Not in a grumpy old way — I’m not about to tell you that waiting builds character and that we should go back to doing things slowly on principle. Just that there used to be an entire interior experience available to you during the time between wanting something and having it, and that experience is mostly gone now, and I’m not sure anyone noticed it leave.
Anticipation used to be its own thing. You ordered something from a catalog and it took two weeks and during those two weeks you thought about it, looked forward to it, built it up into something in your imagination. Sometimes the thing arrived and was smaller than the version you’d been carrying around in your head. Sometimes it was better. Either way, the wait was part of it — it gave you time to want it properly, to earn the arrival through the simple act of not yet having it.
Now things arrive before you’ve finished wanting them. You order something and it’s there tomorrow, sometimes today, and the gap between impulse and delivery is so small that you’ve barely processed wanting it before it’s already on your doorstep. Which is convenient and genuinely impressive and also means you spend a surprising amount of time opening packages with a vague sense of “right, I ordered this” rather than any real anticipation. The thing arrives. You put it somewhere. You keep going.
This happens with information too. You used to not know something and sit with not knowing it — argue about it at dinner, wonder about it on the drive home, maybe look it up later in something physical if you cared enough. Now you don’t know something for about eight seconds before you know it. The not-knowing is just a loading screen. There’s no room for the question to breathe before the answer shows up.
I think waiting taught you something about how much you actually wanted something. A two week wait was a filter. If you still wanted it when it arrived, you wanted it. The instant version skips the filter entirely and you end up surrounded by things you wanted for thirty seconds and then had forever.
I’m not ordering anything slowly on purpose. I’m just saying there was something in the gap and now the gap is gone and the something went with it and I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. Just that it was there. Just that I sometimes miss a feeling I can barely describe anymore.