The Microwave Generation

This week Arnie McKinnis challenged a group of writers to publish a piece on the topics of distraction and attention span. In a great thread of messages, we all agreed that it is getting more and more difficult to focus. There are hundreds -- no, thousands -- of articles about the effects of these tiny screens on our ability to focus and on our shrinking attention span. As writers, we are always working to make our articles engaging, adding details to grab and keep the attention of our readers, while at the same time trying to limit the number of words on a regular post to fewer than 800.

Keep an eye out for the others on this theme!

Distraction & Attention Span: What's Your Story?

We had no idea what to do with it, though the booklet had recipes, and settings to defrost meats and soften butter. I remember using it regularly to heat up our frozen vegetables, peas, corn, green beans. I also remember experimenting with the defrost feature, and failing miserably, cooking to death a beautiful steak or a pound of ground beef to devastating effects -- precious commodities because money was tight. We made scrambled eggs a few times, but cleaning the crusty containers was a hassle so we didn't do that very often.

When my parents splurged on a baby sitter for a date night, I remember the excitement of getting to pick out special frozen dinners at the store, made especially for heating in the microwave. Full of salt and fat, they were such a luxury for me and my siblings. Ick. We would walk through the frozen food aisle, gazing longingly at the variety of Swanson's and Banquet options, knowing we had to avoid any in foil containers, which was most of them.

A few years later, as the microwave generation started to take off and find its way through the frozen food aisle, I remember looking at the back of the package and returning it to the freezer if it said anything more than 12 minutes. Those 6 minutes meant hot food even faster! It was also a signal, now that I can see it from a few decades into the future, that our tolerance for waiting for anything had dropped dramatically, in a very short amount of time.

We don't use the microwave for TV dinners or other prepared food in our household now, except for the occasional Hot Pocket snuck into the house by one of our boys, but we do use it (very carefully) to defrost meats & fish, and to soften butter and boil water. When we upgraded our old microwave a couple of years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find the technology had improved so much that I could now boil water in 3 minutes instead of 5.

Oh dear.

And this is why I call my generation the microwave generation. Every time we improve our technology and make things move faster, we decrease our tolerance and patience for waiting. You do NOT want to see me at Sea World or LEGOLAND these days.

What about you? Have you noticed a decrease in your tolerance for waiting -- for everything? What do you attribute that to? Do you find it more and more difficult to settle in and wait for things?

Thanks again to Arnie McKinnis for the "distraction challenge".
Here's a link to another entry to this collection, by Susan Rooks: It's a Frantic Friday Funday. Keep an eye out for the others on this theme!

Photos are linked to their original url.