The race to the inevitable red light in the peak-hour scramble to work.
Jumping the queue at the coffee shop so you’re out the door three minutes before the person you pushed past.
Honking a cyclist because you were held up a few seconds waiting to get by.
When did this necessity to be first begin? Was it the invention of the petrol powered automobile in 1886 (thanks Mr Benz)? Possible, yes.
I don’t believe so.
I believe it was much more recent, about 1995, when the Internet started to become mainstream. Information became available instantly, well, as instant as 14.4Kbps could be.
Breaking news shared around the globe in minutes not hours, or perhaps even days. Email to friends, family and colleagues delivered in seconds instead of lost in the post.
As the Internet gets faster, so does everything else we do.
We’ve become greedy for as much news, shopping and cat pictures that we can feast our eyeballs on instantly. We can’t wait to get home to watch the 6 o’clock news to see what happened around the world today, it’s on our phones as we wait at the red light we raced to.
The availability of any piece of information you could ever hope to find in mere seconds, wherever we are, is a magnificent thing and we should be grateful for it.
Some stats to blow your mind, every minute:
- Email users send over 200,000,000 messages
- Google receives over 4,000,000 search queries
- Blog writers post in excess of 1400 new blog posts
- Facebook users share almost 2,500,000 pieces of content
- Twitter users Tweet 277,000 Tweets
- Tinder users swipe 416,667 times
- Instagram users post 220,000 new photos
- Apple users download 48,000 apps
- Yelp users post 26,380 reviews
- Skype users connect for 23,300 hours
- Pinterest users pin 3,472 images
- YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video
That’s more than 5,760,000,000 Google searches a day! Can you imagine the line of people at the library to search for that many answers?
However, our rush to consume information has rubbed off on the rest of our lives.
As I was waiting for my coffee this morning, I saw a couple sitting at a cafe table, headphones in, staring at their phones watching videos, completely ignoring each other and not taking in their surroundings.
Sometimes we should stop, take a breath and look at what’s going on in our immadiate surroundings. We live in a beautiful place, the hilarious cat prank can wait.
Set the alarm for 6.15 instead of 6.30, have a relaxing drive to work, let a stranger order their coffee before you and be patient with the slow cyclist.
You'll have a good day and the content (that probably doesn’t even exist yet) you desire will still be in your pocket.
