How many years does it take to become a certified medical doctor or a state licensed attorney or a master in the martial arts or a leader in any profession or field of expertise? Years! It’s so obvious it barely needs mentioning; or does it?
Any great achievement or longed-for success with its accompanied reward(s) requires time, dedication, commitment, and hard work, with long hours of study, training, and practice. Few worthwhile accomplishments or rewards are ever obtained overnight. And if they are, they are seldom beneficial to the recipient in the long run.
Yet we are a society of instant gratification and immediate satisfaction: Buy now, pay later. Play the stock market so as to get immediate payback with your investment. Lose weight now, just take a pill. Take short-cuts, avoid the wait; get short-term results now, instant satisfaction!
It is bad enough for individuals to only focus on short-term goals and immediate payback. It is very bad however, when such attitudes and priorities affect a whole nation’s institutions and industries, such as our banking system or educational institutions and government programs.
For example, consider that most universities now offer fast-track MBA’s and other fast-track degree-completion programs. Fast-Track! It’s as if the time element in the educational/learning process is a minor factor that can be easily side-stepped or dismissed from the educational equation for mastering an academic subject. Yet, how can a student really “master” the subject of “Business Administration” in a one year fast-track MBA master’s program, taking classes only one night a week or on designated weekends, while continuing to carry on other responsibilities as usual—family life, normal work hours, and other obligations and interests? It’s unreal, i.e., unrealistic, to say the least. Yet this is how such programs are often promoted. I’d say that many universities (especially for-profit universities) are no longer in the business of education, knowledge and learning; they are degree factories, selling degrees for profit. Might as well go buy a degree on-online and sidestep the educational/learning process altogether! (I have heard that there is indeed a lucrative online black-market for such degrees.)
Nevertheless, the good things in life, including quality, seldom come instantly. This is in stark contrast to our desire for instant gratification and immediate satisfaction. Many people fail to obtain more out of life precisely for that reason: They want something, may even start-off with much fanfare and excitement in obtaining it, but when they find out that it takes dedicated effort, hard work, plus much time and patience to get it, they give-up and move on, telling themselves that it’s just not worth the effort or the wait—and it never is, for those who want immediate gratification.
This is why, as a nation, our infrastructure is wasting away and why we are so eager to “frack” for oil without first carefully analyzing its impact on our water systems and other negative effects it might have on our ecology. This is why only now, after many years of drought, the State of California has only recently imposed strict limitations on public water usage—in a State where much of its Southern half has a semi-arid desert type climate. This is why we allowed Wall Street’s banking and investment institutions to grow too big to fail and were then faced with an economic disaster in 2007/8. And this is why we are allowing the rich to continue to get richer at the expense of a shrinking middle-class, not to mention the devastating effects our banking, insurance, and other economic/monetary policies already have on the poor—whom we always blame for their poverty—as if our social/economic system has nothing to do with the condition of poverty in our nation.
We want what we want now! And we care little about the belated consequences and long-term effects of our self-indulgent “satisfy me now!” lifestyle.
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