Passage 1: Instant Gratification is Making us

Perpetually Impatient

By Christopher Muther

Globe Staff February 02, 2013

1. The demand for instant results is seeping into every corner of our lives, and
not just virtually. Retailers are
2. jumping into same-day delivery services. Smartphone apps eliminate the
wait for a cab, a date, or a table at a hot restaurant. Movies and TV
shows begin streaming in seconds. But experts caution that instant
gratification comes at a price: It’s making us less patient.

3. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project sums up a
recent study about people under the age of 35 and the dangers of their
hyperconnected lives with what sounds like a prescription drug warning:
“Negative effects include a need for instant gratification and loss of
patience.”

4. “Most of my generation has grown up not having to wait for anything,”

said Zack Dillahunty, 23, who finds dates using the Grindr app on his
iPhone.

5. Retailers, smelling profit in impatience, recently began a battle for

same-day delivery supremacy, with Walmart and eBay challenging
Amazon in the category. In Boston, one city where Amazon same-
day delivery is available, shoppers can place an order by 11a.m.
and, for an $8.99 fee plus 99 cents per item, have it that day.
Walmart launched Walmart-To-Go last year, charging $10 for same-
day delivery, though it’s not yet available here.

6. Ramesh Sitaraman, a computer science professor at UMass

Amherst, examined the viewing habits of 6.7 million internet users
in a study released last fall. How long were subjects willing to be
patient? Two seconds.

7. The results offer a glimpse into the future, he says. As Internet speeds
increase, people will be even less willing to wait for that cute puppy
video. Sitaraman, who spent years developing the study, worries
someday people will be too impatient to conduct studies on patience.

8. “The need for instant gratification is not new, but our expectation of
‘instant’ has become faster, and as a result, our patience is thinner,”
said Narayan Janakiraman, an assistant marketing professor at the
University of Texas, Arlington.
9. Janakiraman conducted a 2011 study called “The Psychology of
Decisions to Abandon Waits for Service.” Subjects were made to
wait for downloads and kept on hold as they waited for help from a
call center. As predicted, many test subjects who were forced to wait
abandoned the process.

10. “It’s why you have people at Disney World paying for a pass so they
don’t have to wait in line,” he added. “You have people who don’t mind
paying for things like same-day delivery.”
11. Cambridge grad student Valla Fatemi has yet to try same-day delivery,
but he relies on Amazon Prime, a $79-a- year membership that offers
shoppers benefits such as free two- day shipping. “The two-day shipping
is huge,” Fatemi said. “It’s gotten me in the mode of expecting things at
my door pretty quickly.”
12. Others seem to feel the same. Netflix has 33 million members who
stream videos, compared with only 8 million who get DVDs by mail.
Meanwhile, Cambridge start-up the Happy Cloud is building its business
by helping zealous video gamers download games in minutes rather
than hours.

13. Darrell Worthy, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M

University who studies decision making and motivation, has found
evidence of what some already feared: We’re becoming more focused
on quick fun — such as a game of Angry Birds on the iPhone — than on
reading books or magazines.

14. That echoes the Pew study. Researchers found the rapid pace of
technology can lead to more nimble thinking, but that “trends are
leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of
information.”

15. “A lot of things that are really valuable take time,” Worthy
said. “But immediate gratification is the default response. It’s
difficult to overcome those urges and be patient and wait for
things to come over time.”

17. A prime example? Saving money. The US Department of

Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis found that Americans’
personal saving rates — the percentage of disposable income saved —
averaged 3.6 percent in December 2012. In December 1982,
Americans saved 9.7 percent. There are a variety of reasons, from high
unemployment to stagnant wages, but our growing focus on immediacy
may also play a role.
 18. “We’re not wired to think about the long-term anymore,” says Phil
Fremont-Smith of Impulse Save, a Cambridge company that encourages
individuals to save through an app that tracks spending and sends
congratulatory messages when members cut costs. In that way, a long-
term goal earns immediate feedback.

19. “It’s instant gratification that we’re giving them,” Fremont-Smith said.
“People have a need for immediacy that they don’t normally see when
they’re saving money.”

20. Whatever the negatives, Worthy of Texas A&M says there is still value
to be found in impatience. “From a business perspective, there’s
nothing wrong with companies selling more and faster,” he said.
“People have always been impatient, and sometimes that impatience
helps move things faster.

Passage 2: Why We’ve Got to Have Instant Gratification By

Smith, Russell C., and Michael Foster

1. Technology has allowed people instant access to more services,
products, and experiences than any time in human history. If you
want a book, a tool, a song, a movie, a meal, a massage, you
can either access it or order it. With the help of the Internet,
smartphones, and every time saving app you can download,
we’re living in a world of instant gratification.

