Have we all become Veruca Salt?

If you don’t know who that is, then you didn’t watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory featuring Gene Wilder as much as you should have as a kid (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory never happened and Hollywood needs to stop giving Tim Burton movies). In the movie, she sings a rather catchy song called “I Want it Now” featuring year 2000+ predictive lyrics such as: “I want the world, I want the whole world, I want to lock it all up in my pocket” and “I want to today, I want tomorrow, I want to wear ‘em like braids in my hair and I don’t want to share ‘em” and “Don’t care how, I want it now”. I call these lyrics predictive because of how our society has developed overall, specifically the ease in which to get resources like internet and technology items, information and food.

Everyone practices a philosophy of now-ism: food now (ala McDonalds), entire seasons of shows now (thanks Netflix), arriving to destinations now (road rage!), and even information now (because smartphones do our thinking for us, it’s Science!). It’s not necessarily ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ to have these advances, but the learned arts of patience and development of skills over time are certainly facing a crisis. Just look at any New Year’s weight loss resolution. January is the highest gym attendance month of any year because people want to keep to their self-made promise to lose weight. If that weight doesn’t shed off in 4-6 weeks though, people get discouraged and quit, somehow forgetting the fact that it took longer than a month to gain the weight in the first place, so it only stands to reason that it would take just as long to lose it.

So how do we combat the now-ism? By remembering this simple premise wrapped up in a wise proverb: Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes time to create anything great. Having results now would be great, but you can’t get the results without the effort, and people seem to forget that it’s the work, the effort that creates the results, rather than the other way around.