Photo by Claudio Schwarz (Unsplash)
One of the glaring aspects of our modern world is that we talk faster than we shop by an order of magnitude.
Sure, it has always been true that we communicate faster than we acquire goods and services. But never before have we been able to talk to so many people across so many distances compared to how long we wait for the delivery truck to arrive. “Snail mail” became untenable so long ago that most of us used to email no longer recognize the term. Meanwhile, Amazon, USPS, and UPS trucks lumber through neighborhoods so frequently that they have become part of the community landscape.
The volume of our discourses with others versus the wait we endure to gratify and fulfill our consumer needs via internet mail order has played havoc with our mechanisms of anticipation in the human and material realms. When your partner can break up with you over a simple text, but you must still wait days after ordering for a tangible product to arrive in your mailbox, it is as if time has become shorter and longer at the same time. Romantic anguish, or desires, are set off within seconds via texts. Consumer fulfillment is stretched like taffy whenever we check tracking services on an order. If you endure the returns process waiting in line at the post office, or Amazon returns location, it becomes a sentence on a desert island. Never will the two points of fulfillment meet.
Remember the days of shopping with your spouse or partner at the shopping mall or downtown street, when you could make purchasing decisions while discussing family or work gossip? Neither do I, but I remember my mother talking about such moments before the advent of Amazon. The 1982 cult film classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High was built on the foundation of a suburban shopping mall, where sappy, confidence-seeking adolescents cultivated desires, both romantic and material, in the confines of the food court, the clothing store dressing room, or darkened movie theater. Congregating of that sort still takes place, albeit on a much smaller scale and in a time when shopping malls are increasingly seen as potential crime scenes requiring adult supervision. For years, we have been content to wait for our mail-order shipments, open them, and then collapse scores of cardboard boxes for recycling.
The holiday season exacerbates all of this. We have exchanged lingering, ritual shopping for “pressing send,” “place your order,” and “Order now!” The order we have delivered most is efficiency, even if it is not quite clear what has replaced the time we saved in such quests. More time for what, exactly? Browsing online for more options to strangle and delay our decisions? More time for regret at money hard-earned, but perhaps needlessly spent?
There is a certain cool vogue in lamenting the emotional landscape of old ways of doing things lost to time. My maternal grandfather cast a cynical eye on almost every technological advance except those that did not extend lifespans or alleviate pain and human suffering. “Hydrogen fertilizers and vaccines are true gifts of God,” he would say. “Everything else is basically nonsense. People think they’re clever in adopting new advances for this and that. They’re clueless to the fact that when you solve one problem, you are most likely creating another one, or even two.”
Even the record player and radio left him unimpressed. (He died before the invention of compact discs.) Nothing could replace the marvel of hearing a gifted piano player at a party or in your living room when everyone sat still and quiet to listen. Music made rare was music truly worthy of respect. To hear it seldom was what made church services special through hymns.
Amid the hundreds of items I have ordered via mail since the dawn of the internet, I still recall the first item I ever ordered through the mail, thanks to a back-page advertisement in Boys’ Life (now Scout Life) magazine when I was a Cub Scout. The “Wolf Knife” called to me through a flashy illustration that promised an ebony handle, a detailed embossed logo on that same handle, and a locking, stainless steel blade. With no checking account to my ten-year-old name, I purchased a money order for $17.95, sending my “lawn-mower money” to some mysterious post office box in Michigan. The wait took forever. The days of running home from school to check the mailbox seemed interminable.
After months, I forgot I even sent the company my hard-won dinero. When at last it arrived, the memory of wanting it seemed like a phantom limb, but I was happy to have it. It was a great knife, heavy in the hand, ruthless in whittling ticks, and the envy of many of my neighborhood friends. Of the many material wants and needs that awaited my adult years I was, of course, oblivious. One need satisfied, one long wait fulfilled, was more than enough.
