Whenever I travel, I am always on the lookout for the right kind of chocolate-as-a-gift. This is often a difficult choice as although the taste of the chocolate is certainly important, the packaging is often an important constraint as well. Tourist-focused chocolates might have a landmark imprinted on the package — say the Eiffel tower or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Finding the right degree of authenticity is one thing I seek.

For the above chocolate bar series I was drawn to the simplicity of the packaging style. The chocolate is clearly visible and a sticker is slapped onto the transparent sleeve. I felt it was an open approach first of all because the candy was not hidden behind gold foil or what-not. And in addition I sensed that the packaging process itself was one that took very little time either to conceive or execute. My takeaway was that freshness is supported by the illusion that thoughtful haste has been applied in presentation of an object.

Looking through my stamp drawer I see a variety of penny and two-penny stamps that I use to “upgrade” my older valued stamps to whatever the current USPS rate might be. My memory isn’t all that great, and thus I have found the pursuit of mastering knowledge of current postage rates to be an elusive art.

As a remedy, I developed a US postage finder a few months back that wasn’t working anymore as the USPS server had changed its service finder. I just fixed it and was glad to do so as I hadn’t realized that domestic rates had gone up from $0.39 to $0.41 recently. When I made that post, a kind reader pointed out the forever stamps now available in different countries. The concept is simple. You never have to be confused by the changing postage rate as the value of the stamp is eternal.

A few posts back we debated the value of saving time and concluded that there are often moments when you wish to savor an experience for a longer period. In the savoring case, you would want to prolong the pleasure. But on the other hand, there are definite instances for when you’d like to curtail the pain of an experience — like trying to figure out whether you have enough postage affixed to your envelope.

I have a friend that purposefully collects the most beautiful stamps to periodically affix to his personal communications. The experience of receiving these letters is profound. In that sense, he has chosen favoring emotion over the efficiency of saving time.

So in conclusion, as I send this letter off to the health insurance agency to whom I have no particular feelings for on this date and don’t mind the efficiency of a forever stamp, I feel my life is simplified. But tomorrow as I ship a few letters off to some old friends, I think I might browse through my stamp drawer to see if I can find something more emotion-ally meaningful.

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.