Hurry Up Right Now Too Late You Missed it!

Anyone else getting the sinking feeling that no matter what you achieve in life, it’ll be quickly lost in the spiraling eddy of data overload that now engrosses every aspect of our lives like an inverted supermassive black hole relentlessly vomiting out “information” instead of sucking it in? Just me? Lucky you…

It feels like if we find the cure for cancer or world peace or life on Mars, it’ll be tweeted out between headlines of government shutdowns, unpunished financial scandals, Kardisgustian baby gossip, and the network’s fall lineup of prime-time dogshit—where wicked, sexy people do devilishly sexy things that leave us hanging till next week’s devious, sexy wickedness.

“Hey, d’you hear about the cure for cancer?” you’ll hear on a street corner, though not in L.A. because everyone’s in a car with the windows up, and not in New York because everyone’s wearing a headset. “No way! That’s awesome! Hey, check this TikTok I made. It’s only a few seconds…”

Yes, cancer’s cure will trend for a day before being knocked out of the cycle by the utterly banal because trends, by definition, come and go. And with character limits and seven-second running times, nothing sticks for long before it’s eclipsed by new infinities of trivia.

It’s not that time is speeding up these days. It’s that we can’t focus for as long as we used to. Every smartphone communicates in the language of the instant. iPhone updates happen “Now” and then “Just now,” and then “1 minute ago.” Then “5 minutes ago.” If ten minutes go by and you haven’t updated, it says, “Ancient history.”

But all this is old news. Polemical rhetoric about technology robbing us of deeper experiences has already filled the shelves of virtual bookstores, and—not unironically—they’ll all get lost (after a marketing blitzkrieg of time-sensitive expletives declaring how NOW these books about NOW are).

We’ve entered an era where there’s too much supply and not enough demand, and it applies to everything from cars and online sex to independent movies to remote data storage. Too many choices, options, alternatives. So a battle ensues in every area—to be heard, needed, wanted, demanded—and the effect it creates is the worst trend of all: false urgency. The gravity with which all this trivia is spewed is detestable.

I swear if I get duped by another mega-brand commercial, I’m gonna pluck my eyes out. You know what I’m talking about because it’s happened to you—the moment when you’re focused on something worthwhile, like reading, and your attention gets pulled to an illuminated flat screen.

You can’t tear yourself from the images because they’re beautiful and they move in quick succession, evoking emotions you don’t have time to quell. Then, the music kicks in, scoring the escalation. It’s symphonic and powerful and, against all odds, you find yourself somehow invested in what you’re watching, even though it’s only been 14 seconds. You’re caught up in a narrative as gorgeous as a feature film, and you can’t wait to find out how it ends.

Have you seen the one about the woman trying to get to the airport in a storm? Her husband’s arriving, and she wants to be there for him, so she drives cautiously as a storm closes in around her like some kind of sexual predator, slapping its phallic branches against her wet windshield and splashing fluids under her wheels.

Swooping crane shots and edgy POV angles raise the tension with every frame. The score soars with symphonic bursts and eerie thriller sound FX. The spot is nothing short of Hitchcockian at this point. And I’m sitting in my living room on a sunny Sunday, trying to enjoy another miserable Giants shutout, and suddenly my heart is in my mouth. Is this poor woman gonna make it?!

The screen goes BLACK.

Oh god. She’s dead! I’m beside myself with grief. I think about how my own mother is getting older and has a hard time driving at night. I want to call her. I should’ve already! What is my problem? Why am I not more grateful for everything she’s done for me? I’m a selfish little prick, that’s why. I hate myself.

Then, a big, bright logo illuminates the screen: BRIDGESTONE! Our tires represent sexual equality for bad women drivers.

The woman, now safely in the passenger seat, smiles at her Wonder Bread-eating husband. The rain has stopped because men control the weather, and they’re safely on their way to Anglo suburbia, where they’ll make love missionary style and sleep on 300-count sheets. Oh, and 20% off all tires at Pep Boys. Sale ends tomorrow!

I mean, holy shit, did I just go through all that for a fucking tire spot? And what was the budget for that extravaganza—twenty million? Thank god for local cable channels still making awful commercials that don’t elicit my deepest primordial empathies. Thank god for casting cross-eyed guys and women with not-quite-perfect teeth. I wouldn’t buy carpet cleaning services from anyone else.

I confess, as a storyteller, I take pride in the principles of drama. They’ve been around since the first caveman realized what made his fellow Neanderthals lean forward around the fire. What is it exactly that keeps people interested?

Aristotle advises that the best way to move an audience to catharsis (meaning purification) is to evoke a primary concern—death usually does the trick. But there are degrees of death on the storytelling scale: near death being a close second, a serious threat just after that. Then fear and danger in general. Followed by the ticking clock of some urgency to achieve a goal… you get the gist.

The problem is that everyone with a platform today has the same goal. There’s a collective (and non-stop) need to craft compelling narratives, whether you’re a college kid in Dayton, a local newspaper in Westchester, or a multinational conglomerate enslaving third-world workers. Whether you’re selling hair replacement products, children’s books, or edible dildos, the goal is to “fight for eyeballs” through some form of urgency, and it’s maxing out our capacity for authentic emotional connection.

The result is a plague of bad storytelling that reaches from individual Facebook updates to the White House press corps. Instead of authenticity, it’s surface manipulation. There’s only so much bandwidth in the human psyche, and a lot of entities are competing for it. The result is a cat chasing its tail. And the hard changes that would result in some form of personal or national catharsis are forgone for superficial stories of exceptionalism—stories lost as fast as they’re spun in the imminently rising sea of zeros and ones.

How do we escape the insatiable velocity of the NOW? The only answer seems to be: individually. Only by voluntarily tuning out can we make authenticity a virtue again—one that could spread virally to the tribe and maybe become a collective value. It’s a local movement that’s already started to happen. Just think how threatened you are when you hear someone isn’t on Facebook. It’s like saying “I don’t believe in God” in 1500s Spain.

When the ancient Greeks had their week-long theater festival in 500 BC, by law, the marketplace was shut down, as were the courts and the Athenian Assembly. For that entire week, it was about gathering in the theater with the singular demand of focusing on the centuries-old ritual of honoring the god Dionysus. It’s almost hard to imagine something like that today, where our government shuts down for the exact opposite reason: they can’t agree on what the story is.

The Greeks understood one thing we’ve forgotten: the culture with the best stories dominates. One wonders, in between detergent spots, what our seven-second culture will leave behind for the future. Three thousand years from now, what of THE INSTANTANEOUS will remain?