It don't come easy: Working hard for instant gratification

By Jaymie Stuart Wolfe, OSV News

How we live our lives is substantially different from how our parents and grandparents lived theirs. We no longer need to wait a whole week for the next episode of a favorite TV show; we can watch all five seasons in a single binge. We don't have to buy tickets or drive to a theater to see a movie; we can stream it whenever we want and pause it to make popcorn. We can listen to our music whenever we want to hear it and regardless of where we are. And if we want to shop for a new bookcase or a pair of shoes, we can do it online and at any hour of the day or night.

Life may seem more complicated, but most of what we need to do takes less time than it used to. We bank and pay our bills online, split a restaurant check with friends, take classes, and see our lab results all on our phones. We apply for a new job and find someone to date from the comfort of our favorite chair.

The result is that every one of us has time to do more.

That sounds like progress until we stop long enough to fully consider the "more" we're so busy doing. We spend more, own more, eat more (and throw away more) than our predecessors did just one generation ago. We access more healthcare, subscribe to more ongoing services and pay people to do things our parents did for themselves more than ever before. In all of history, no group of people has consumed as much as we do. And, as we kill ourselves to keep consuming or to meet the demands of those who do, we tell ourselves we have achieved a higher standard of living.

But there's a catch to all this. It's not just the world around us that's changed; we've changed too. Being able to tailor our lives to fit our personal preferences places us at the center of our world and creates a whole portfolio of high, possibly unfair, expectations. We want what we want when we want it. We take in as much as possible as quickly as possible, like Pacman speeding through the maze to the next available snack, barely digesting anything as we consume, consume, consume. Even within our spiritual gleanings, valuable insights barely take hold because we take so little downtime to let anything really sink in.

Most of us stopped asking ourselves "How much is enough?" -- for ourselves and of each other -- a long time ago, even as we take everything, including the availability of others, for granted. We work hard -- too hard -- to keep feeding our insatiable appetites while forgetting that things don't just appear out of thin air. Hidden in everything we consume is the contribution made by a living human soul. That film, book, meal, music download, contract, retreat, or homily we consume (and too often quickly forget) is a product of someone else's real time and labor, sacrifice, creativity, and expertise.

Somewhere along the way to where we have arrived, we've lost sight of the fact that our on-demand lifestyle isn't fair in what it demands of other people. None of us is entitled to someone else's labor, or their time. The overnight clerk at the 24-hour gas station and the professor we email at 10:00 p.m. the night before the term project is due don't owe us much of anything. In fact, loving our neighbors might just include not overworking them; it might mean taking a moment to consider their lives, and appreciate their work.

That's why our faith has a body of thought we call Catholic Social Teaching -- 2,000 years of considering how we must treat the people with whom we live in this remarkable era, and why. It's too easy to lose our own humanity and disregard the real lives of others' in the rat race we are so thoughtlessly running.

It's become way too easy to convince ourselves that we deserve everything we want, the moment we want it, no matter what it costs someone else.

The next time we find ourselves on the 24/7 consuming end of life, let's keep our wits about us and recognize not only the price we pay for all the instant gratifications we want and demand, but the real -- and very human -- cost behind it all.