We all have done it. You’re out shopping with your friends, or you’ve had a really bad day and need a little retail therapy, when suddenly, you see the dress of your dreams. You look at the price tag and notice that it’s about $50 over your budget for the month. You have a credit card, but you swore to yourself it would only be for emergencies only. But, we all know, a perfect dress is an emergency. So, you pay with your credit card because you simply cannot go another day without this dress. Before you know it, you’re suddenly over $200 because you just happened to find the perfect shoes and the perfect necklace to match. We end up thinking to ourselves “Why save up and wait a few weeks, when I could just use my credit card and have them in my hands now?!”  I for one am definitely guilty of this thought process, as many of us are with this current generation trend.

The days of saving up every penny to pay for something that you really want is diminishing and we are now in the age of instant gratification and instant satisfaction. Our parents and grandparents were taught that if you wanted something, you must save up for it and when they were rich enough to buy that cool pair of shoes or new sweater, it was a great sense of accomplishment. A sense that you worked hard to purchase something you really wanted on your own.

Well, with how easy it is these days to sign up for credit cards, we have the mindset that we don’t have to do that anymore. In a way it makes us ungrateful for the things we do have because we know that we can just go out and buy another red sweater or pair of designer boots. This trend of instant gratification can be attributed to the change in technology from our parent’s age. These days all you have to do is log onto twitter, or Facebook, or even Google and you can instantly see the news of the day. You don’t have to wait until tomorrow and read the paper like our parents did. The moment a news story breaks, instantly it’s out in the media for all to see.

For example, I attended the USG Town Hall Meeting in the student union on Monday. The event occurred at 3:00 in the afternoon and at 6:00 that same day I was reading about it on the Plain Dealer’s website. Even if you didn’t want to wait that long to read the story, you could have just followed The Buchtelite’s live tweets about what the questions were and the answers that were given. Technology, in particular social media, makes everything readily available at our fingertips.

Unbeknownst to us, we have transferred that idea into our everyday lives and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, especially with the generation below us already born into the age of technology.