4A: Well Worth the Wait

                Delayed gratification is the ability to put off instant gratification, showing your own personal self-discipline thus leading to the fact that you possess one of the most important virtues.. patience. Middle school was around the time when all of my friends were first starting to get their first cell phones, and I was that odd man out. My mother insisted that I was far too young and irresponsible to maintain the oh-so sacred cell phone. She decided to make me wait until my freshman year of high school to get my first phone, the Blackberry Curve 360, and boy was I cool. Though in sixth grade I wanted the phone right away, instant gratification, just because my friends had it; it was well worth the wait because the phone I had gotten going into high school was the newest phone on the market. Patience was a virtue.. It almost was like the marshmallow test except a far longer wait period for the reward I had received.

                Being in an era of the smart phone and Apple technology, we as American’s are seemingly growing to lack the virtue of patience and maybe even hard work itself. We are so used to instant gratification and knowing exactly what’s happening at every exact time, that if that was taken away from us I don’t think we would function very well. Take Siri for instance, Apple’s voice animated information provider, anything you don’t have an answer for you can simply ask Siri and twenty seconds later you have the desired answer.. seems like instant gratification to me. If one hasn’t experienced delayed gratification before in their life, I feel as if they were put into a situation in which they’d have to experience it they wouldn’t handle it very well. Instant gratification has taken over today’s people and the advancement of technology is the number one cause of it. 

                Technologies provide us with almost instantaneous relief to any problem that we are seemingly faced with; there is almost a technology for everything. Take the App Store on the iPhone for instance, there is over 100,000 apps that are designed to instantly gratify us.. thus because we live in a world of instant gratification.