The Customer is Always Right
Meaningfulless; Meaningfulmore.
I’m more of a Mac guy nowadays so I don’t buy Dell computers anymore, but I appreciated the recent copy in Dell’s in-print catalog of, “Wait Less.” Anything that helps you feel like you are saving valuable time is going to feel like simplicity.
I then began to wonder if there’s any situation where you’d want to wait more? Definitely not waiting in line, or waiting for your food to come to the table, or waiting for your computer to startup (as in this Dell ad).
I guess one could look at it instead as the joy of waiting. For instance to someone that loves gardening, if they were to pop a seed into the soil and within milliseconds a flower were to pop out of the ground would they be truly happy? Or for example you wait anxiously for your kids to grow up and when that’s all happened you kind of wax nostalgically that it didn’t have to happen so quickly. Without a drawn-out period of anticipation, can there ever be true appreciation.
Instant gratification is indeed simplicity. But although waiting for something wonderful may lose its appeal along the way, the net result is equally, and if not more, fulfilling.
Wait less, thank less; wait more, thank more.
6 Responses to “The Need for (Un)Speed”
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anticipation is fantastic as long as the wait yields something .. if only a story to tell.
And how about waiting through a wonderful novel, or a great film. You certainly wouldn’t want the last page or last scene to come in some speeded-up instant comprehension moment, I think.
Yes Susie, good point. I was with the publicity firm for JK Rowling this week in Shanghai, and they were telling me that the biggest challenge for the next Harry Potter novel is that the ending doesn’t get leaked on the Web. Apparently some kids in the UK are refusing to browse the Web until they get the book in their hands and read it themselves. I thought this was charming. Regards, John
The most terrific thing about waiting, specially regarding books, is that it is not a linear process. Sometimes you can “jump” a part of the book, sometimes you read again a part just to don’t let it finish. I found myself starting a book again just after reading the end, because i didn’t wanted to leave it.
Roland Barthes in “The pleasure of the text” gives a moving description on this process.
I am reminded of something I read in a book: that the value of the scientific method is that it teaches an attitude of suspended judgement. There are plenty of situations where you would want to wait more; most situations that a scientist finds themselves in, in fact.
I wish that I could remember the source, and the exact quote.
I think that scientific method uses the potencial of asking the reality of the fenomenous. What is very exciting at the beggining. But the next step of this method is the sistematic doubt, that lives us in a process of separating componentes, with the finality of finding the right answer. But answers never are enough so the method goes in a growing movement that has the efect of incrementing the speed of time . The speed is important for funcional activities, to slve concrete problems but fore emotional matters is not “usefull”. The time of significant things is very slow. So please lets put in order what is important and what is urgent.