I had a bit of a revelation during the time the JagWire staff was supposed to come up with story ideas for this issue. As I wasn’t really focusing on the task of actually completing story ideas I was telling myself I needed to go to the gym and start my workout for the night. The problem is, I hadn’t gone to workout in a few days at that point, actually about two weeks, as I had come up with plenty of excuses to skip out. I was struggling to find the motivation to get myself to the gym. Due in part to the fact that I’m just really lazy, but I think mostly due to the fact that I wasn’t seeing any real changes in my life. I was not being immediately gratified by the work I was putting in and so that work slowly fizzled into nothing.

I have found that our generation is becoming so reliant on this idea of immediate gratification for our efforts that when we don’t see results, we just kind of give up. I do think it’s a lot easier to give up and call it quits now because we rely so much on our parents and others nowadays that it almost makes it easy to just “take the L” and stop putting in effort before we see any results.  While that may not pertain to every single person, I believe it’s a problem more prevalent now than ever, and I’m plenty guilty of it.

I see this frustration even in the smallest things during my daily routine. For example, if Twitter doesn’t load fast enough, I just close out. Oh that Youtube video takes more than ten seconds to load? I don’t have time to wait like that. A friend is trying to show me a photo and it takes a second too long to load, I’ll just say, “show me later,” and leave it at that. I will probably never see that photo. It might be a really small and insignificant action but I think it transcends in other parts of my life as well. The easiest word I can use to describe this phenomenon of our generation is an overall impatience in our lives.

I feel that this attitude towards life in general may be relevant to a large portion of the student population. In fact, in issue four of the JagWire we had a spread over cheating. The essence of cheating is, and I think most students can relate, if I take these answers from someone else and it keeps my grade up; one, I get to keep my grade up with minimal effort, and two, it’s about ten times faster and easier to cheat than it is to do the actual work. Forget that we’re not actually learning anything, I know that my work is done and that’s where my gratification lies. And while I do think this happens because the current education system values grades way more than actual learning, I think this mindset perpetuates the immediate gratification attitude that a lot of people have nowadays and in turn damages one’s integrity.

We value the easiest and quickest way to get a task done because we immediately see results instead of putting in the required effort to get where we want to be. I’m clinging tooth and nail to my New Year’s resolution to stick to boxing because after I broke my leg I couldn’t do anything and I’ve become accustomed to not doing anything. After I started boxing, I expected to be in the shape and where I was physically before I broke my leg but that’s not the case, and it was hard for me to realize that I need to put in months of work to get even close to where I used to be.

Now more than ever, we need to stick to our New Year’s resolutions, we need to put in the work in school and actually learn what we’re being taught because we have some really fantastic teachers at Mill Valley that do treasure our learning and they will do what they can to help the student body. We need to realize, as a generation and generally as an entire population of humans, that while the easiest and quickest way to reach our goal is incredibly enticing, it does nothing but hurt us in the long run.