The art of delayed satisfaction

THE problem with print media, besides the lack of funds, dwindling readership, and the fact that you have to clean your own mugs after drinking chicory masquerading as coffee every 20 minutes, is that it’s not immediate.

Breaking news! Awesome! I’ll get the facts, write it up, send it for proofreading, get it sub-edited, re-write it, cry, send it off for subediting again, down a dirty mugful of chicory, send it to the printers, wait a week, and then read a story that was already read by the entire nation the week before on social media.

Take this column, for example. Here I sit, still reeling from the weekend hangover sponsored by the Springboks giving England a good ‘how’s your father’ for a solid 2 minutes on French soil, and yet you will be reading this from the future, either still reeling from another weekend hangover sponsored by the Springboks, or a weekend hangover of drowning your sorrows and bemoaning a bias ref because we gave our World Cup away. Win or lose, the print media platform will never win.

This is just the age of instant gratification in which we now find ourselves. You want news? Check social media. You want real news? Check the comments on social media. You want food delivered straight to your door? Delivery apps.

You want to watch a show about a man who married his own sister thinking it was his mother? Stream it. Everything you want and don’t need is now at your fingertips.

Being in my very late mid-30s, I’m ‘I remember the '95 World Cup final’ old but not ‘Neil Diamond is my jam!’ old. But, even so, I feel like my children will never understand the suffering my generation went through (pipe down Boomers, we don’t want to hear about how you licked the roads clean).

When my children go somewhere on holiday, which for them is essentially watching TV in a different house, they can’t understand the concept of adverts. It blows their little minds.

Not having the ability to choose what they want to watch when they want to watch it is tantamount to torture.

Never will they know the panicstricken dash from the couch to the bathroom to relieve yourself before The Simpsons started up again because if you missed it, you missed it – forever. Torture? Torture was the adverts Mnet used to play during their free ‘Open Time’ period enticing you to buy a decoder when you couldn’t because you were only six years old.

All those wonderful shows you would never get to watch but could hear through your neighbour's wall.

And music! Spending all your savings on a CD single to listen to one song on repeat? Sitting at the radio waiting to hit ‘record’ when the Top 10 songs played so you had your own recording of your favourite tune… until the cassette tape broke a month later. The stress of missing that moment still haunts me today.

The delayed satisfaction extended into your school life as well. School projects were just an endless battle of trying to find one paragraph in the ‘Y’ encyclopaedia that vaguely corresponded with your topic.

I wish I’d known then that the teachers didn’t have a clue either, and I could have written up a complete fabrication, claiming it as fact, just like most media networks do now. I would’ve been so ahead of my time.

Actually, that was often the case. If you didn’t know something, you’d ask the closest adult, they’d give you an answer with absolute authority and you’d believe that lie for the next 40 years, quoting it as gospel and picking bar fights over it if need be.

Throw in some religious dogma that was my convent upbringing and you start to understand why my connection with reality is flighting at best.

In the end, there’s something to be said for delayed gratification. Just ask the Bokke. Or don’t. How could I know?