2. We’re living in a time where kings of old would be jealous of what

the average working person can have, with very little effort. If your
idea of happiness is to live in a world where you can instantly get
what you want, you’re already living in the future you dreamed
about.
3. One of the lessons digital natives are being taught by our
culture is that it’s no longer necessary to wait for experiences
or goals. What happens when we don’t have to wait for
anything anymore? In a world of endless instantaneous need-
fulfilling, is it still possible or necessary to teach the human
virtues of patience, practice, and persistence?
 4. Life may currently be stuck on fast forward, but there’s a
resistance growing to the idea of always having and getting more
right away. In the past few years’ mindfulness, slow food, and
long novels have infiltrated popular culture. Emotional
intelligence has become a common and useful phrase in our
culture, shorthand for people understanding there’s a variety of
ways to know things, and one of those ways is to care deeply.

5. Ingesting information and technical details is no longer considered to be

enough, one must also feel something about the knowledge one carries
within. We used to only need facts and statistics, but these days, more
often we’re seeking an underlying truth about someone’s life, or about
how events unfolded. The story around events and experiences is what
draws us in. People want to dig deeper and understand the story behind
the bullet points. Long form storytelling connects us directly to the social
need to understand how human beings react when love or conflicts arise.

6. Memories accumulate in our minds over years, and our bodies

experience our lives one day at a time. Over millions of years,
we’ve changed the planet and created civilizations. It’s not in
our best interest to not have anything to strive for. We’re
complicated beings who were hardwired to be social and
interact in tribal settings long before the age of social media.
Google might deliver an answer that’ll satisfy you in seconds
but connecting meaningfully to people takes much longer.

Passage 3: Instant Gratification’s Effect on Society

1. Aside from the impacts on our personal lives when we give in to

instant gratification’s seduction, there are society-wide impacts as
well. We are undoubtedly becoming a society that is accustomed
to getting what we want when we want it, and there is a big reason
for this trend: technology and social media.
2. Although instant gratification has been a struggle for
humans for a long time, it is undoubtedly harder than it
used to be to delay gratification.

3. The biggest contributor to this increase in difficulty is modern

technology and social media. When you have, essentially, the
world at your fingertips, it’s extremely challenging to consciously
choose delayed gratification over instant. In an age where
Amazon has accustomed us to one-day delivery and Netflix and
Hulu have gotten us hooked on instant streaming, it seems
unthinkable to wait.

4. This relationship between instant gratification and

technology is a two- way street: the more we are offered
instant gratification through our technology, the more we
come to expect it, and the more habituated we become to
getting what we want right now, the more pressure there is
on companies to fulfill this urge.

5. Emma Taubenfeld of Pace University outlines some of the

effects of this interplay with salient examples

6. DVRs eliminate the need to wait through commercials to

get back to your show or movie. Disney parks offer fast
passes that allow you to skip the wait and jump to the front of
the line—for a fee. Walmart and eBay are offering
progressively faster shipping to compete with Amazon.
Internet providers are constantly upgrading the speed of their
connections to compete with other providers (2017).

7. Social media. Not only can we find out in an instant what all
of our friends are up to or share the picture we snapped just
moments ago, we can meet new people in seconds as well.
Dating apps like Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, and Ok Cupid offer
the opportunity to connect with literally millions of people
within seconds, and to filter them by dozens of specifications
with a delay of only a minute or two.

8. While there are certainly positive outcomes

from our new constantly connected world,
there are negative effects as well. It’s not a
stretch to say that people are simply much
less patient than they used to be.
9. Research from the University of Amherst found that video streamquality
has a shocking impact on viewer behavior: if a video takes more than two
seconds to load, would-be viewers start melting away, and each
additional second of load time causes an additional 5.8% of people to
give up and move on to something else (Krishnan & Sitaraman, 2013).

10. This is astounding when you stop to think about it. A delay of
only two seconds is enough to make many of us give up on
discovering something new, learning something we need to
know, or even being entertained!

11. In a study on a similar topic, the Nielsen Norman Group found

that most people stay on a web page long enough to read
only about a fifth of the text that it contains (Nielsen, 2008).
The average web page in the study contained 593 words, so
visitors generally read only about 120 words on a typical visit.
Data from this study also showed that for 100 additional
words on a page, visitors will spend only 4.4 seconds more
before moving on to a new page. Depending on reading
speed, that translates to around 18 words.

12. Think about that—when you add text to a page, you can
only expect visitors to read about 18% of it! Although this
certainly points to a tendency towards instant gratification
(i.e., visitors find what they need and get out as soon as
possible, or they give up because it takes too long), it may
also be a sign that internet users are getting better at
scanning pages and finding the information they are looking
for.

13. However, with the exponential growth of false information

online, even this silver lining has its own cloud—with so little time spent
on gathering information, how could anyone have time to verify what
they read? It’s all well and good to quickly find what you need, but how
certain can you be that it is accurate when you spend mere seconds
scanning the page?

14. As we become more dependent on the internet, and less

patient with our time, it’s hard to see a future in which the
prevalence of false information becomes less of a problem. If
the past decade has been any indication, we can only expect
more inaccuracy and less patience!
1.

Writing
Prompt
Write an expository essay about how instant gratification has changed
today’s society. Your essay must be based on this prompt and topic,
and it must incorporate ideas and information found in the sources
provided.

Use your best writing to complete an essay that:

 is focused on your central idea

 combines evidence from multiple sources with your own
elaboration to develop your ideas
 is organized and includes transitions within and among ideas
 provides citations for quoted material and source ideas
 demonstrates correct use of grammar and language
appropriate to the task

Write your multi-paragraph essay to an academic audience in the

space provided.

Tiktok exploded in early 2020, but for what reasons? Well, during 2020, the pandemic hit, millions of
people were forced to stay in their homes less they catch Covid, but that left many people seeking
gratification. Many websites like Tiktok exploded because any user can just swipe the screen to view a
short filled with excitement and pleasure. Instant gratification doesnt only apply to the virtual world, it
can also be applied to real life, which resulted in changing the world in many ways, either for the better
or worse.

To start with arguably the biggest contributor to instant gratification is social media, a multi-billion dollar
industry. There are millions of creators and a study by Proffessor Ramesh K. Sitaraman, teaching
computer science at UMass Amherst found that people who watch videos will typically not move on
until after about 2 seconds, then the abandonment rate increases at about 40% every 10 seconds or a
little less than 5% a second . His study examined 6.7 million users so that means that theres
approximately 234,500 people have already clicked off the video after the 2 second mark if that same
6.7 million people watched the same video, and thats a small percent of the overall users of the entire
internet. Shipping companys like amazon offer same day delivery for a fee and millions chose streaming
services rather than dvd.

Instant gratification has become a central feature of our lives in the modern world. In an age
where Amazon has accustomed us to one-day delivery and Netflix and Hulu have gotten us
hooked on instant streaming, it seems unthinkable to wait. Technology has allowed people
instant access to more services, products, and experiences than any time in human history, and
this trend has only been accelerated by the rise of social media. While there are certainly
positive outcomes from our new constantly connected world, there are negative effects as well.
Increasingly, our society is becoming accustomed to getting what we want when we want it, and
our growing focus on immediacy can have a detrimental impact on our lives and our culture.
The trend of instant gratification is having a major effect on our personal lives. According to the
Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, trends in technology are leading to a
future in which people have a need for instant gratification and loss of patience (paragraph 14,
passage 1). This is especially true for people under the age of 35, who have grown up with
technology and experienced the demand for immediate results since a young age. With the help
of apps like Grindr, people can socialize in an instant, and retailers such as Walmart and eBay
are offering same-day delivery services. This is all contributing to a culture of impatience in
which people are less willing to wait for anything. In fact, research from the University of
Amherst found that “video stream quality has a shocking impact on viewer behavior: if a video
takes more than two seconds to load, would-be viewers start melting away, and each additional
second of load time causes an additional 5.8% of people to give up and move on to something
else” (paragraph 9, passage 3). This is astounding when you stop to think about it; a delay of
only two seconds is enough to make many of us give up on discovering something new,
learning something we need to know, or even being entertained.
Aside from the impacts on our personal lives when we give in to instant gratification’s seduction,
there are society-wide impacts as well. We are undoubtedly becoming a society that is
accustomed to getting what we want when we want it, and there is a big reason for this trend:
technology and social media. Emma Taubenfeld of Pace University outlines some of the effects
of this interplay with salient examples, such as “DVRs eliminating the need to wait through
commercials, Disney parks offering fast passes that allow you to skip the wait, and Walmart and
eBay offering progressively faster shipping.” (passage 3, paragraph 6) Social media has also
had an immense impact in our society’s relationships with instant gratification. “With apps like
Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, and Ok Cupid, people can meet new people in a matter of seconds.”
(paragraph7, passage 3) The Nielsen Norman Group found that “most people stay on a web
page long enough to read only about a fifth of the text that it contains” (passage 3, paragraph
11) and with so little time spent on gathering information, it’s hard to verify the accuracy of what
we read.
In conclusion, although instant gratification has been a struggle for humans for a long time, it is
undoubtedly harder than it used to be to delay gratification. Technology and social media have
had a major effect on our society, making it much easier to get what we want right away. While
this is convenient, there are significant drawbacks to this trend of instant gratification, such as
the lack of patience and tendency to believe false information. We need to remember that
although Google might deliver an answer that’ll satisfy, understanding the truth of the matter can
take much longer. In order to combat the effects of this instant gratification, it’s important to take
a step back and remember that some things can’t be rushed.