Everything is on demand these days. You push a button and it comes to your doorstep, or it’s downloaded to your computer, or you just subscribe to something and it comes to you without any effort. It sounds great, right? But at what point does living in this on-demand world start to sacrifice actually living?
My wife and I used to go to Blockbuster and just walk around looking at the aisles of bad movies, and occasionally have something stand out that we just had to rent. It was time spent together out of the house. But now? We just hit a few buttons to shove a movie into our Netflix queue and that’s that. It gets here when it gets here and we never had to leave our home. The first few months it was fantastic; movies came in a steady flow and we had new things to watch and it was great. But now I miss actually going out to Blockbuster. I miss us walking over there just to look around, because that time we used to spend outside together is now likely spent with me on the computer and her on the couch, or her on the computer and me at work. Has convenience killed the joy in renting movies for me?
Another example: RSS feeds. I’m a Mac whore, I’ll get that out of the way right now. So as soon as Safari with RSS came out, I subscribed to the RSS feeds on every single website I visit regularly. So now I just have this steady influx of 1-2 new postings as they come in. You know what I miss? Actually sitting at my computer and going to sites, the almost thrill of checking for something new to read. But I don’t have that, because now I know in advance if they’ve been updated or not. I no longer have that 15 minute break in the middle of the day when I’d go around searching my favorite sites for content, because I already know what’s there, and I already know what it’s about, and I already have seen the gist of it fly by on my laptop’s screensaver. Has convenience ruined just surfing the web for me?
I don’t know…a couple examples…possibly a couple of stupid examples, but something to think about none-the-less. At what point does everything being brought to you kill the enjoyment of you actually getting something yourself.
Post a Comment