Instantaneous Gratification

We all know love as this amazing thing that we share with another and that it may only grace us once or twice in a lifetime if we are lucky but what if I told you there is no such thing as love? Would your world crumble as mine did when I came to the same realization that you are having right now? If you believe there is such a force called love then you are more misguided than I thought. Love is a concept, an idea if you will. It is something you will never truly grasp, it is the one lesson in school you never truly understood because in simplest of terms, it does not make sense. Love is different for everyone and for every couple so you can’t put it into one box when it fills so many other ones. What if when Pandora opened that infamous box, revealing all the evils to the world, that right in the middle was the cruelest of all: love. It is ironic that the only thing left in the box when she closed it was hope, a symbol most of us carry through life, sometimes joyfully other times woefully. Hope may be good at it’s core but it gives rise to many bad evils as we hope to find the one we love, we hope they love us back, we hope they will never cheat on us but let's be honest here, hope is not enough, was never enough. Hope can motivate an army and keep them alive on the battlefield just so they can slaughter more people, hope is the cause for a rebellion in hope that tomorrow will be a better day, we hope our prom outfit gets delivered in time for prom so we look good. Hope does not change anything, it doesn’t stop a war, guns and armies do, hope doesn’t start a rebellion, the people do, hope doesn’t get that outfit delivered any quicker. Hope is like praying, praying to a God which is false hope in itself as he is not real. It is humorous that we pray to a God which isn’t real in hopes someone will hear us. You may ask how this relates to love? Well we pray to an entity which isn’t real because we supposedly love him which cannot happen as how can you love something that is not real, something that is nothing.

Modern society is more forward now and is slowly moving further away from the ideas and bounds of religion and is moving toward a more technologically forward generation of post modernity. But the issue with our generations especially in the newer generations- generation Z and generation Alpha- we want everything instantly with little to no cost. We are the generations to not know life without the internet, without technology and because of this privilege we think that we are owed this and that it is not so much of a gift anymore or as the older generations do. We have been brought into a society where kids of age 7 have an iPhone, an iPad, an iPod, a new laptop and are up to their ears in gaming consoles. The newer generations are so much more focused on body image than ever before because when I was 12 I would read a book, draw and discover but the new 12 year olds want to sit on their phone whilst playing on the Xbox, perfect a selfie and look more grown up. Although a 16 year old girl now may look 20 and all mature they are far from grown up. This is the issue, we present ourselves like a tv reporter presenting the weather: looks like it going to be cloudy with a chance of 15 year olds wearing heavy make up. What happened is my question? What happened to a time where kids only had to worry about going home and what they were having for dinner or when the hardest decision of your life was deciding what colour you were going to colour in the skin of a character because there wasn’t a skin coloured pencil back in the day. Now kids are worried that some boy or girl doesn’t like them and they are not realising that growing up is going to be the worst thing that ever happen to them. They want instant connection to the internet, instant food, instant socialisation on social media platforms and more often than not they want instant love.

This instant does not exist, it is an infatuation, an infatuation for everything to be yours within the touch of a button. There is no button for this instantaneous need, this hunger for everything to be yours. Although modern computers load in a few minutes and google loads searches in just under three quarters of a second, modern kids want it quicker so quick that it practically reads your mind. They want a machine to know what they want before even they do and in my opinion that is dangerous. It's dangerous to let a learning machine know what you want, what you need as if machine retaliates against us we stand no chance as a society. So I say scrap this need for instantaneous desires, instantaneous ‘highs’, instantaneous weight loss because it is never going to happen because you have to work for it. You think that girl on Instagram who is toned, skinny and happy got that in an instant like a google search? Well she didn’t, she woke up one day and thought she is going to do what she wants and if that means working hard to lose weight, workout and find inner happiness then so be it. Just because she has gone out of her way to look more like a stereotypically attractive girl does not mean that she wants to be sexualised.

Women are so often degraded by both men and women. Women put other women down due to a sense of insecurity whereas men typically do it out of a sense of power, power over women. Even in media you will struggle to find an empowering female character that is not voyeuristic in any sense of the word. I challenge you to do it, 99% of the time women are degraded to an object and for some reason our society deems that as ok. The issue comes with this sense of either feminine innocence or a depiction of over sexualised women. Feminine innocence in the media is huge and can be seen often in magazines where a celebrity appears innocent and defensive and this plays heavily into the hegemonic ideology of modern day society. As women are made innocent, frail and afraid on the front cover of magazines, men are made as empowering statues who are strong and brave. It plays to an idea that women need masculine protection, they can’t survive without male input but it equally degrades men as it makes this hyper masculine image that cannot be achieved. Photoshop is to blame for kids nowadays wanting the body of a bull or a body as thin as a twig and this usually results to bad health problems as kids now want instant attractiveness, weight loss and likes on facebook. I’m sorry to say it but if you don’t have the money to get plastic surgery because you don’t like your body image then you are just left with the genetic lottery. Some people win big, some not so much but the main problem is that the media has set an image in our heads of what a man should look like, what a women should look like but I don’t know about you but I most certainly do not see a buff guy walking around with muscles like Channing Tatum, I do not see girls walking the streets with asses like Nicki Minaj and do you know what? That is ok. Society brands you and programmes you to want this conventional look and lifestyle, it brainwashes you to feel bad about yourself, don’t let it. If we were all made perfect I fairly certain it would be a boring life and perfect is not a concept I want to associate with any part of my life. When you date someone and you realise they are not perfect you don’t break up with them (unless you are a douche with no friends) because no one is. Perfection, much like love is a concept.

Beauty is what you believe it to be, so make it you own convention, make it your way of life.

• La beauté est dans les yeux du spectateur
• Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder