Delayed gratification has given way to Amazon Prime mentality

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Delayed gratification used to be a thing; you wanted something, you longed for it, you counted down the days to Christmas or summer or your birthday – and then it arrived, and you enjoyed it all the more because it was worth the wait.

But delayed gratification went out, for the most part, with the dodo (the bird, not the child’s soother) because everyone wants everything now. That’s why – days before Santa comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve – you’ll still see kids getting toys in toy shops.

Nobody wants to wait for anything anymore; they want it now – and because they can order most things on their phone, they don’t even have to go out in the rain to get it.

And they now have a name for it – it’s called Amazon Prime Mentality. That’s shorthand for high expectations and inability to wait for anything.

It could as easily be Netflix or Sky bBox set syndrome; any platform where you can gorge yourself to death by downloading one show after another instead of waiting an unfathomable seven days between episodes.

This particular diagnosis of Amazon Prime Mentality had nothing to do with television at all; it came from an English GP who was having a go at patients who were blocking up Emergency Departments instead of seeing their local doctor – leading to a massive wait for hospital beds.

We’ve a bit of that here too as can be seen in the overcrowded A&E departments. The vast majority of people are in the right place – but some could as easily have been treated by their GP or at one of those growing number of Primary Care Centres.

Dr Jonathan Griffiths, a GP in Winsford, Cheshire, said that his belief was that some patients didn’t want to wait for GP assessment – but instead wanted everything investigated and sorted in one trip.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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