Instant Life
by Jeff Olson


If you were offered the same choice the wealthy man gave his sons, would you choose the million dollars or the penny? Most people would make the second boy's choice: the right-now money. After all, a million dollars! In cash! Right now!

And, of course, you'd be making the wrong choice-and you would have been fooled, as millions of people around the globe are fooled every minute of every hour of every day, by those two seductive little words:
Right now!

I remember one day, years ago when microwave ovens were still somewhat of a novelty, seeing a man standing in front of a microwave, fidgeting impatiently as he peered through the window at his lunch being coked, and muttering, "Come onnnn…come onnnn…!

It blew my mind. Sixty seconds wasn't fast enough?!


It's become a truism to say we live in a push-button, instant gratification world, but this is a truth very much worth pondering, because it doesn't simply mean we have more impatient temperaments than our parents do. It represents an entirely different way of thinking. An entirely different philosophy.

There is a natural progression in life, which everyone knew intimately back in the days when we were an agrarian society. You plant, then you cultivate, and finally you harvest. Plant, cultivate, harvest.

In today's world, everyone wants to go directly from plant to harvest. We plant the seed by joining the gym, and then get frustrated when a few days go by and there's no fitness harvest. Taking recreational drugs IS an effort to go from plant directly to harvest. So is taking steroids to enhance athletic performance. So is robbing a bank; so is playing the lottery.

The step we keep overlooking (and overskipping!) is the step of cultivating. And that, unlike planting and harvesting, takes place only through the patient dimension of time.

Because we are a culture raised on television and movies, we've lost track of time. We don't understand time any more. I'm not criticizing television and films. Film is an amazing art form, television is a powerful medium, and in the hands of true artists, they can both teach us valuable lessons about life. Just not about time.

Through a great film, you can experience the triumph of the human soul over adversity, the drama of a struggle between doing what's right and succumbing to the temptations of the world, a moving encounter between generations, the flowering of a powerful romance, the struggle and birth of a nation…

But it all has to be finished in two hours.

Can you imagine a nation being born in two hours? Meeting the person who will become the love of you life-the dating, courtship, romance, struggle, triumph, wedding and life thereafter-in two hours? Of course not. But in a world filled with instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant credit, instant shopping instant news and instant information, we have come dangerously close to losing touch with reality and believing we have access to instant life.

Past generations learned about life through books. Books take time to read. When John Irving adapted his novel, The Cider House Rules, to the screen, he collapsed the time frame. The story in the novel takes fifteen years; the story in the film takes fifteen months. James Grady's novel Six Days of the Condor was turned into a film: Three Days of the Condor. A child who a generation ago might have spent a month reading Charles Dicken's great coming-of-age novel Great Expectations can now catch the 1998 version on cable and gobble it up in one hour and fifty-one minutes.

In a film, we never see the little steps, repeated hundreds of times, which create the results. There isn't time. We might see a quick sequence of steps that conveys a super-compressed sense of the evolution of the thing-the "falling in love montage" in practically every romantic comedy, or the "training sequence" in every sports movie. But there little Slight Edge-like dramas never last longer than thirty or forty seconds!