just wild how technology has gotten so much more convenient, and everything has sped up, and yes, that has reduced attention spans . . . but also patience. I'm so used to not having to wait that, in the event I do have to wait, I get aggro about it like a boomer who's mad that the manager at Wal-Mart has to actually physically walk up to the cash register to override a mistake the system made. At the very least, the things I'm mad at are just technology; and honestly I'd rather wait longer for packages than exploit actual human beings to get my stuff to me faster. Like, I know I'm bitching, and on the inside I'm like "ugggghhhhh" at having to wait, but if I was given the option of, we can teleport this into your house but for every item we teleport into your house we have to murder an employee, or you have to wait a week to get your package . . . I'm going to wait the week. And then also see what I can do to remove the option to murder an innocent person for faster packages, because you just know someone is going to consider Amazon Steve a reasonable sacrifice to manifest the Apple watch they just ordered directly into their hand rather than having to wait two days.
Anyway. This is why I reblog that "I don't like who I become when I'm waiting for a package" post every time I see it. I'm so impatient now. The me of twenty years ago would be appalled at my lack of patience, albeit also completely gobsmacked at how fast everything is now. You mean it doesn't take at least an entire school day to download one fansubbed episode of anime via bitTorrent anymore? 2026 internet can do it in about five minutes? That's insane.
(Yeah, back in my day we had to set a brand new episode of fansubbed anime to download at 7:00 AM, and then hope that it was finished downloading by the time we got home from school at around 2:45 PM. God help us if someone in the house used or even unplugged the internet during that seven hour stretch, but sometimes even without that happening it still wasn't finished by the time we got home from school. Shit was wild.)
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