Instant Gratification

As a kid, I grew up being told I was gifted. I was put in higher level classes all throughout my academic career. They all told me I was special, that I sat in an elevated seat along with all of my peers around the country. I ate up every word of it, mainly because it did all come so easy to me. I had no reason to suspect otherwise. Every test I spent almost no time studying for, and I would get back stellar results most times. Projects and papers could be drafted up at the last minute without much trouble, resulting in the same outcome. There were some rough patches here and there, but I excelled at being "gifted."

What happens when you spend your whole first couple decades cruising along running into very few challenges learning nothing but book smarts? When things do go wrong, you run into a brick wall and don't know what to do. When things come easy for so long, it's hard to know what to do when you run into the slightest bit of difficulty. On top of that, you spend the beginning of your life going through the school system, which is an incredibly structured environment. You either go to college afterwards or you're thrown out into the world. Either way, the rug is pulled out from under you sooner or later.

There's more to all of this. We grew up on these devices we practically live on. I happened to grow up right at the tail end of a world still transitioning to this technology, but for all of my high school years at least, we all relied on our phones. This technology can be wonderful. An encyclopedia of nearly everything the world has to offer is right at our fingertips, and yet...I feel like I owe a lot of my problems to this crazy, wonderful device. It caused me to become reliant on instant gratification. If I want to know something, I can immediately find the answer. Okay, that's not too bad. But let's look at social media and communicating with friends. There's plenty of studies out there that I'm sure everyone has seem by now, so I don't need to get into details. Long story short, I found myself wanting things now. I found myself slowly and slowly losing patience.

Now you have someone who is used to seeing results immediately and is used to overcoming anything without trying hard at all. That's a very dangerous combination. But I'm gifted, right? Why isn't it coming so easily to me now? I keep starting up things and getting immediately frustrated when I don't see progress right away. I saw it way back in the summer of 2021 when I first tried to job search. I thought it would be so easy, but I got overwhelmed quickly and haven't touched it since. It was a foreign feeling to me. I see it now while working out. Going to the gym has been great for me; it has provided a little bit of structure in my otherwise structureless life. Still, I can't help but notice a bit of frustration that I'm not seeing the fruits of my labor yet. As I was thinking about this tonight, it all came together in my head. I want instant gratification, and that's not how most of the world works.

I look back at my recent life and think about all of the projects I started and quit, or all of the paths I started down and never found the end of. Sure, part of it was lack of motivation. But now that the worst of my depression is gone, what's the cause of that? How can someone who grew up being told they were gifted...someone who is used to not having to try hard...someone who is used to receiving dopamine from instant messages...how can that person operate when thrown into a completely different environment? This is an entirely new world we live in, and I'm not sure we've taken the right measures to adjust with it. The challenge now...well, the challenge is figuring out how to deal with challenges. One of these days I'm going to have to find the courage to throw myself at the uncertainty of it all and tackle this challenge. Hopefully I'll be up for it.